The Mexican cartels, especially Guzmán’s Sinaloa group, have also found heroin to be very profitable as they deal with falling cocaine consumption and marijuana legalization in parts of the United States.
On Valentine’s Day 2013, the heads of the Chicago Crime Commission and the Chicago office of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration named infamous Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán as the city’s Public Enemy No. 1.
The timely label, occurring 84 years after gangster Al Capone first earned it following the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929, lasted only a year as Guzmán was arrested in Mexico the following February, but the imprint his organization made – and continues to make – on Chicago has helped turn the U.S.’s third-largest city into one of the nation’s largest drug trafficking hubs, replete with the violence and related crimes that come with that designation.
“Sinaloa Cartel traffickers sit on the top of the pile, and they feed down all the way to the street level dealers,” Dennis Wichern, special agent in charge for the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Chicago field division, told Fox News Latino.
The drug trade in Chicago has helped fuel pervasive gang violence that has resulted in a quickly rising homicide rate. Chicago ended 2014 with 425 murders, and this year the city had seen 30 slayings by the end of January.
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