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A U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) operation has exposed the activities of a violent Los Angeles gang, Barrio 18, which was distributing Mexican cartel drugs on the streets. The group sold methamphetamine with 100% purity (even higher than the 99.1% boasted by Walter White in Breaking Bad), used a business as a front, and relied on dealers who did not fit the usual profile. One of their stash houses was located in the exclusive neighborhood where the Kardashian family lives, while gang members sold their product in a park crowded with addicted homeless people — described by authorities as an “open‑air drug market.”

On Wednesday, as the operation came to a head, dozens of federal and local agents took control of MacArthur Park, a few blocks west of downtown, and raided two homes and a business in the early morning hours. They arrested at least 18 people, including Yolanda Iriarte-Avila, a 40-year-old woman identified as the area’s main drug distributor. All of them face sentences of between 10 and 20 years in prison.

Iriarte-Avila lived in Calabasas, a wealthy and quiet town north of Los Angeles. She was a neighbor of the Kardashian family, Drake, Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, Will Smith, and Miley Cyrus, among other celebrities. Her apartment was the perfect stash house, until she sold a kilo of fentanyl for $10,000 to a DEA informant, and her cell phone was found to contain some 150 phone conversations she had over 30 days with her boyfriend, Jesús Morales-Landel, a known drug dealer in MacArthur Park.

On Wednesday, authorities found 18 kilograms of fentanyl at Iriarte-Ávila’s hideout. She and her partner have been linked to the Barrio 18 gang, a rival of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13). The DEA has not revealed who supplied the drugs to Iriarte-Avila, although it said that the gang has formed alliances with the Sinaloa Cartel, Jalisco New Generation Cartel, and Los Zetas.

A park disputed by three gangs

The federal indictment names at least 25 people involved in this criminal network and details 27 undercover purchases of fentanyl and methamphetamine made between March 9 and April 15, both inside and around the park. To track them, the DEA had the support of the Los Angeles Police Department and the Sheriff’s Office, who deployed drones, surveillance cameras, and a tracker installed in one of the suspects’ vehicles.

Agents monitored suspects’ movements through houses, parking lots, restaurants, clothing stores and supermarkets, until they reached what investigators describe as the group’s center of operations: a business called El Paraíso, located across from the park, where — according to the investigation — they stored narcotics and coordinated sales ranging from $10 to $40.

At the mid-level of distribution were Mallaly Moreno-López, 31, and her boyfriend, Jackson Tarfur, 28. A swarm of police officers woke them while they slept in their Westlake apartment. As a desperate measure, they flushed the fentanyl pills they had with them down the toilet, and some remained in the toilet bowl; this was seen in a video released by the DEA as the final piece of evidence against them. Both are now in jail.

“For far too long, MacArthur Park has been plagued by drug addiction, crime, and despair,” said Anthony Chrysanthis, head of the DEA’s Los Angeles office, in a statement. “While this is a drug enforcement operation, it is also an effort to restore safety and wellness, and to return MacArthur Park back to the community.”

For years, MacArthur Park has been a recreational space for dozens of Hispanic migrant families. But it also became contested territory for gangs such as Barrio 18, MS‑13, and the Crazy Riders. According to authorities, to avoid clashes between rival groups, the prison gang known as the Mexican Mafia divided control of different sections of the park among them. After the pandemic, the area filled with homeless people and drug users, creating a lucrative open‑air market for these criminal structures.

“We witnessed drug activity return to MacArthur Park, ” Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell said in the statement.

Covert purchases

Amid the constant bustle of Alvarado Street, a man approached Jordan Jaramillo, who was wearing a black sweatshirt, camouflage pants, and a black mask covering his face. He asked for “crystal,” handed him a $20 bill, and received a small white rock. The dealer had a Chilean accent, uncommon in this neighborhood that has welcomed Central American and Mexican diasporas for decades. The customer, who was actually a police informant, placed the rock on a napkin and put it in his bag. Tests by a DEA lab revealed it to be 1.74 grams of methamphetamine with a purity level of 100%.

