We’re not like dad, say El Chapo’s sons
Los Chapitos, say they are victims of a misinformation campaign and deny they are part of a cartel flooding the US with drugs.
Four sons of the Mexican cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, whose arsenals include armoured vehicles, grenades and a gold-plated pistol, have issued a letter saying they have no role in their father’s drug-dealing network.
The sons, who are known as Los Chapitos, say they are victims of a misinformation campaign. They say they have not taken over their father’s business and deny they are part of a cartel flooding the US with drugs.
One of the sons, Ovidio Guzman, 33, who is known as the Mouse, was arrested in January in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state. He and his brothers, Ivan, Alfredo and Joaquin, are accused by the US of “running the largest and most violent fentanyl trafficking operation in the world”.
The US authorities claim that the network used waterboarding, electrocution, corkscrews and hot chillies to torture enemies. Last month the justice department accused the four men of being part of a group of 23 people responsible for trafficking the synthetic opioid and other narcotics.
“We are not the leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel, nor are we interested in being so,” they wrote, referring to their father’s business, which made him a billionaire. “We have never produced, manufactured or marketed fentanyl or any of its derivatives.”
They said that their name was “being dragged through the mud”, adding that because they have an “internationally famous” father, people would make up stories about them. “A lie told a thousand times ends up becoming the truth,” they said, paraphrasing Joseph Goebbels.
US prosecutors insist the Chapitos have concentrated their power through violence, including torturing policemen and even feeding rivals to their pet tigers. The sons took specific issue with that allegation.
“The stories about the bats and the tigers, that we killed someone with our own hands, are false,” they wrote. “A tiger can kill a person, but eat him?”
Ovidio’s brothers are on the run, with bounties of between $US5m and $US10m offered by the US government. The men said they had not previously made any public statement in the hope that attention on them would eventually wane. “We believed that keeping quiet and not bothering anyone would diminish the consequences of the cradle in which we were born,” they wrote.
Their father, 66, is serving a life sentence in Colorado after being convicted in 2019 for drug trafficking, money laundering and weapons offences.
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