Two reputed high-ranking Mexican cartel figures have already landed in Chicago as part of a historic prisoner transfer with Mexico as the Trump administration turns up the pressure on drug trafficking organizations, federal authorities said late Thursday.
Norberto Valencia Gonzalez, a financial guru affiliated with the once-powerful and notoriously violent Beltran-Leyva cartel, was extradited to Chicago and pleaded not guilty to an indictment unsealed Thursday alleging he conspired to traffic kilogram-quantities of cocaine and launder drug proceeds, according to a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago.
Also coming to Chicago was Jose Angel Canobbio-Inzunza, an alleged aide and security chief for the Sinaloa cartel once headed by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the spokesman said.
An indictment unveiled last year accused Inzunza, 44, of assisting one of Guzman’s sons, who took over the business after their father’s arrest, with manufacturing and importing cocaine, methamphetamine, fentanyl and marijuana to the U.S. for sale. The charges also alleged Inzunza financed and ran the cartel’s security arm, known as Los Chimales.
Inzunza pleaded not guilty during a hearing Thursday before U.S. District Judge Martha Pacold, before the prisoner deal was announced by the Department of Justice, court records show.
In all, Mexico sent 29 drug cartel figures, including drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero, who was behind the killing of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent in 1985, to the United States — an unprecedented show of security cooperation that comes as top Mexican officials are in Washington trying to head off the Trump administration’s threat of imposing 25% tariffs on all Mexican imports starting Tuesday.
Those sent to the U.S. were brought from prisons across Mexico to board planes at an airport north of Mexico City that took them to eight U.S. cities, according to the Mexican government.
Among them were members of five of the six Mexican organized crime groups designated earlier this month by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration as “foreign terrorist organizations.”
One prisoner, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, was a former leader of the Juarez drug cartel, based in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas, and brother of drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes, known as “The Lord of The Skies,” who died in a botched plastic surgery in 1997.
“We will prosecute these criminals to the fullest extent of the law in honor of the brave law enforcement agents who have dedicated their careers — and in some cases, given their lives — to protect innocent people from the scourge of violent cartels,” U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement Thursday.
Meanwhile, the two cartel figures sent to Chicago mark the latest in a string of high-profile cases pending at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse, which for years has been the epicenter of the U.S. government’s long-running war on Mexico’s powerful drug-trafficking organizations.
Last year , the intrigue surrounding the improbable arrival of one of El Chapo’s sons, Joaquin Guzman Lopez, on U.S. soil put the spotlight squarely on Chicago, where leaders of the infamous Sinaloa cartel have been named in a parade of indictments that began more than 15 years ago.
Among them El Chapo, who was ultimately convicted by a jury in New York in 2019 and is now serving a life sentence in a Colorado supermax prison.
Also charged in that original 2009 indictment was El Chapo’s partner, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada Garcia, whose extraordinary 50-year run of avoiding arrest ended in stunning fashion in July 2024 when he arrived at a small airport near El Paso, Texas, on a private plane along with his rival, Guzman Lopez, prompting allegations that Mayo had been kidnapped and brought to U.S. soil against his will.
El Mayo is currently facing trial in federal court in Manhattan. The case against Guzman Lopez, meanwhile, is proceeding in Chicago along with his brother, Ovidio Guzman Lopez, who was extradited in 2023.
In many respects, the Chicago area serves as a drug trafficker’s dream. For years, its central location and vast transportation networks have made the city a pivotal hub of narcotics distribution, authorities and federal witnesses have said.
Thousands of tons of drugs have moved through the city over the decades, hidden in vehicle compartments, in suburban stash houses, and semi-trailer loads of everything from avocados to live sheep.
The cartels have also made use of the city’s entrenched street gangs, which have proven more than capable of breaking down the product and delivering it to the streets.
Pedro Flores, the Little Village-born narcotics trafficker who, along with his twin brother, Margarito, helped U.S. authorities bring charges against more than a dozen cartel leaders, testified at El Chapo’s trial in 2018 about the significance of his hometown to the Sinaloa operation.
“I believe it being the third largest city in the United States is important,” Flores testified. “Also its geographic location. It’s practically situated in the center of our country, which makes it convenient, you know, you’re halfway to everywhere, and logistically the infrastructure of railroad systems, highways, airports, waterways, just makes it ideal, not just for drugs but for any type of goods.”
The Associated Press contributed.
jmeisner@chicagotribune.com
