The US Treasury Department announced Monday sanctions on an international operator of the Sinaloa Cartel, whose activities span the globe.
The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control blocked all property in the United States belonging to José Ángel Rivera Zazueta and two other men.
The agency noted that the Rivera Zazueta network “operates worldwide with nodes in the United States, Mexico, Central and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia.”
“Rivera Zazueta imports chemical precursors from China to Mexico, which are later used in the manufacture of synthetic drugs,” including fentanyl, a deadly opioid, and crystal methamphetamine.
The agency noted that Rivera Zazueta worked with a Chinese chemical transport company. Shanghai Fast-Fine Chemicals, “which has shipped various precursor chemicals, often falsely labeled, to drug trafficking organizations in Mexico for the illicit production of fentanyl for US markets.”
More than 70,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses, particularly fentanyl, in 2020.
Mexican drug trafficking organizations often compress the drug into pills similar to legitimate drugs, making it much more deadly because many victims don’t know they are taking fentanyl.
Rivera Zazueta has also moved “large quantities of cocaine from Colombia to the United States, Spain, Italy, Guatemala, Mexico and other countries in Europe and Central America,” the department said.
The agency also imposed sanctions Monday on his Mexican partner, Nelton Santiso Águila, and Guatemalan Jason Antonio Yang López.
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