At a joint press conference with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) on April 14, the Justice Department announced that it was unsealing charges against twenty-eight upper-echelon members of the Sinaloa Cartel, including three sons of the cartel’s former leader, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. “Today, the Justice Department is announcing significant enforcement actions against the largest, most violent, and most prolific fentanyl trafficking operation in the world — run by the Sinaloa Cartel, and fueled by Chinese precursor chemical and pharmaceutical companies,” announced Attorney General Merrick Garland.

For her part, DEA director Anne Milgram painted a lurid picture of a Sinaloa Cartel “more ruthless, more violent, more deadly” under the so-called Chapitos, one whose global fentanyl operation radiates out from Mexico to Asia and Central America, controlling every stage of the production process and performing gratuitous acts of violence on enemies, including electrocutions, waterboarding, and feeding them alive to tigers. Hence, over the course of a year and a half, the agency “proactively” infiltrated the cartel, “obtained unprecedented access to the organization’s highest levels, and followed them across the world.”