Mexico's Drug War - Page 65

ESMERALDAS, Ecuador — The graffiti image of a tiger with bared fangs makes clear who controls the neighborhood in this impoverished city near the Colombian border: The Tiguerones, an Ecuadorian gang allied with Mexico’s brutal Jalisco New Generation cartel. God help anyone who forgets it: Last fall two men were found hanging from a bridge, tied up by their feet, decapitated. One man, still clothed in shorts and a red shirt, hung so low his torso was almost touching the street; the other, dangling several feet higher, had a trash bag covering his body. A note left by the corpses suggested the men were killed for being informants.

It was the kind of gruesome display of violence used to instill terror in cartel-dominated regions of Mexico, but the gangs were just getting started. Over the next 24 hours, they detonated a dozen car bombs and explosives in coordinated attacks in Esmeraldas and in Guayaquil, a port city to the south that’s become a major jumping off point for cocaine headed to Europe. They also killed five police officers and took seven prison guards hostage. Now, Ecuadorian soldiers travel in squads of no less than 30 to impose a 9 p.m. curfew on the city.

These are worrying signs of how the Mexican cartels have exported their drug war south and are quickly turning Ecuador into a war zone. The Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel are battling for dominance over the transport of cocaine from the vast, green coca fields of Colombia, through Ecuador to the United States and Europe.

Ecuador has long been known as one of the most peaceful countries in Latin America, but its soaring murder rate is comparable to Medellin, Colombia during the reign of Pablo Escobar. Ecuador’s homicide rate jumped 245 percent between 2020 and 2022. Murders reached 26.6 per 100,000 residents in 2022 compared to 7.8 per 100,000 in the U.S., putting it right behind troubled Honduras and Venezuela.

Gang members are being sent to cartel-financed training camps in northern Ecuador to learn how to kill, according to drug traffickers interviewed by VICE World News. Children are being recruited as assassins because under Ecuador’s legal system they face relatively little prison time if they are caught.

This month, President Guillermo Lasso issued a decree ending a 12-year-old ban on civilians owning firearms, which he said would further the goal of defeating “delinquency, drug trafficking and organized crime.” The message? With police and the military unable to protect citizens from gang violence, access to weapons might give citizens a fighting chance.

“We are fighting to contain this sickness that is threatening our country,” said Ecuadorian General Alexander Levoyer, a war veteran who now oversees the military’s operations along the border with Colombia.

Nestled between the world’s two biggest cocaine suppliers, Colombia and Peru, Ecuador has long been a transit hub for cocaine because of its geography and lax security. But if Ecuador was once a thoroughfare for cocaine, it’s now a superhighway. Ecuadorian authorities are seizing so much cocaine they are turning it into concrete.

“We are a small country up against big mafias that have enormous financial resources,” said Pablo Ramírez, Ecuador's anti-narcotics chief. “Ecuador has institutional weaknesses that allow these criminal organizations to take advantage of our location between these two countries.” He estimated that 45 percent of the cocaine produced in Colombia now passes through Ecuador.

Mexican cartels have long played a supporting role in Ecuador's drug trade, but now they’re calling the shots, financing the production of cocaine by Colombian guerrilla groups, paying them to transport it into Ecuadorian territory, and then hiring Ecuadorian gangs to move the cocaine into ports and boats at sea. Flush with cash and weapons, the Ecuadorian gangs are waging a proxy war on the cartels’ behalf and fighting for power amongst themselves, turning the country into Latin America’s new killing fields.

A half dozen major gangs in Ecuador are now moving cocaine for international drug cartels. The Choneros, Gangsters, and Big Feet (the “Patones”) work for Sinaloa, while the Tiguerones, Wolves and Chonekillers are allied with Jalisco, according to Ecuadorian authorities and drug traffickers. The Alligators work for the Albanian mafia, one of Europe’s most powerful criminal organizations that has also fueled bloodshed in Ecuador.

The violence has triggered a mass exodus of Ecuadorians heading north toward the U.S. border. In just the first two months of 2023, immigration officials apprehended Ecuadorians at the southwest border 16,080 times—a stunning number considering that for most of the past two decades, fewer than 3,000 Ecuadorians arrived per year. There are now more Ecuadorians arriving at the U.S. border than Haitians or Salvadorans, and they are the number one nationality being detained by Mexican authorities.

