Washington Moves Against El Mayo’s Cartel Network, Accusing It of Bribery, Political Capture, and Cross-Border Fentanyl Trade

WASHINGTON — Today the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control announced sweeping sanctions on the Los Mayos faction of the Sinaloa Cartel, a move that highlights the group’s violent war with El Chapo Guzmán’s heirs for control of a multibillion-dollar fentanyl empire entrenched in more than 40 nations including Canada. The sanctions also pointed to deep corruption of political and security offices on Mexico’s northwest border.

“The Sinaloa Cartel is a foreign terrorist organization that continues to traffic narcotics, launder its proceeds, and corrupt local officials,” said John K. Hurley, Treasury’s under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence. “Today’s actions cut at the heart of the political and commercial infrastructure that Los Mayos relies upon to poison Americans with fentanyl and maintain control of territory in Baja California.”

Once a monolithic enterprise spanning cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, marijuana, and now fentanyl routes across the Americas, the Sinaloa Cartel has fractured since the imprisonment of co-founders Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada García. Their successors — Guzmán’s sons, collectively called Los Chapitos, and the Zambada loyalists known as Los Mayos — have plunged northwest Mexico into open war.

A sign of the Mayo faction’s foreign reach emerged in British Columbia months ago, when court filings revealed that a fortified compound in Surrey, south of Vancouver, housed a trafficking syndicate tied directly to El Mayo’s network. According to the government’s civil-forfeiture suit, the group negotiated cocaine shipments with Zambada’s emissaries and stockpiled a cache of weapons, opioids, and counterfeit pharmaceuticals. When the RCMP raided the mansion, they found Hikvision surveillance systems, encrypted phones, and nearly a kilogram of Ecstasy alongside fentanyl pills and counterfeit Xanax. The property — minutes from the Peace Arch border crossing — is now the subject of a multimillion-dollar forfeiture case.

After years of tense coexistence, hostilities between the Chapo and Mayo factions erupted last year, and the human toll has been staggering. Reuters and the Associated Press reported that homicides in Sinaloa surged to 883 in the first half of 2025, up from 224 a year earlier. Entire towns have been emptied and convoys of gunmen have left highways strewn with burned-out vehicles.

OFAC, in its designation notice, confirmed: “Turf wars between Los Mayos and Los Chapitos have resulted in the deaths of over a thousand people in the Mexican state of Sinaloa.”

At the center of today’s sanctions is Juan José Ponce Félix, better known as El Ruso. OFAC identified him as “the founder and leader of the primary armed wing of Los Mayos,” controlling routes in Baja California and extending the faction’s fentanyl operations north. A 2015 indictment from the Southern District of California described El Ruso as the commander of “a fleet of soldiers” responsible for kidnappings, hostage-taking, torture, and murder in furtherance of Sinaloa Cartel interests. Now, OFAC says, his dominance in Baja has become a key pillar of Los Mayos’ trafficking empire. Earlier this week, the State Department offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest.

The designations go beyond gunmen. OFAC spotlighted Rosarito, a coastal town just 15 miles south of San Diego, as a laboratory of cartel political capture. Los Mayos, it said, operated through the Arzate brothers — Alfonso and René — and their financial lieutenant, Jesús González Lomelí, who owned bars, restaurants, and resorts across Mexico, used to launder millions in cartel proceeds.

These commercial fronts were paired with direct political influence. Candelario Arcega Aguirre, a cartel operative with close ties to Rosarito’s then-mayor, Hilda Araceli Brown Figueredo, leveraged his relationship to place allies in the municipal Department of Public Security. According to OFAC, Arcega, González, and Brown “collected extortion payments for the Arzates, assisted in managing the Arzate brothers’ operations, and ensured protection for the Arzates’ criminal activities by the Department of Public Security in Rosarito.”

The network extended to a transportation company, Transporte Urbano y Suburbano del V Municipio S.A. de C.V., which OFAC identified as a laundering vehicle for Arcega. All told, the sanctions designated not just traffickers but a matrix of businessmen and public officials accused of entwining Rosarito’s government with cartel command.

U.S. officials describe the cartel as a global enterprise, with distribution and laundering nodes in more than 40 countries and thousands of operatives and facilitators. Canada has been deeply saturated in that network, a surge that accelerated after former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau eased immigration requirements for Mexican citizens.

Court filings in the British Columbia case alleged that the Surrey-based network had the clout to negotiate supply terms directly with El Mayo until his arrest by U.S. law enforcement in July 2024. That capture “disrupted the DTO’s efforts to import and distribute cocaine in Canada,” the documents said, forcing the group to seek new contacts in Mexico. The cache discovered at the mansion included 400 grams of counterfeit Xanax, 810 oxycodone pills, 5.5 grams of fentanyl, and sophisticated video surveillance equipment designed to fortify the property against raids.

The Canadian government formally listed the Sinaloa Cartel as a terrorist entity in February 2025, following the State Department’s U.S. designation. By June, OFAC had moved to sanction the Chapitos wing of the cartel. With today’s action, both sides of the cartel’s civil war are now under U.S. financial blockade.