El Chapo’s son pleads not guilty to drug charges

The son of the former Sinaloa drug cartel leader El Chapo pleaded not guilty Tuesday to a raft of charges linked to one of the world’s biggest illicit narcotics operations, prosecutors said.

Joaquin Guzman Lopez was arrested in a scheme allegedly orchestrated by Washington without the involvement of Mexico, in which he was detained in Texas on Thursday.

The judge in the case denied bail and remanded him in custody, ordering a case management hearing for September 30, the assistant US Attorney’s office said in a statement to AFP.

Many of the details of the arrest operation, in which co-founder of the cartel Ismael Zambada Garcia, known as “El Mayo”, was also taken into US custody, remain murky.

He has also pleaded not guilty and has been remanded in custody.

US media have quoted law enforcement sources as saying that Zambada was unwittingly lured across the Mexico border by Guzman Lopez, one of El Chapo’s four sons.

According to a US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) report released in May, the sons were engaged in an “internal battle” against Zambada, their father’s former partner.

Guzman Lopez was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of drug trafficking, money laundering and weapons charges according to court documents previously released by prosecutors.

Broadcaster CNN reported that Guzman Lopez’s lawyer, Jeffrey Lichtman, told reporters his client faces the death penalty in the case. Lichtman did not return an AFP request for comment.

Guzman Lopez, aged in his 30s, is among El Chapo’s sons known collectively as Los Chapitos, or “The Little Chapos.”

El Chapo was convicted of drug charges in New York in 2019 and is serving a life sentence in a maximum security prison.

Guzman, the then-62-year-old former co-leader of Mexico’s mighty Sinaloa drug cartel, was convicted in February 2023 in US federal court on a variety of charges, including trafficking hundreds of tons of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines and marijuana to the United States.

DEA chief Anne Milgram said Zambada’s arrest “strikes at the heart of the cartel that is responsible for the majority of drugs, including fentanyl and methamphetamine, killing Americans from coast to coast.”

AFP