Mexico's president lashed out Monday at what he called U.S. "spying" and "interference" in Mexico, days after U.S. prosecutors announced charges against 28 members of the Sinaloa cartel for smuggling massive amounts of fentanyl into the United States. The three sons of former drug lord Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán — known as the "Chapitos" — were among those charged.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador suggested Monday that the case had been built on information gathered by U.S. agents in Mexico, and said "foreign agents cannot be in Mexico."

He called the Sinaloa investigation "abusive, arrogant interference that should not be accepted under any circumstances."

A former top U.S. drug enforcement agent called the president's comments unjustified. Mike Vigil, former head of international operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration, said López Obrador was mistakenly assuming that U.S. agents needed to be in Mexico to collect intelligence for the case. In fact, much of the case appears to have come from trafficking suspects caught in the U.S.

"He wants to completely destroy the working relationship that has taken decades to build," Vigil said. "This is going to translate into more drugs reaching the United States and more violence and corruption in Mexico."

López Obrador continued Monday to describe fentanyl - a synthetic opioid that causes about 70,000 overdose deaths annually in the United States - as a U.S. problem, claiming it isn't made in Mexico. He has suggested American families hug their children more, or keep their adult children at home longer, to stop the fentanyl crisis.

The Mexican president also made it clear that fighting fentanyl trafficking takes a back seat to combating Mexico's domestic security problems, and that Mexico is helping only out of good will.

"What we have to do first is guarantee public safety in our country ... that is the first thing," López Obrador said, "and in second place, help and cooperate with the U.S. government."

Vigil pointed out that it was the very same cartels trafficking fentanyl and methamphetamines that cause most of the violence in Mexico. Avoiding confrontations with cartels is unlikely to bring peace, Vigil said, noting "it is going to have exactly the opposite effect."

The U.S. charges announced Friday revealed the brutal and shocking methods the cartel, based in the northern state of Sinaloa, used to move massive amounts of increasingly cheap fentanyl into the United States.

Federal officials on Friday detailed the Chapitos' gruesome and cruel practices aimed at extending their power and amassing greater wealth — from testing the potency of the fentanyl they allegedly produced on prisoners to feeding victims of their violence to tigers in order to intimidate civilians.

Apparently eager to corner the market and build up a core market of addicts, the cartel was wholesaling counterfeit pills containing fentanyl for as little as 50 cents apiece.

López Obrador own administration has acknowledged finding dozens of labs where fentanyl is produced in Mexico from Chinese precursor chemicals, mainly in the northern state of Sinaloa.

Most illegal fentanyl is pressed by Mexican cartels into counterfeit pills made to look like other medications like Xanax, oxycodone or Percocet, or mixed into other drugs, including heroin and cocaine. Many people who die of overdoses in the United States do not know they are taking fentanyl.

López Obrador deeply resents U.S. allegations of corruption in Mexico, and fought tooth and nail to avoid a U.S. trial of former defense secretary Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos on U.S. charges of aiding a drug gang in 2020.

López Obrador at one point threatened to kick DEA agents out of Mexico unless the general was returned, which he was. Cienfuegos was quickly freed once he returned. Since then, the Mexican government has imposed restrictive rules on how agents can operate in Mexico, and slowed down visa approvals for a time.

APATZINGAN, Mexico (AP) — The drug cartel violence that citizen self-defense leader Hipolito Mora gave his life fighting flared anew on Sunday, just one day after he was buried, as shootings and road blockades hit the city of Apatzingan, a regional hub in Mexico’s hot lands.

Roads in and out of Apatzingan were blocked Sunday morning by trucks and buses pulled across the road by cartel gunmen, as the vehicles’ owners stood by helplessly.

“They told me to park my truck across the road. They said if I moved it, they would burn it,” said one truck driver, who asked his name not be used for fear of reprisals.

And in the city of Apatzingan, the regional hub where the area’s agricultural products are traded, gunmen carjacked a family, took their auto at gun point and used it to shoot another driver to death just a few blocks away.

