How El Chapo’s Sons, ‘Los Chapitos,’ Became the Face of a New Drug War

As sons of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, once one of world's most powerful drug lords, Ovidio and Joaquín Guzmán López inherited not only their father’s name, but also his brutal legacy. 

Known as “Los Chapitos” (“The Little Chapos”), they led a violent faction of the Sinaloa Cartel, expanding its reach and modernizing its operations. While their father built his empire on cocaine and heroin smuggling into the United States from Mexico, Los Chapitos expanded the gang’s operations into synthetic drugs and digital tools, embracing fentanyl for its potency, profitability and portability. U.S. authorities accused the brothers of flooding the country with fentanyl, deepening the opioid epidemic that killed more than 70,000 Americans in 2023.

The brothers reportedly employed social media to recruit gang members and spread fear, maintained torture sites and carried out executions on video.

Some of their drug smuggling profits went towards bribes to politicians and to hire hit men to protect them. During the brothers’ reign, internal cartel rivalries sparked bloody turf wars across Mexico, escalating drug gang violence.

That all began to unravel in 2023.

Born in 1990, Ovidio quickly emerged as a powerful leader in his own right after his father’s 2016 arrest in Mexico led to his extradition to the U.S. in 2017 when they took over key segments of the Sinaloa cartel’s operations. 

According to U.S. indictments, the brothers played a major role in fentanyl production and trafficking and helped to transform the cartel into a dominant force in the global synthetic drug trade.

Ovidio made international headlines in October 2019 when Mexican authorities briefly captured him in the northwestern Mexican city of Culiacán, the longtime base of the Sinaloa Cartel. An iconic image of his arrest showed him in an impeccable white shirt dress open at the neck and holding a black baseball cap on one hand.

But after the arrest, cartel gunmen flooded the streets, killing civilians and outgunning the military. Mexico’s government made a controversial decision to release Ovidio to prevent further bloodshed, an event widely seen as a show of the cartel’s power over the state.

In January 2023, he was captured again in a major military operation and extradited to the U.S. in September 2023. 

After nearly two years of legal wrangling, Ovidio entered a guilty plea in July 2025 to multiple federal charges, including conspiracy to traffic fentanyl, money laundering and weapons violations. As part of the plea deal with prosecutors, 17 of Ovidio’s relatives, including his mother, were allowed entry to the U.S., presumably in an attempt to protect them from violence from other cartel leaders because of his cooperation with investigators.

Ovidio admitted to overseeing drug labs, coordinating smuggling routes into the U.S. and ordering brutal violence to enforce cartel control, including the torture and execution of rivals and suspected informants. 

Prosecutors announced they would not seek the death penalty in the case. Sentencing in Ovidio’s trial was delayed in 2025 as officials weighed whether his cooperation was enough to lessen his potential prison sentence.

The elder of the two brothers, Joaquín Guzmán López was a key leader within Los Chapitos, overseeing cartel logistics, finance and international distribution networks. 

He helped maintain the flow of chemicals from China to clandestine fentanyl production labs in Mexico, where the synthetic opioid was mass produced and sent across the U.S. border. In the 2023 Department of Justice indictment, Joaquín was charged with manufacturing and distributing fentanyl, firearms trafficking and conspiracy to import narcotics.

In July 2024, Joaquín was arrested in Texas alongside Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada (who co-founded the Sinaloa cartel with “El Chapo”) after the pair were lured to El Paso in a sting operation. 

In the wake of the arrests, it was reported that Joaquín was likely in negotiations with U.S. prosecutors for a plea deal in exchange for leniency. Hearings in Joaquín’s case were repeatedly delayed in 2025, and on December 1, he pleaded guilty to one count of drug conspiracy and one count of engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise. He faces a minimum penalty of 10 years in prison and a maximum penalty of life in prison.

Los Chapitos, like their father, became infamous in Mexican narcoculture and were romanticized to a certain degree in music and in the media. But to law enforcement on both sides of the border, they were emblematic leaders of a secretive, violent and globally connected cartel.

Following the conviction of Ovidio, U.S. and Mexican authorities in 2025 were trying to tighten the net around remaining cartel members, particularly Ovidio and Joaquín’s half brothers, Iván Archivaldo and Jesús Alfredo, who were believed to be leading cartel operations. 

In June 2025, the U.S. Treasury Department announced sanctions against the half brothers and offered rewards of up to $10 million for information leading to their arrests and/or convictions. Experts warned that arresting them would not dismantle the Sinaloa Cartel because it is vast, resilient and adaptable–and often regenerates leadership from within. 

The fall of Ovidio and Joaquín did signal a shift, though, because the cartel's second generation faced a legal reckoning and limited the period of time it operated with impunity.