The Trump administration sanctioned Los Chapitos, a faction of the Mexico-based Sinaloa Cartel involved in the illegal production and trafficking of fentanyl into the United States and connected to gunmen who murdered a Marine veteran in Mexico last year.
On Monday afternoon, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control imposed sanctions on a regional network of Los Chapitos associates and businesses based in Mazatlan, a city in Mexico’s Sonora state.
The Treasury also designated Archivaldo Ivan Guzman Salazar and Jesus Alfredo Guzman Salazar, sons of imprisoned Sinaloa Cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, as the two fugitive leaders of Los Chapitos.
The move came almost eight months after Marine veteran Nicholas Quets was fatally shot when he was ambushed by another vehicle while driving on a northern Mexican highway to the beach on Oct. 18, 2024.
The Treasury cited “gunmen linked to the Sinaloa Cartel” as being “involved in” the murder of Quets. However, Quets’s family has continued to wait for the U.S. government to extradite the suspects for prosecution in the U.S.
“Secretary Bessent’s decisive action to target the Sinaloa Cartel’s financial networks strikes at the heart of this transnational threat,” Doug Quets, Nicholas Quets’s father, said in a statement provided by the Treasury. “Disrupting their ability to move money, launder profits, and bribe officials is essential to dismantling this criminal empire.”
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“Cowards in cartel insignia — more than two dozen strong — pursued Nicholas and fatally shot him in the back, through the heart, during a failed carjacking, only after confirming his status as an American,” Doug Quets said. “This was not just murder — it was a deliberate act of terror against a known American citizen.”
Earlier this year, the State Department designated the Sinaloa Cartel as a Foreign Terrorist Organization following President Donald Trump’s executive order in January authorizing Secretary of State Marco Rubio to go after Latin crime rings involved in the cross-border smuggling of drugs, people, and other goods.
