Mexico announced the capture on Wednesday of a man accused by the United States of being a drug cartel leader, less than a week after the two countries’ presidents vowed to crack down on fentanyl trafficking.
Nestor Isidro Perez Salas, alias “El Nini,” was listed in the National Registry of Arrests as being captured around 1:30 pm local time, with Mexican media reporting that a major operation involving helicopters and ground forces had been deployed in the northwest state of Sinaloa.
The United States had offered up to $3 million for information leading to the arrest of Perez Salas, who faces charges of conspiracy to traffic fentanyl, cocaine and weapons, among others.
The US State Department says Perez Salas is a Sinaloa Cartel security lead who works “directly” for a chief deputy of Ivan Archivaldo Guzman Salazar, a son of the cartel’s imprisoned founder Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
After Guzman was sentenced to life in prison in the United States, several of his sons, collectively known as the “Chapitos” or “The Little Chapos,” inherited control of the Sinaloa Cartel, according to the US authorities.
One of the sons, Ovidio Guzman Lopez, was extradited to the United States in September.
The US State Department described Perez Salas as also being “one of the leaders and commanders of the ‘Ninis,’ a particularly violent group of security personnel for the Chapitos.”
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador vowed in a meeting last week with US President Joe Biden to tackle the trafficking and production of fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid which has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths in the United States over the years.
He told Biden on the sidelines of the APEC summit in San Francisco that he was “fully aware of the damage it poses to the youth of the United States.”
The Mexican government has insisted that fentanyl and its precursors are not manufactured on its territory, but has admitted that Mexican drug traffickers buy the opioid to mix it with other drugs.
Chinese President Xi Jinping also pledged in a meeting with Biden last week to crack down on fentanyl production in his country, where many precursor chemicals are made.
Nationwide, the United States saw a record of around 110,000 drug overdose deaths between March 2022 and March 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Fentanyl accounted for some two-thirds of them.
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