Ovidio Guzmán López, a son of the notorious Mexican crime lord known as El Chapo, pleaded guilty on Friday to sprawling federal drug charges and using violence to help take control of his father’s criminal empire.
Mr. Guzmán López was the first of El Chapo’s four sons to admit guilt in an American courtroom. His plea came at a vulnerable moment for the Sinaloa drug cartel, the organization his father helped to found. The group is under such pressure in Mexico from the government and its adversaries that it recently formed a strategic alliance with a rival drug gang.
At a heavily guarded hearing in Federal District Court in Chicago, Mr. Guzmán López, wearing an orange jumpsuit, acknowledged having taken part in a sweeping drug conspiracy and a continuing criminal enterprise. He also admitted to playing a role in three murders in Mexico and Arizona.
As part of his plea deal with the government, he has agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors, though it remains unclear what information he has provided the authorities.
Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman, who is overseeing his case, did not set a date for Mr. Guzmán López to be sentenced. While some of the charges he pleaded guilty to technically carry a life sentence, his lawyer, Jeffrey Lichtman, said he was unlikely to be punished with life in prison.
The charges Mr. Guzmán López acknowledged came from two separate indictments, one filed in Chicago and the other in New York. Mr. Guzmán López’s full brother, Joaquín Guzmán López, is also in custody in Chicago and is trying to negotiate his own plea deal.
His two half brothers, Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar and Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar, remain at large in Mexico, where they recently reached a deal with their longtime rivals in the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, essentially trading turf for protection from their enemies.
The sons of El Chapo, whose real name is Joaquín Guzmán Loera, have often been dismissed as the spoiled second-generation scions of drug-trade royalty. But after their father was convicted in a landmark trial in Brooklyn in 2019 and sentenced to life in prison, the sons, known as Los Chapitos, inherited a significant part of his empire, building the cartel into a major exporter of fentanyl.
Ovidio Guzmán López was central to efforts by the Chapitos to distribute fentanyl in the United States, prosecutors say, where it remains a serious public health risk. President Trump, at the start of his second term, put enormous economic pressure on the Mexican government to stop the flow of fentanyl across the border, and the Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, responded by making several spectacular busts this year.
Ms. Sheinbaum has recently criticized the United States for designating groups like drug cartels as terrorist organizations and then negotiating plea deals with individual members.
“On the one hand, the U.S. government labels criminal organizations as terrorists and has a policy of not negotiating with terrorists,” she told reporters last month. “But if there is an agreement, what happened to not negotiating with terrorist groups?”
Ms. Sheinbaum has said that she wants U.S. officials to provide her government with more information about Mr. Guzmán López’s case, especially because he was extradited to the United States two years ago after an operation that “caused the deaths of Mexican soldiers.”
She was referring to the bloody battle that erupted after Mr. Guzmán López was arrested in October 2019 in the city of Culiacán, which has long served as the cartel’s urban stronghold.
In a remarkable display of might, cartel gunmen humiliated the Mexican military and forced the government to release Mr. Guzmán López shortly after he was captured.
Last summer, Joaquín Guzmán López joined his brother in the United States in an audacious fashion: He abducted their father’s closest business partner, Ismael Zambada García, in Culiacán and forcibly flew him over the border into the custody of U.S. federal agents.
The kidnapping deepened an already tenuous rift between a faction of the cartel run by the Chapitos and another led by Mr. Zambada García’s sons. War broke between the two sides, leaving more than 1,300 people dead and more than 1,500 missing in Sinaloa State, according to official data and local search groups, and the violence has not relented.
After the hearing, Mr. Lichtman criticized Ms. Sheinbaum for complaining about how his client’s plea deal had been negotiated.
“The idea that the American government would include the Mexican government in any kind of American legal decision or negotiation is absurd,” he said.
Emiliano Rodríguez Mega contributed reporting.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
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