The victim’s car was left dangling from a bridge as he lay dead inside, slumped onto the passenger’s side seat.

The execution was so quick that his car continued on for a few yards, the front end climbed onto the guard rail of the bridge, and came to rest almost turned on its side.

A friend of the man said he worked at a car dealership and had gone on a pizza run for a family get-together a few moments before he died. The friend blamed the Jalisco cartel for the killing, despite the fact that Apatzingan has long been dominated by the rival Viagras cartel.

The theory is not so wild. The Jalisco cartel, from the neighboring state of the same name, has been fighting an years-long offensive to enter Michoacan. The roadblocks Sunday might have been because the Viagras gang feared such an attack.

The front lines in the battles now lie along the ill-named Rio Grande, a small river that runs about 15 miles (23 kilometers) south of Apatzingan.

Residents of Las Bateas, a riverside village, had to flee their homes about a month ago after raging gunbattles between the Jalisco cartel and the Viagras broke out in the fields outside the homes. Jalisco gunmen have crossed the river, seeking to take over territory farther north, on the southern outskirts of Apatzingan.

Residents recounted cowering behind the brick walls of their homes as bullets whizzed through the night.

The Mexican government sent in army and National Guard reinforcements, part of an unspoken, years-long policy of keeping Jalisco from advancing, while tolerating the Viagras.

Residents say they feel a bit safer now, and have largely returned to their homes, at least for now.

But the status quo is clearly unsustainable. Because of systematic extortion by the Viagras cartel, many common items in Apatzingan are far more expensive than in the rest of Mexico. A soda that costs 80 cents elsewhere costs $1.40 here. An coconut popsicle that costs 90 cents in the rest of Mexico costs $1.75 in Apatzingan.

Those price differences — and direct extortion that wrings protection payments directly from farmers, ranchers and businessmen — is slowly strangling the rich farmlands.

That is what Hipolito Mora, one of the last leaders of Mexico’s anti-gang citizens’ movement, died fighting. He was buried Saturday alongside two of his faithful followers who were killed with him Thursday. Along him died practically any hope of reviving an armed civilian resistance to drug cartels.

While some angry relatives talked of reviving the 2013-2014 armed farmers’ movement that kicked out one cartel — only to see it replaced by others — many doubted that chapter could ever be repeated.

“He looked out for his town, for his people, and that is something none of us is going to do,” his sister, Olivia Mora, said in a tearful address in front of his coffin.

“We all think first about our own families,” she said. “None of us are going to have the courage to do what he did.”

MEXICO CITY (AP) — The Mexican army said Tuesday that drug cartels have increased their use of roadside bombs or improvised explosive devices this year, with 42 soldiers, police and suspects wounded by IEDs so far in 2023, up from 16 in 2022.

The figures provided by Defense Secretary Luis Cresencio Sandoval appeared to include only those wounded by explosive devices, but officials have already acknowledged that at least one National Guard officer and four state police officers have been killed in two separate explosive attacks this year.

Particularly on the rise were drone-carried bombs, which were unknown in Mexico prior to 2020. So far this year, 260 such incidents have been recorded. However, even that number may be an underestimate: residents in some parts of the western state of Michoacan say that attacks by bomb-dropping drones are a near-daily occurrence.

Six car bombs have been found so far in 2023, up from one in 2022. However, car bombs were also occasionally used years ago in northern Mexico.

Overall, 556 improvised explosive devices of all types — roadside, drone-carried and car bombs — were found in 2023. A total of 2,186 have been found during the current administration, which took office in December 2018.

More than half of all the explosive devices found during the current administration — 1,411 — were found in Michoacan, where the Jalisco cartel has been fighting a bloody, yearslong turf war against a coalition of local gangs. Most of the rest were found in the states of Guanajuato and Jalisco.

It was not clear whether the figures for the number of explosive devices found includes only those that failed to explode.

Sandoval said that the explosive devices frequently failed to explode.

“All of these explosive devices are homemade, based on tutorials that can be found on the internet,” he said.

Sandoval said most of the devices appear to have been made with black powder “which is available in the marketplace,” or more powerful blasting compounds stolen from mines.

