The son of the notorious drug lord known as El Chapo arrived in the United States on Friday following his extradition from Mexico to face drug trafficking charges, according to ABC News sources.
Ovidio Guzman Lopez, 33, was charged in April with two dozen others as part of a crackdown targeting a global drug trafficking network run through Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel.
He was flown to Chicago but is also charged in New York and Washington, D.C. He is being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center downtown.
Law enforcement sources told the ABC7 Chicago I-Team that Guzman Lopez is expected to make his initial court appearance on Monday.
According to the charges, the cartel used precursor chemicals shipped from China to fuel the fentanyl crisis plaguing the U.S. The I-Team has reported that the cartel has been responsible for 80% of street drugs flooding metro Chicago streets over the past three decades, according to law enforcement officials.
The I-Team also reported on Guzman Lopez’s arrest in Mexico.
Guzman Lopez had been wanted by U.S. authorities since 2019 and captured by Mexican armed forces in January in a small town just outside the city of Culiacán, the capital of the Mexican state of Sinaloa.
He was captured in an overnight raid that had been in the works for more than six months, officials said at the time.
The arrest followed an infamous incident in 2019, in which authorities briefly detained Guzman Lopez at a home in Culiacán, before word spread and heavily armed gunmen flooded the city. Massive shootouts occurred between cartel members and Mexican armed forces around the city. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador ordered Guzman Lopez released in order to avoid more bloodshed.
Source.- ABC News
