US law enforcement and government agencies including the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the military have all tracked the cartel’s supply chains and money-laundering networks as they expanded into China almost a decade ago. Yet the evidence of the relationship between the cartel and Chinese entities is not new.

In April, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said Mexico had yet to notify China that it had seized any illegal precursor shipments. The sanctions notice identified the younger Guzmán as a manager of the cartel’s “super labs”, which turn precursors bought from China and elsewhere into fentanyl.Ĭhinese officials have repeatedly denied any nexus between China and illicit fentanyl, often touting their country’s leadership as the first to schedule the opioid as a narcotic. On 9 May, three weeks after the US Department of Justice issued the sweeping indictments that caught Rubio and Wu in their net, the US treasury department followed up with sanctions against Joaquín Guzmán López, 36, one of the four sons of the Sinaloa cartel founder, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, who have amassed power and steered the cartel into the fentanyl trade since their father’s last arrest. The pair are just two links in a chain connecting the Sinaloa cartel to Chinese companies and criminal organizations, relationships that are now drawing increasing attention from the US government after years of investigation by law enforcement. The US attorney general, Merrick Garland, called the Mexico-based Sinaloa cartel “the largest, most violent, and most prolific fentanyl trafficking operation in the world” in a statement accompanying the sweeping indictments covering cartel bosses, enforcers and suppliers such as Rubio and Wu. “We are the biggest in Mexico so we can purchase a lot,” the indictment quotes Rubio telling Wu Yonghao, a sales representative for the chemical supplier Wuhan Shuokang Biological Technology Co Ltd, in an encrypted message before her arrest.

According to the arresting agency and a federal indictment released on 14 April, for almost 10 years Rubio arranged illegal imports of controlled drug-making substances, sometimes hiding them in food containers and leveraging corruption to deliver the chemicals to the cartel.

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