In July, a drug cartel set off a coordinated series of seven roadway bombs in western Mexico that killed four police officers and two civilians. The governor of Jalisco state said the explosions were a trap set by the cartel to kill law enforcement personnel.

In June, another cartel used a car bomb to kill a National Guard officer in the neighboring state of Guanajuato.

Explosives also wounded 10 soldiers in the neighboring state of Michoacan in 2022 and killed a civilian.

A son of jailed drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera was extradited to the United States on Friday, nine months after his arrest in Mexico, a senior U.S. law enforcement official said.

Ovidio Guzman Lopez was in federal custody in Chicago and has been linked to violence and the drug trade, the official said. A joint operation between the DEA and the U.S. Marshals Service led to the extradition.

Guzman was taken into custody Jan. 5 in the Sinaloa city of Culiacán. Violence erupted in the city following his arrest, with alleged cartel members carjacking residents and setting vehicles on fire.

After a previous arrest in 2019, Mexican authorities released Guzman following a gunbattle known as the “Battle of Culiacán.”

A member of the “Chapitos” — as four of the sons are known — Guzman was indicted in April on federal charges of large-scale drug trafficking, money laundering and violent crimes linked to his father’s arrest and extradition in 2017, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for California’s Southern District said at the time.

Prosecutors described the brothers as leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel, one of the most powerful drug trafficking operations in the world.

All four brothers were indicted in April. The other three were not in custody at the time, and their whereabouts weren’t immediately clear.

The prosecutor’s office accused the brothers of transporting and manufacturing tons of drugs, including cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines. When their indictments were announced, Attorney General Merrick Garland called the organization the “largest, most violent and most prolific fentanyl trafficking operation in the world.”

They also allegedly bribed officials and used murder, kidnapping and other violent crimes against law enforcement, rival drug traffickers and cartel members, prosecutors said.

Their father, the former head of the Sinaloa Cartel, was convicted in 2019 and is serving a life sentence at a maximum security prison in Colorado.

His wife was released from prison Wednesday after serving less than two years for helping run his multi-billion dollar drug empire.

TAPACHULA, Mexico (AP) — Drug cartel turf battles cut off a series of towns in the southern Mexico state of Chiapas, near the Guatemala border, Mexico’s president acknowledged Monday.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said that the cartels have cut off electrical power in some towns, and forbidden government workers from coming in to the largely rural area to fix power lines.

He said the cartels were fighting for control of the drug smuggling routes that lead into southern Mexico from Central America. But the area around the town of Frontera Comalapa is also a valuable route for smuggling immigrants, thousands of who have clambered aboard trains to reach the U.S. border.

The Sinaloa cartel is fighting the Jalisco New Generation cartel for control of the area, located in a rural, mountainous area north of the border city of Tapachula.

Four men, apparently members of the Jalisco cartel, were found dead over the weekend in a nearby town, according to an employee of the Chiapas state prosecutor’s office who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to be quoted by name.

The local Roman Catholic Diocese said in a statement over the weekend that cartels were practicing forced recruitment among local residents, and had “taken over our territory,” blocking roads and causing shortages of basic goods.

López Obrador also appeared to lend credence to videos posted over the weekend, showing residents applauding about 20 pickup trucks full of armed Sinaloa cartel gunmen as they entered one Chiapas town. The president said the cartels might be forcing or bribing residents into acting as civilian supports, known in Mexico as “social bases.”

“On the side of the highway there are people apparently welcoming them,” López Obrador said of the video, which shows uniformed men aboard the trucks brandishing rifles and machine guns mounted on turrets. Voices in the video can be heard shouting phrases like “Pure Sinaloa people!”

“These may be support bases, like those in some parts of the country, because they give them food packages, or out of fear, because they have threatened them,” the president said.

But López Obrador said the problem was a local, isolated issue that had been magnified and exploited by his political foes. “They may make a campaign out of Frontera Comalapa, but it won’t go far,” he said. “They are going to magnify everything they can.”

The Diocese of San Cristobal de las Casas said in a statement Saturday that there had been forced recruitment, along with extorsion, road blockades, kidnappings and killings.

“The drug cartels have taken over our territory, and we are under a state of siege, suffering widespread psychosis from narco blockades” that have prevented food and medical care from reaching the isolated towns.

