Under the plea deal announced by the Department of Justice, Guzmán López pleaded guilty to two counts of drug conspiracy and two counts of knowingly engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise.
He also admitted to organizing the smuggling of large shipments of drugs including cocaine, heroin and fentanyl into the United States, as well as his and his associates’ involvement in violence against law enforcement officials, civilians and rival drug traffickers.
The Justice Department, prosecutors from three U.S. districts as well as several law enforcement agencies worked to secure the plea agreement, which resolves the charges Guzmán López faced in Illinois and New York, according to the statement.
“Today’s guilty plea is another major step toward holding the Sinaloa Cartel and its leaders accountable for their role in fueling the fentanyl epidemic that has plagued so many Americans,” Jay Clayton, the interim United States attorney for New York’s Southern District, said in the DOJ statement. “We remain committed to dismantling the Cartel’s entire fentanyl infrastructure and ensuring that the Chapitos and their violent organization can no longer flood our communities with this poison.”
Attorney Jeffrey Lichtman, who represents Guzmán López and one of his brothers, declined to comment on whether the plea agreement was a good deal before sentencing took place, the Associated Press reported.
Lichtman did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Saturday.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum criticized the deal in a news conference Friday, saying that there was a “lack of coherence” in U.S. policy, by declaring cartels to be terrorist organizations while also entering into plea deals with their leaders.
According to the plea deal, the government will inform the sentencing judge of the level of Guzmán López’s cooperation with authorities, and he could avoid a mandatory life sentence for one of the charges. However, the government said it would not request a lower sentence than the mandatory minimum of 10 years’ imprisonment for the second charge and noted that the final decision for any part of the deal rests with the sentencing judge.
A date for sentencing has not been set.
Laurie Levenson, a law professor at Loyola Law School and former assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, told the Associated Press that Guzmán López’s guilty plea may have “saved other family members.”
“In this way, he has some control over who he’s cooperating against and what the world will know about that cooperation,” she said, adding that the plea deal was a “big step” for the U.S. government. “The best way for them to take out the cartel is to find out about its operations from an insider, and that’s what they get from his cooperation.”
Guzmán López’s father was the head of the powerful Sinaloa cartel who became known for his dramatic escapes from two maximum security prisons in Mexico. He was recaptured in 2016 and extradited to the United States the following year and is now serving a life sentence.
In 2019, Mexican authorities briefly detained Guzmán López in the city of Culiacán but were forced to release him in a bungled operation that saw members of the Sinaloa cartel turn the city into an urban war zone — to the embarrassment of the Mexican government. The Mexican military eventually captured Guzmán López in 2023, ahead of a visit by then-President Joe Biden; he was extradited to the United States the same year.
One of his brothers, Joaquín Guzmán López, was taken into U.S. custody alongside another of the cartel’s top leaders in June last year, after they boarded a private plane that landed in Texas. Joaquín Guzmán López has pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking charges filed in Illinois.
