Mexico City: In a recent indictment, prosecutors claimed that while Sinaloa cartel leader Joaqun "El Chapo" Guzmán was serving a life sentence, his sons directed the family business towards fentanyl, setting up a network of labs that produced massive amounts of the cheap, lethal drug that they smuggled into the U.S.

Although the focus of Guzmán's trial was on cocaine shipments, the case against his sons sheds light on the inner workings of a cartel that was transitioning from one generation to the next as it sought "to manufacture the most potent fentanyl and to sell it in the United States at the lowest price," according to the indictment unsealed on April 14 in Manhattan.

More Americans die from synthetic opioids, mostly fentanyl, each year than from the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan combined. This has led some politicians to argue that the cartels should be classified as terrorist organisations and has led to previously unthinkable calls for U.S. military intervention in Mexico.

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It's necessary to reframe the fentanyl problem, as some State Department employees informed me. Alejandro Hope, a security analyst in Mexico who passed away on Friday, said: "It's not a drug problem; it's a poisoning problem. "Very few people go out looking for fentanyl on purpose."

With aggressive overprescribing of the synthetic opioid oxycodone more than 20 years ago, the foundation for the U.S. fentanyl epidemic was laid. Users switched to heroin as U.S. authorities cracked down on its prescription, which the Sinaloa cartel gladly supplied.

But producing its own fentanyl, which is much more powerful and useful than heroin, in tiny, covert labs was a game-changer. In less than ten years, the cartel expanded from its first improvised fentanyl lab to a network of labs centred in the northern state of Sinaloa.

According to Mike Vigil, a former head of international operations for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, "These are not super labs, because they give people the impression that they're like pharmaceutical labs, you know, very sophisticated." They use wooden paddles, even shovels, to mix the chemicals in these simple metal tubs.

To trick Americans into thinking they are taking Xanax, Percocet, or oxycodone, a single cartel "cook" can press fentanyl into 100,000 fake pills every day. The indictment claimed that the pills are smuggled across the border to supply the "streets of junkies," as described by the defendant's son Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar.

Because fentanyl is so inexpensive to produce, the cartel allegedly makes enormous profits even when selling the drug wholesale for just 50 cents per pill.

The drug is particularly dangerous due to its potency. Because the narcotic dose of fentanyl is so close to the lethal dose, a pill designed to give a habitual user a high can easily kill a less experienced person taking something they didn't know was fentanyl.

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More than 107,000 Americans died from drug overdoses between August 2021 and August of the previous year, the majority from synthetic opioids. According to the New York indictment, the DEA seized more than 57 million fake prescription pills last year that contained fentanyl.

The "Chapitos," as the sons are known, have resorted to grotesque violence in order to defend and grow that business.

Of the 23 associates charged in the New York indictment, enforcers Ivan Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar and Jesus Alfredo Guzmán Salazar are the main defendants. Ovidio Guzmán López, also known as "the Mouse," is accused in another indictment in the same district of pushing the cartel towards fentanyl. He was detained in Mexico in January, and the United States has asked for his extradition. The Northern District of Illinois has filed charges against Joaqun Guzmán López.

The Guzmán Salazar indictment claims that while the cartel performs some lab testing on its goods, it performs more gruesome human tests on rivals who have been kidnapped or addicts who have been injected until they pass out.

Purity of the cartel's fentanyl "varies greatly depending on the method and skill of the particular manufacturer," according to prosecutors. One batch was still shipped to the United States despite a user overdosing on it.

The Sinaloa cartel was controlled to some extent by the elder Guzman and Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada. But because Zambada was thought to be ill and Guzmán was serving a life sentence, the Chapitos moved swiftly to prevent a power vacuum that might split the cartel.

"What really was a unique advantage of the Sinaloa cartel and El Chapo was the ability to calibrate violence," said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Strobe Talbott Centre for Security, Strategy, and Technology.

The extensive New York indictment against the Guzmán Salazar brothers describes their propensity for feeding adversaries to their pet tigers as well as how they tortured two Mexican federal agents, one of whom they shot after ripping through his muscles with a corkscrew and stuffing chile peppers into the holes left behind.

The indictment also provides background information on some recent Mexican violence.

Across from El Paso, Texas, in August 2022, Ciudad Juarez was attacked by gunmen. Nine city residents and two prisoners were killed. According to U.S. prosecutors, the Chapitos' security division directed their local gang allies to carry out the violence, which was directed at a rival cartel's commercial targets.

This Sinaloa cartel is not their father's, according to Felbab-Brown. Simply put, "These guys think very differently than their father does."

The Guzmán Salazar indictment makes an initial effort to break up the cartel's supply chain by naming four people connected to a Chinese chemical company and a Guatemalan broker who is accused of assisting the cartel in obtaining the chemicals and even advising them on the best fentanyl recipes.

"Unless you get the finished product or the precursor chemicals, when they talk about labs and you're trying to focus in on labs, that's not going to have an impact," Vigil said.

The government of Mexico has stumbled due to conflicting messages from its security forces, who have highlighted the closure of labs while President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has claimed that fentanyl is not produced in Mexico.

DEA Administrator Anne Milgram was questioned by lawmakers on Thursday about Mexico and China's level of cooperation with the United States.

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Milgram stated that the DEA would not be hesitant to pursue public officials in Mexico or elsewhere should it find evidence of ties to the cartels. "We want the Mexicans to work with us and we want them to do more," Milgram added.

According to experts, López Obrador is one barrier to reducing the production of fentanyl by the cartels. López Obrador reacted angrily when U.S. prosecutors revealed the coordinated effort against the Sinaloa cartel. Accusing the American government of "spying" and "interference," the president claimed that information gathered by American agents in Mexico had been used to build the case.

According to experts, the president had already drastically reduced Mexico's cooperation with the DEA.

The fundamental issue, according to Hope, the security analyst, is that López Obrador doesn't seem to comprehend the danger posed by fentanyl. The president bemoans the decline in family values in America and portrays addiction as a moral failing.