López Obrador acknowledged that the gangs “cut off the electricity in some towns and have not allowed workers from the (state-owned) Federal Electricity Commission in to restore service.”

The Diocese of Tapachula issued a statement saying local residents were suffering as a result of the conflict.

“In these times of suffering and shortages, we must use our intelligence, calmly, to survive day to day with what we have at hand,” according to the statement.

In neighboring Guatemala, the army deployed troops along its side of the border.

The Chiapas state government, which had not spoken much about the conflict, issued a statement Monday saying 800 soldiers, police and National Guard members were being dispatched to Frontera Comalapa after reports of “several” gang roadblocks in the area.

The area has long been the scene of a various shootouts, kidnappings and reports of widespread extortion by drug gangs in recent months.

In August, prosecutors said a half dozen men were killed in an apparent ambush in a township near Frontera Comalapa along a known migrant smuggling route.

CULIACÁN, Mexico—The Sinaloa cartel, the leading exporter of fentanyl to the U.S., is prohibiting the production and trafficking of the illegal opioid in its territory after coming under increasing pressure from U.S. law enforcement, cartel members say.

The order comes from the “Chapitos,” the group led by the four sons of imprisoned drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who transformed the Sinaloa cartel into a global empire managing the supply of narcotics, from Mexican heroin to Colombian cocaine and fentanyl made with precursors from Asia.

The directive from the most powerful faction within the criminal group aims to evade pressure from U.S. law enforcement, operatives say, though some U.S. officials are skeptical that the ban will endure.

The Biden administration is pushing the Mexican government to take more aggressive steps to dismantle the organization, considered by the U.S. to be the top fentanyl trafficking group. U.S. deaths from fentanyl have become an American political issue, with some Republicans, including lawmakers and others running for president, advocating to send the U.S. military into Mexico to fight criminal groups trafficking fentanyl.

For the many people in this northwestern Mexican region who make a living producing and smuggling an opioid that has killed tens of thousands of Americans, the message was clear: stop or die. In June, when the shift away from fentanyl began, three bodies covered with blue pills of the drug appeared on the outskirts of Culiacán.

The Chapitos’ decision to wean themselves from fentanyl trafficking and production comes after a series of high-profile blows against the crime group in recent months.

Chapitos leader Ovidio Guzmán was captured in January during a daylong gunbattle with Mexico’s security forces that killed at least 29 people, including nine soldiers and a Mexican army colonel.

In April, the U.S. indicted the four Guzmán brothers and two dozen of their associates. Anne Milgram, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, said at the time that the DEA had infiltrated the Sinaloa cartel and the Chapitos’ network, obtaining “unprecedented access to the organization’s highest levels.”

In September, Ovidio Guzmán was extradited to the U.S.

“He will not be the last,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in Mexico this month when he met with senior government officials.

A midlevel Sinaloa cartel operative, who used to deal in chemical precursors needed to make the synthetic opioid, said the Chapitos are leaving the business in part because they wanted the U.S. to shift its crackdown efforts to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, their chief rival and another leading fentanyl producer.

Exports of cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine to the U.S. will likely rise in the near future to make up for the income shortfall from the fentanyl ban, cartel members say. Although the core business of the Sinaloa cartel traditionally centers on illegal narcotics, say U.S. officials, the criminal group has diversified into other illicit activities such as widespread extortion.

U.S. officials with knowledge of the cartel cautioned that there is no significant indication of a change in strategy or output, and likened the move to a public relations ploy.

“In the aggregate it won’t mean anything” in terms of overall fentanyl production, one of the officials said. “They think if they do this, they won’t take as much heat.”

Mexico’s Security Minister Rosa Icela Rodríguez didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Earlier this month, days before Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador met in Mexico City to discuss bilateral strategies to combat fentanyl trafficking and production, about a dozen banners ordering the fentanyl ban were hung from overpasses, billboards and construction sites in Culiacán.

“In Sinaloa, the sale, manufacture, transport or any kind of business involving the substance known as fentanyl, including the sale of chemical products for its elaboration, is permanently banned,” the banners read. “You have been warned. Sincerely yours, the Chapitos.”

