Mexican soldiers and police have detained a Sinaloa cartel leader who was once Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán’s right-hand man, but more recently became locked in a power struggle with the imprisoned kingpin’s sons.



Dámaso López was arrested at an apartment block in an upper middle class Mexico City neighbourhood on Tuesday morning, the attorney general’s office said in a statement.

Troops and police officers in masks and full battle gear led López from the building before he was sped in a convoy of white vehicles to a unit of the attorney general’s office.

Nicknamed “El Licenciado” – a title for college graduates – López was a former security official himself, and once worked as head of security in the Puente Grande prison near Guadalajara, where Guzmán was held after his first arrest in 1993.

López is accused of helping Guzmán slip out of the prison in 2001 in the first of two high-profile escapes.

After the escape, López kept a low profile but reputedly worked closely with the fugitive kingpin. Guzmán became godfather to López’s son, Dámaso López Serrano, nicknamed “El Mini-Licenciado” and the supposed leader of a Sinaloa cartel hit team known as Los Ántrax.

In 2013, the US Department of the Treasury’s office of foreign assets control described López as “one of the top lieutenants of the Sinaloa cartel” when it announced sanctions identifying him as a major international drug trafficker.

A grand jury in Virginia has accused López of conspiracy to distribute cocaine and launder money, according to the Associated Press.

Guzmán, who escaped a second maximum security prison in 2015, was detained for a third time outside a motel in the Sinaloa city of Los Mochis in January 2016. He was extradited to the US on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration to face multiple charges.

López is now believed to be engaged in a bitter dispute with Guzmán’s sons for control of the cartel’s territories, especially in its heartland of Sinaloa state, where violence has surged since El Chapo’s recapture.

“It’s going to get worse,” said a local reporter who said that López’s arrest – and the fact that he was in Mexico City, not Sinaloa – suggested Guzmán’s sons were gaining the upper hand.

“The war now is inside Dámaso’s faction. Internal disputes are always much more violent than when they fight rival groups.”

Federal officials said that López was in the capital to seek an alliance with another cartel, although they did not say which one.

With Guzmán now in the US, the Sinaloa cartel has been controlled by Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada García and Rafael Caro Quintero, two of the more traditional, old-school capos, who are understood to have stayed on the sidelines of the dispute between López and Guzmán’s sons: Iván Archivaldo Guzmán and Jesús Alfredo Guzmán, sometimes called “Los Chapitos”.

The battle between them has brought bloodshed to Sinaloa, which registered 142 homicides in March, the most violence month there since 2011, according to the newspaper Noroeste.

In a handwritten letter made public by journalist Ciro Gómez Leyva in February, the sons alleged they were lured to a meeting with López, but attacked upon arriving.

The Sinaloa cartel is often described as a horizontal confederation of crime leaders – many with roots in the rural areas of Sinaloa state – in which Guzmán was seen as the ultimate authority to referee internal disputes.

“Something the Sinaloa cartel did well was have these cells in which everyone made good money, but they also got along,” said Adrián López, editor of the Sinaloa newspaper Noroeste. “There was a mafia model in which the main interest was everyone doing well.”

But analysts say that the structure has come under unprecedented pressure since El Chapo’s recapture and the emergence of a new generation of leaders more prone to conspicuous displays of wealth, and less willing to follow established cartel codes which discouraged attacks on rivals’ families or the local population.

“They just don’t have the street smarts and they don’t understand that the Sinaloa cartel functions like a global corporation,” Mike Vigil, former DEA chief of international operations, said of the new generation of leaders, including Guzmán’s sons.

“The only thing they know is violence. They want to people to fear them, but [running the cartel] is much more than that.”