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US prosecutors working on the ‘El Chapo’ case have unearthed some truly gruesome new evidence as they attempt to get behind the bloody mess of the Mexican drug cartel.

It’s been revealed that Los Chapitos, or Jesus Guzman Salazar, Ivan Guzman and Ovidio Guzman Lopez, as their daddy calls them, are responsible for a string of horrific murders that took place in Mexico as the brothers attempted to capture the fentanyl market for the Sinaloa Cartel.

It is also alleged that the bulk of fentanyl distribution in the US is a result of the brother’s extreme form of import.

According to witness statements, the kids used unsuspecting victims as guinea pigs to test the strength of their products, often injecting their tied-down victim over and over again until they finally died of an agonising overdose.

“The defendants tested the potency of the cartel’s fentanyl on individuals who were tied down, and experimented on a woman they had been ordered to shoot. Instead, they injected her repeatedly with fentanyl until she overdosed and died.”

The cartel’s hitmen also regularly fed humans to their tigers, in some instances these victims were alive when they were thrown into cages with the beasts.

The surge in fentanyl use in the US is becoming an increased risk for local authorities north of the Rio Grande. Often the cartel would even ship drugs they knew were not ‘safe’.

“After an addict died testing a batch of the cartel’s fentanyl, one of the defendants sent the batch to the United States anyway.”

33-year-old Ovidio Guzmán López was the most recent brother to be arrested after a gunfight with authorities that left 29 people dead.

Meanwhile, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has flat-out denied that the cartels are cooking up illicit fentanyl in dodgy labs all across Mexico. Considering how the cartels deal with detractors, perhaps we can’t blame him for being scared to face the truth.

Los Chapitos has been accused of running “the largest, most violent, and most prolific fentanyl trafficking operation in the world.”

US prosecutors allege that the eldest brother, Iván, “leads the Chapitos’ security apparatus. In that role, he commands the Sicarios who perpetrate violence to protect and further the Chapitos’ operations and vast holdings.”

The Sinaloa Cartel’s first fentanyl manufacturing operation began in 2014 “in a single makeshift lab located within a modest house in Culiacán,” prosecutors allege. “Fentanyl precursors, stored in warehouses owned by the Cartel, were transported to the lab under armed guard. Once processed, Cartel workers packaged, transported to Tijuana, and smuggled the finished fentanyl across the U.S.-Mexico border.”

It seems that all those cartel movies on Netflix are pretty close to the truth when it comes to the viciousness and brutality of these drug lords. For more background on the fight against these cartels, check out the below video:

Drugs kill, but cartels kill harder.

[source:vice]