Who is Ovidio Guzmán López?
Ovidio Guzmán López was born in Culiacán, located in Sinaloa, Mexico, on 29 March 1990. His father, El Chapo, who had four wives, had between thirteen and fifteen children.
However, the number of siblings Ovidio has remains uncertain. Griselda López Pérez, his mother, named him after his paternal grandfather, Ovidio Loera Cobret.
As reported by the Mexican paper Milenio, López’s parents enrolled him at Mexico City’s Center for Education and Culture Ajusco, or Ceyca School, when he was five years old.
This elite school was established based on the ideals of the Legionaries of Christ and was renowned for instilling values of honor and integrity in its students.
All the school students and their families were aware of who he was and Ovidio was excluded from activities or birthday celebrations.
Ovidio Guzmán López’s Takeover of the Sinaloa Cartel
In 2012, the BBC reported that the U.S. Treasury Department had prohibited Ovidio Guzmán López and Iván Archivaldo Guzmán-Salazar from having any American assets and forbade them from engaging in any business with U.S. citizens.
Their father, a fugitive, was taken into custody again in 2014 but then managed to run away once more the following year.
López, Guzmán-Salazar, their brother Jesús Alfredo Guzmán, and El Chapo’s friend Ismael Zambada García had already assumed command of El Chapo’s activities.
They kept producing huge amounts of money on his behalf by buying Colombian cocaine and transporting it into the US together with Mexican-grown marijuana.
López and his siblings took the money they made from their cocaine and pot business and plowed it back into the cartel to expand their range of business activities.
Soon, they were procuring huge amounts of ephedrine, a necessary element for manufacturing meth, from Argentina.
Subsequently, they established 11 research centers throughout Sinaloa to manufacture methamphetamine from the drug and then sold the completed product to illegal vendors in Mexico, Canada, and America.
In 2019, the U.S. government charged Ovidio Guzmán López with conspiring to bring cocaine, methamphetamine, and marijuana into the United States. Despite López’s progress, the sentencing of his father in July appeared to put an end to their rule.
The Detainment & Release of Ovidio Guzmán López
By October, Mexican security forces managed to track down both of El Chapo’s sons. On Oct. 17, they attempted to apprehend Iván first. According to The New York Times, Iván managed to overpower the security forces and summoned hundreds of members of the cartel to take over Culiacán, where López was located, to protect him.
When Mexican troops arrived at López’s residence, cartel members shot at them from inside. After a fierce battle, they were able to enter and arrest López, who submitted without having any weapons, as shown in the video of the incident. However, the fight was still ongoing.
Hundreds of cartel members surged through the city in trucks loaded with .50-caliber, military-grade machine guns. They torched vehicles to block major crossroads, seized government facilities, and closed the airport while dozens of convicted traffickers were freed from prison.
The Mexican government quickly caved to the cartel’s demands and instructed its troops to surrender López in a matter of hours. As a result, Ovidio was given a telephone and told to call off the violence against local citizens.
Where is Ovidio Guzmán López today?
The locations of Ovidio Guzmán López, Iván Archivaldo Guzmán, and Ismael Zambada García still remain a mystery to both Mexican and American law enforcement authorities. However, according to both local sources and the U.S. Department of State, López has grown in notoriety and severity.
Ovidio Guzmán López has been managing the Sinaloa Cartel’s methamphetamine operations, transferring millions of dollars worth of the drug each month and ordering the killings of rivals, people thought to be informants and even a renowned singer who declined to entertain at his nuptials.
Just days before Christmas 2021, in Culiacán, he held a large outdoor event where eight new cars were raffled off, bicycles and home appliances were given away, and toys were distributed for children, all with his father’s initials imprinted on them.
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