WASHINGTON — The Biden management on Tuesday imposed sanctions on 13 members of Mexico’s tough Sinaloa cartel and 4 Sonora, Mexico-based firms accused of trafficking fentanyl and different medicine into the United States.
The newest motion follows a sequence of measures taken this yr towards members of the Sinaloa cartel, money couriers and cartel fraud schemes.
Included within the sanctions are a supervisor of cartel operations in Nogales who oversaw the trafficking of multi-ton amounts of substances, government stated, in addition to members of his circle of relatives and his mates. Also sanctioned are a cafe, stone and mining corporations and an import-export company.
The sanctions minimize them off from the U.S. banking machine, bring to an end their talent to paintings with Americans and block their U.S. property.
The Treasury Department’s undersecretary for terrorism and monetary intelligence, Brian Nelson, stated that the U.S. “will aggressively pursue all who are complicit operators and facilitators of these illicit fentanyl networks.”
The Treasury “will continue to use its authorities to expose and isolate those who profit from deadly fentanyl sales in the United States,” Nelson said.
Fentanyl, a powerful opioid, is the deadliest drug in the U.S. today.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that drug overdose deaths increased more than sevenfold from 2015 to 2021. More than 100,000 deaths a year have been linked to drug overdoses since 2020, and about two-thirds of those are related to fentanyl.
Mexico and China are the primary sources for fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances trafficked directly into the U.S., according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, which is tasked with combating illicit drug trafficking. Nearly all the precursor chemicals that are needed to make fentanyl come from China. And the companies that make the precursors routinely use fake return addresses and mislabel the products to avoid being caught by law enforcement.
In October, President Joe Biden’s administration announced a sweeping series of indictments and sanctions against Chinese companies and executives blamed for importing the chemicals used to make the deadly drug.
Republicans have complained, alternatively, that the Democratic management isn’t doing sufficient to forestall fentanyl and the problem is prone to determine prominently in subsequent yr’s presidential marketing campaign.
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