By CHRISTOPHER SHERMAN and MARK STEVENSON

MEXICO CITY-- With Sinaloa cartel employer Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán serving a life sentence, his children guided the family company into fentanyl, developing a network of laboratories churning out huge amounts of the cheap, fatal drug that they smuggled into the U.S., district attorneys exposed in a recent indictment.

Guzmán's trial revolved around drug shipments, the case versus his kids exposes the inner functions of a cartel undergoing a generational shift as it worked "to manufacture the most potent fentanyl and to sell it in the United States at the lowest cost," according to the indictment unsealed April 14 in Manhattan.

Artificial opioids-- primarily fentanyl-- now eliminate more Americans every year than died in the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined, feeding an argument amongst some politicians that the cartels must be branded terrorist companies and triggering once-unthinkable calls for U.S. military intervention throughout the border.

" The problem with fentanyl, as some individuals at the State Department informed me, has to be repositioned. It's not a drug issue; it's a poisoning issue," stated Alejandro Hope, a security expert in Mexico, who died Friday. "Very couple of individuals head out intentionally looking for fentanyl."

The groundwork for the U.S. fentanyl epidemic was laid more than 20 years back, with aggressive over-prescribing of the artificial opioid oxycodone. As U.S. authorities clamped down on its prescription, users relocated to heroin, which the Sinaloa cartel gladly provided.

Making its own fentanyl-- far more powerful and flexible than heroin-- in small, quickly concealed laboratories was a video game changer. The cartel went from its first makeshift fentanyl laboratory to a network of labs focused in the northern state of Sinaloa in less than a decade.

" These are not incredibly labs, because they give individuals the illusion that they're like pharmaceutical labs, you understand, really advanced," said Mike Vigil, former head of international operations for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. "These are absolutely nothing more than metal tubs and they use wood paddles-- even shovels-- to blend the chemicals."

A single cartel "cook" can press fentanyl into 100,000 counterfeit pills every day to trick Americans into believing they're taking Xanax, Percocet or oxycodone. The tablets are smuggled over the border to provide what boy Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar said are "streets of addicts," the indictment stated.

Fentanyl is so cheap to make that the cartel gains massive profits even wholesaling the drug at 50 cents per pill, prosecutors stated.

The drug's potency makes it especially harmful. The narcotic dose of fentanyl is so near the deadly dose that a tablet implied to ensure a high for a habituated user can quickly eliminate a less experienced person taking something they didn't understand was fentanyl.

In between August 2021 and August of last year, more than 107,000 Americans died from drug overdoses, many from synthetic opioids. In 2015, the DEA took more than 57 million fentanyl-laced counterfeit prescription pills, according to the New York indictment.

To safeguard and broaden that service, the "Chapitos," as the children are understood, have turned to monstrous violence.

Enforcers Ivan Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar and Jesus Alfredo Guzmán Salazar are the lead offenders amongst 23 associates charged in the New York indictment. Ovidio Guzmán López, alias "the Mouse," who supposedly pushed the cartel into fentanyl, is charged in another indictment in the very same district. Mexico jailed him in January and the U.S. federal government has requested extradition. Joaquín Guzmán López is charged in the Northern District of Illinois

According to the Guzmán Salazar indictment, the cartel does some lab screening on its item however conducts more grisly human screening on abducted rivals or addicts who are injected up until they overdose.

The pureness of the cartel's fentanyl "differs considerably depending on the approach and ability of the particular maker," district attorneys noted. When the senior Guzmán and Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada led the Sinaloa cartel, it operated with a specific degree of restraint.

" What was truly an unique advantage of the Sinaloa cartel and El Chapo was the ability to adjust violence," said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow in the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology at the Brookings Institute.

The wide-ranging New York indictment versus the Guzmán Salazar siblings information their fondness for feeding enemies to their animal tigers and explains how they tortured 2 Mexican federal agents, ripping through one's muscles with a corkscrew then packing the holes with chile peppers prior to shooting him.

The indictment also provides context to some current violence in Mexico.

In August 2022, gunmen shot up Ciudad Juarez across from El Paso, Texas. Two prison inmates and 9 civilians in the city were eliminated. U.S. district attorneys state the Chapitos' security arm purchased their local gang associates to devote the violence, targeting a rival cartel's organizations.

" This is not their daddy's Sinaloa cartel," Felbab-Brown stated. "These people simply run in very different state of minds than their dad."

The Guzmán Salazar indictment makes an initial effort at interrupting the cartel's supply chain, naming 4 people tied to a China-based chemical company and a broker in Guatemala who supposedly assisted the cartel get the chemicals and even instructed them on the very best recipes for fentanyl.

"When they talk about labs and you're trying to focus in on labs, that's not going to have an impact unless you get the finished item or the precursor chemicals," Vigil stated.

Mexico's federal government has actually stumbled through the combined messaging of its security forces playing up their decommissioning of laboratories even while President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has actually asserted that fentanyl is not being produced in Mexico.

In congressional statement Thursday, DEA Administrator Anne Milgram was pressed about whether Mexico and China are doing enough to work together with U.S.

"We desire the Mexicans to deal with us and we want them to do more," Milgram stated, adding that the DEA would not hesitate to pursue public authorities in Mexico or elsewhere ought to it discover evidence of ties to the cartels.

Experts say López Obrador is one challenge to slowing the cartels' fentanyl production. After U.S. prosecutors announced the concerted effort versus the Sinaloa cartel, López Obrador responded angrily. The president accused the U.S. federal government of "spying" and "disturbance," recommending that the case had actually been constructed on details collected by U.S. representatives in Mexico.

The president had actually currently severely reduced Mexico's cooperation with the DEA, professionals said.

Hope, the security analyst, said a basic problem is that López Obrador doesn't appear to comprehend fentanyl's risk. The president rails versus a degeneration of household worths in the United States and paints dependency as an ethical failing.

"He's caught in an ethical universe from 50 years ago," Hope stated.