Similar banners also appeared in two cities of neighboring Sonora state, which borders the U.S. They were signed by Los Pelones, or “The Bald Ones,” an armed group allied with the Chapitos. Last weekend, similar banners signed by the Tijuana cartel appeared in the border city of Tijuana, which officials say is a major fentanyl entry point to the U.S.

Drug gang leaders appear to be concerned about getting arrested and extradited to the U.S., like Ovidio Guzmán, said Eduardo Guerrero, a Mexican security consultant.

One operator of a fentanyl lab who stopped working three months ago after the bodies were found said that he buried his remaining chemical supplies, fearing a crackdown by the Chapitos. He said he knows of five people, two brothers and three cousins, who were killed because they defied the ban.

Many people in Sinaloa have learned how to produce fentanyl and depend on it for their livelihood, so they are reluctant to shut down business since there are still ways to sell to the U.S., where demand is strong.

“Teaching so many people how to make it was a mistake,” said the midlevel Sinaloa operative.

About a dozen people in Sinaloa have been kidnapped and gone missing over the past 10 days, most of whom were likely involved in the fentanyl underworld, said Miguel Ángel Murillo, a human-rights activist who belongs to the Sinaloa Civic Front, a grassroots organization.

“We believe these kidnappings and disappearances are linked to the ban on fentanyl because their relatives haven’t presented formal complaints to authorities,” he said. “These people are very scared.”

The midlevel Sinaloa cartel operative confirmed that the group is killing those who won’t follow the new dictate. Until a few months ago, he said, he was in charge of some 25 fentanyl labs. “Now I’m destroying them,” he said, in a darkened house in a working-class neighborhood of Culiacán, with skinny dogs barking outside.

“Some stopped producing. Others kept producing, and we are killing them. Others have fled,” he said.

Sinaloa state officials say they don’t have information about the crime group’s prohibition on fentanyl production. Manelich Castilla, a former head of Mexico’s federal police, believes the Sinaloa cartel won’t actually exit fentanyl for good because it means leaving their Jalisco rivals in charge of the profitable business.

Before the ban, there had been excess production of fentanyl in Sinaloa, so the flow of the drug to the U.S. will likely continue over the short term, but the price is likely to increase, cartel members say.

A few miles outside Culiacán on a hilltop overlooking a lush valley, the former lab operator who last year was busy running a pill factory says he shut down production in June after he called the person who supplied him with the precursor chemicals needed to make the synthetic opioid.

“He told me he couldn’t sell any precursors because if he moved them, they would kill him,” said the lab operator. “Without precursors I can’t do anything.”

It is now too dangerous to transport the chemicals in drums in his pickup from Culiacán to his lab outside the city. “If I run into a road checkpoint, they will kill me,” he said.

He hopes an upsurge in the demand for Mexican brown heroin or a more refined product known as China White will tide him over the end of fentanyl. And he said trafficking in guns from the U.S. is another option.

A man who officials say is a top assassin for the cartel once led by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was arrested in Mexico and is the subject of extradition efforts in the United States, officials said Thursday.

Néstor Isidro Pérez Salas, better known as "El Nini," was arrested at a walled compound in Culiacan, Mexico, on Wednesday afternoon by national security forces, according to an arrest registry.

President Joe Biden, who met with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in San Francisco last week, praised the arrest as a result of bravery and U.S.-Mexico cooperation.

"Both our countries are safer with him behind bars and facing justice for his crimes," Biden said.

U.S. officials allege that Pérez is a top sicario, or assassin, for the murderous Sinaloa Cartel, once led by Guzman, who's serving a life sentence in Colorado for his role in its trafficking and violence.

They also said he's the head of security for four of Guzman's sons — Ivan Archivaldo Guzman Salazar, Jesus Alfredo Guzman Salazar, Joaquin Guzman Lopez, and Ovidio Guzman Lopez — known as the "Chapitos."

"He and his security forces murdered, tortured and kidnapped rivals, witnesses, and others who opposed the Chapitos," U.S. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement Thursday.

Wanted in the United States for nearly three years — a $3 million U.S. reward was over his head — Pérez was named in federal charges unsealed in April that allege narcotics, firearms and witness retaliation crimes.

