“Char” for Borderland Beat
This article translated and reposted RIODOCE
According to information obtained by Milenio from Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents, the Sinaloa Cartel has called on its operators in the United States to collect debts and pay for the legal representation of Ovidio Guzmán López following his arrest in Mexico for extradition purposes.
The national newspaper points out that the agency’s intelligence data show that after the arrest of El Ratón, on January 5 in the Tacuichamona syndicate, the cartel’s financial machinery was ordered to move from Sinaloa to collect money and support him, according to a former worker of a cell of the criminal organization who agreed to cooperate with the U.S. government.
Identified as Witness Cooperator 4 by the authorities, he is a Sinaloa cartel operator who operated in Oklahoma, transporting drugs and the profits obtained from their sale.
An FBI agent stated that with the testimony of this subject they discovered that “shortly after Ovidio Guzman was arrested in Sinaloa, Mexico, Witness Cooperator 4 was tasked with collecting money in Oklahoma from drug debts owed to the drug trafficking organization”.
According to U.S. authorities, the Sinaloa Cartel had already established a method for collecting the profits they made from drug trafficking in that country.
A series of couriers would take the dollars directly to a subject identified as Gerardo Santillan, currently under arrest and charged with money laundering, who would then be in charge of getting them to the cartel in Mexico, already laundered.
“Thus, those sums could be delivered to Santillan, who would then watch that it went back to the cartel in Mexico. They told Cooperating Witness 4 that this money would be used in Ovidio Guzman’s defense after his arrest,” the FBI detailed in the money laundering indictment against him, filed in the Western District Court of Oklahoma.
The discovery of the Sinaloa Cartel’s operation to pay for the defense of Chapo Guzman’s son is part of a high-profile investigation by the FBI and Oklahoma police that began in April 2022. The criminal group had been identified as using a network of operatives within the US, including Santillan, for the purpose of collecting and laundering money for the drug organization.