The indictments unsealed on Friday were not the first charges brought against Mr. Guzmán’s sons. Like their father, who was charged in seven cases in seven cities before his eventual conviction in Federal District Court in Brooklyn in 2019, they are now facing multiple indictments in several jurisdictions.
One of the sons, Ovidio Guzmán López, was facing charges with his brother Joaquín Guzmán López, unsealed in Federal District Court in Washington in 2019, days after their father was found guilty. Long known as the least accomplished of Mr. Guzmán’s children, Ovidio Guzmán López was arrested by the Mexican authorities in January in Culiacán, a northwestern city that has served for decades as the home base of the Sinaloa cartel.
Two of Mr. Guzman’s other sons by a different wife — Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar and Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar — were named on Friday in two separate indictments in Chicago and Manhattan. The Chicago case also included Joaquín Guzmán López as a defendant.
Iván was already facing charges filed in 2014 in San Diego, and Jesús Alfredo had been charged in 2015 in Chicago. Both remain at large in Mexico, as does Joaquín.
The sons inherited a portion of their father’s fractured empire after his extradition to the United States in 2017, on the day before Donald J. Trump took office. Often derided in the Mexican news media as playboys and unworthy successors to the family patriarch, they nonetheless created a thriving trade in fentanyl, U.S. law enforcement officials say, while navigating the treacherous relations with other top cartel figures, including Mr. Guzmán’s brother, Aurelio, and his longtime business partner, Ismael Zambada García.
The trial of Mr. Guzmán, which sprawled over the course of three months, laid bare the depravity at the heart of the Sinaloa cartel as witnesses described how its assassins seared people with irons and burned them alive in bonfires.
“We take aim at the Sinaloa cartel and the global network of death that feeds it,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said at the news conference on Friday.
Glenn Thrush contributed reporting.
