Ovidio Guzmán, the son of the notorious drug cartel kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, was arrested after an intense operation in northern Mexico that led to the deaths of 29 people.
After the arrest, a bloodbath erupted in the city of Culiacán, where more than 200 Mexican special forces battled Guzman’s henchmen. At least 19 of Guzman’s associates were killed as well as 10 Mexican special forces.
The operation occurred just two days before Joe Biden was scheduled to attend a summit of North American leaders in Mexico City.
Capturing Guzmán could be a way for López Obrador to show the US that he is “in control of the armed forces and Mexico’s security situation,” Gladys McCormick, a associate professor at Syracuse University who focuses on Mexico-US relations, told CNN in an email.
“It also defuses the power behind any ask from the Biden administration to stem the tide of fentanyl and other narcotics across the border,” she added.
At a news conference Friday, López Obrador denied that Guzmán’s arrest was linked to Biden’s arrival, saying Mexican authorities had acted autonomously.
“About interpretations, there are a lot of them, we do not share them, we acted with autonomy,” the Mexican President said.
Biden is very likely to beg Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to do a better job keeping illegals from the border with the U.S. and to please do something about all that fentanyl that’s being brought into the United States.
Capturing Guzmán is a good start, but his cartel has 11 meth labs in the state of Sinaloa alone. And the flow of cocaine and illegal marijuana from Mexico into the U.S. hasn’t slacked off one bit.
The US State Department wrote that law enforcement investigations indicated that Guzmán and his brother, Joaquín Guzmán-López, “inherited a great deal of the narcotics proceeds” following the death of another brother, Edgar Guzmán-López.
They “began investing large amounts of the cash into the purchasing of marijuana in Mexico and cocaine in Colombia. They also began purchasing large amounts of ephedrine from Argentina and arranged for the smuggling of the product into Mexico as they began to experiment with methamphetamine production,” the State Department said.
As it stands now, the lack of cartel infrastructure in the U.S. mitigates the violence that crosses the border with Mexico thanks to the great work of Texas law enforcement and the CBP that shuts cartel operations in the U.S. down with a fair amount of effectiveness. But unless Joe Biden can slam the door shut and keep the illegal alien situation under control, we risk bloodbaths like the one that happened in Mexico in capturing Ovidio Guzmán.
This article was updated to refer to Sinaloa as a state rather than a province.
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