(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Last month, American and Mexican authorities captured a fugitive, David DeWayne Young, who was wanted in the U.S. as part of a massive drug conspiracy case.
According to Mexican journalist Óscar Balmen, the U.S. authorities had help from “Los Chapitos,” the sons of notorious Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who headed the Sinaloa Cartel until he was eventually captured and extradited to the U.S. in January 2017.
“As for El Chapo’s sons, they knew that an American fugitive was hiding in one of their strongholds. They decided they would score points with the FBI and hand him over as a goodwill offering,” Balmen recently said, according to a report in the UK Daily Star.
“Giving his [Young’s] head on a platter would be convenient for them, because after the surprise arrest and express extradition of Ovidio [Guzmán] they started an operation to remove the label of ‘Uncle Sam’s priority targets for trafficking fentanyl’.”
Balmen also reportedly said the sons weren’t happy with Young’s “anti-Mexican” rhetoric. Young is a member of the neo-Nazi prison gang, the Ghostface Gangsters Gang.
The notion that the Sinaloa cartel helping the FBI might seem preposterous, given that Guzmán is serving a life prison sentence in the U.S., and one of his sons was arrested in January last year and is now awaiting trial in the U.S.
However, the Sinaloa cartel has a long history of cooperating with federal authorities as part of a self-preservation strategy.
Newsweek detailed Sinaloa’s strategy of working with the U.S. in 2013, when the news organization interviewed an informant from the cartel.
“Most criminals who become informants do so because they’ve been arrested and squeezed, encouraged to betray their criminal employers in exchange for leniency. But this man had an unusual story to tell about his first encounter with U.S. federal agents. It was his boss, a top manager at the Sinaloa cartel, who encouraged him to help the Americans: ‘Meet with the U.S. investigators, he was told. See how we can help them with information,’” Newsweek reported.
The informant reportedly said an Immigration and Customs Enforcement told him that they were here to help [the Sinaloa cartel]—”and to fuck the Vicente Carrillo cartel. Sorry for the language. That’s exactly what they said,” the informant told Newsweek.
The same year as Newsweek’s investigation, an anonymous Mexican government official reportedly accused the US government of helping the Sinaloa cartel in an internal email leaked in 2012. The Mexican official reportedly alleged that US authorities told the Juarez Cartel in 2010 that it should recognize the superiority of the Sinaloa Cartel and called on both groups to cut down on violence in the area.
And in 2014, another outlet, Business Insider, revealed in 2014 that the DEA was exchanging intelligence with the Sinaloa cartel.
More recently, an ATF whistleblower has come forward with information suggesting that the U.S. is still funneling guns to Mexican cartels in an operation similar to the Obama-era Fast and Furious scandal.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