That same day, March 9, agents arrested Jaramillo while he was traveling in a car with one of his accomplices, and his Chilean passport appeared in the police database. According to the Department of Justice, Barrio 18 has been using undocumented South Americans to carry out street-level drug sales, in an apparent attempt to mislead authorities and break with the typical profile of dealers.

Other undercover police buyers approached Jaramillo to purchase powdered fentanyl for $20 to $40. In code, they asked him for “fettie.” This Chilean man was recorded by surveillance cameras that the Los Angeles government had installed in various areas of the park, and those images are now part of the evidence presented by the Central District of California. According to the indictment, at one point, this gang’s operations became so blatant that they stopped taking precautions: they were constantly entering the El Paraíso store and selling the merchandise in plain sight, right in front of the shop.

During Wednesday’s operation, as a loudspeaker warned in English and Spanish that it was a DEA raid, an agent used a saw to cut through El Paraíso’s metal shutter. The scene marked the end of the hideout from which Barrio 18 had operated with impunity.

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Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán has blamed the Mexican government for “all the violent crimes” and has insisted on his extradition in a new letter sent to Judge Brian Cogan. This new request from the once most wanted man in the world comes just a couple of days after he delivered another letter in which he requested “fair treatment under the law” and “to be transferred” to Mexico to face the pending charges against him. The judge responded to the previous message in a statement, denying his requests because he considered them unreasonable.

According to information released on Thursday by the Federal Court for the Eastern District of New York, on May 1, Guzmán sent another handwritten letter in English in which he insisted on his extradition. In this new text, the drug lord argues that all the violent crimes he is accused of “are based on a single witness.” “The Mexican government was responsible for all the violent crimes,” he wrote. “They blamed me for things I didn’t do, all because of who I am.”

“I was known in my country not for bad things. The good things I have done in Mexico are wanting family to eat together and have a great life,” another excerpt of the letter reads.

The violence during the years when El Chapo led the Sinaloa Cartel was marked by its extremity, strategic intent, and high impact, setting a before‑and‑after moment in the history of drug trafficking in Mexico. During his trial in the United States, prosecutors presented evidence and testimony linking him directly to the killings of rivals, traitors, and members of opposing cartels.

The cartel leader has been serving a life sentence since 2019 for multiple drug‑related crimes and has been held ever since at ADX Florence, the federal super‑maximum prison in Colorado. According to the judge’s response letter, he received up to five requests from Guzmán in the past two weeks. “Some of these documents make no sense, and none of them have any legal merit. They are all accordingly denied,” reads a section of the document signed by Judge Cogan.

In another letter, sent just two weeks ago, Guzmán requested the “protection” of his human rights as enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. The drug lord asked that the First and Eighth Amendments be applied to him. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, while the Eighth Amendment prohibits the government from inflicting cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment. In that letter, he argued: “The emerging of the constitution laws in the court of law have the rights to connect and be use for my equal protection on my rights.”

The last time those close to the former Sinaloa Cartel leader spoke out about his conditions was this past February. At the time, his lawyer Mariel Colón told the Mexican newspaper Reforma that her client had lost a significant amount of weight and had suffered episodes of tachycardia in recent months. “He is being held in extremely harsh conditions of confinement; in my opinion, they are inhumane and violate the U.S. Constitution. They are cruel,” she said.

El Chapo was arrested in Mexico in January 2016, after two spectacular prison escapes. The most recent, from the Altiplano maximum‑security facility in July 2015, was worthy of a Hollywood production: a tunnel equipped with ventilation, lighting, oxygen tanks, and rails for a motorcycle led directly to his cell, triggering a political crisis for then‑president Enrique Peña Nieto’s government. His final capture ended his criminal career. In 2017, he was extradited to the United States, where he has repeatedly denounced the extreme isolation he is subjected to. These same conditions are applied to terrorists.

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