Three of the Chapitos were named in the same case. A fourth, Ovidio Guzman Lopez, pleaded not guilty to a separate-but-identical case in Chicago, where he was being held.

The brothers have all denied the allegations in the federal criminal complaints against them.

The Justice Department has called the four “principal leaders” of the Sinaloa Cartel.

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico wants an urgent investigation into how U.S. military-grade weapons are increasingly being found in the hands of Mexican drug cartels, Mexico’s top diplomat said Monday.

Mexico’s army is finding belt-fed machine guns, rocket launchers and grenades that are not sold for civilian use in the United States.

“The (Mexican) Defense Department has warned the United States about weapons entering Mexico that are for the exclusive use of the U.S. army,” Foreign Relations Secretary Alicia Bárcena said. “It is very urgent that an investigation into this be carried out.”

The Mexican army said in June that it had seized 221 fully automatic machine guns, 56 grenade launchers and a dozen rocket launchers from drug cartels since late 2018.

The military-grade U.S. weaponry — which cartels have bragged about and openly displayed on social media — poses a special challenge for Mexico’s army, which along with police and the National Guard already faces cartels operating homemade armored vehicles and bomb-dropping drones.

In June, Defense Secretary Luis Cresencio Sandoval said five rocket launchers had been found in the possession of the Jalisco New Generation cartel, four were seized from the rival Sinaloa cartel and three more seized from other cartels. Sandoval did not specifically say the weapons were from U.S. military stockpiles.

Ken Salazar, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, confirmed Monday that Mexican officials had brought up the issue at meetings last week, and while he had not been aware of the problem, he pledged the United States would look into it.

“We are going to look into it, we are committed to working with Sedena (Mexico’s Defense Department) to see what’s going on,” Salazar said.

There are a number of possible routes by which the weapons may have made their way to Mexico. Central America was awash with U.S. weaponry during the conflicts of the 1980s, military grade weapons sometimes go missing from stocks in the United States, and some manufacturers who sell arms to the U.S. military might also have sold some abroad or on the black market.

While the Mexican army and marines still have superior firepower, the drug cartels’ weaponry often now outclasses other branches of Mexican law enforcement.

Mexico has long had a problem with semi-automatic rifles that are permitted for civilian use in the United States being smuggled into Mexico, where only low-caliber firearms are permitted and strictly regulated. Mexico has launched legal actions against U.S. arms manufacturers and gun shops, arguing that they contribute to violence.

On Monday, an appeals court in Boston, Massachusetts handed Mexico a victory in one of those actions, reviving a $10 billion lawsuit against seven U.S. gun manufacturers and one distributor. Mexico argued the companies knew weapons were being sold to traffickers who smuggled them into Mexico and decided to cash in on that market.

In 2022, a U.S. federal judge dismissed Mexico’s claims based on the broad protection provided to gun manufacturers by a 2005 U.S. law, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, or PLCAA. The law shields gun manufacturers from damages “resulting from the criminal or unlawful misuse” of a firearm.

Mexico appealed that ruling, and on Monday the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals revived the lawsuit, saying the PLCAA did not apply to the claims the guns caused deaths, damages and injuries in Mexico. The appeals court returned the case to the lower court, to consider the facts in the case.

The Mexican government estimates 70% of the weapons trafficked into Mexico come from the U.S., according to the Foreign Affairs Ministry.

Also Monday, describing talks last week with U.S. officials, Bárcena said the United States is planning to announce sanctions against airlines and transportation companies that move migrants to South and Central America and through Mexico to the U.S. border.

“The United States said it was going to impose sanctions on South American and Central American companies that are transporting migrants irregularly, and they want us to do the same,” Bárcena said. “The (Mexican) Interior Department is going to call on the bus and airline companies, but we don’t want them (the United States) to act unilaterally.”

Mexico, meanwhile, wants changes made to the U.S. CBP One mobile application for asylum-seekers to make appointments.

The app is designed only to work on telephones in northern Mexico, but Bárcena said Mexico has asked that coverage be extended to allow appointments to be made from further south, to avoid a pileup of migrants rushing to Mexico’s northern border cities.