The United States State Department has announced rewards of up to $5m each for information that will help authorities capture and convict four Mexican drug cartel leaders, including the brother of infamous trafficker Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
Along with Aureliano Guzman-Loera, US authorities are also upping their pursuit of brothers Ruperto Salgueiro-Nevarez, Jose Salgueiro-Nevarez and Heriberto Salgueiro-Nevarez.
The quartet has been “charged in US indictments for violation of US drug laws, to include international conspiracies to distribute marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, and fentanyl,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a statement on Friday.
The highly dangerous synthetic opioid fentanyl is “responsible for more than 63 percent of the 96,779 drug overdose deaths in the United States between March 2020 and 2021,” Price added.
The four men operate under the umbrella of the federation of the Sinaloa Cartel, one of Mexico’s most notorious drug trafficking groups, which El Chapo led until his most recent capture and imprisonment in 2016.
Guzman was extradited to the US a year later and has since been sentenced to life in prison.
Credit: aljazeera.com
