President Claudia Sheinbaum confirmed Saturday that convicted drug trafficker Dámaso ‘El Mini Lic’ López Serrano was arrested in the United States.
The journalist Luis Chaparro first reported the arrest on Friday.
“EXCLUSIVE: FBI sources just confirmed to me Dámaso López Serrano, ‘El Mini-Lic,’ was just apprehended in the Virginia area for ‘fentanyl trafficking charges,'” Chaparro wrote on X.
Sheinbaum confirmed the arrest while in Palenque, Chiapas, on Saturday. United States authorities hadn’t publicly commented on the arrest by midday Monday.
López Serrano is the son of former Sinaloa Cartel leader Dámaso “El Licenciado” (The Graduate) López Núñez. He was released from a jail in San Diego, California, in September 2022 after serving most of a six-year sentence for the trafficking of methamphetamine, heroin and cocaine.
Mexico’s Federal Attorney General’s Office said at the time that it would “insist” on López Serrano’s extradition to Mexico due to his “alleged intellectual responsibility” for the murder of Javier Valdez Cárdenas, a journalist who was killed in Culiacán, Sinaloa, in May 2017.
EXCLUSIVE: FBI sources just confirmed to me Dámaso López Serrano, ‘El Mini-Lic’ was just apprehended in the Virginia area for “fentanyl trafficking charges”. pic.twitter.com/2uIZzmewks
— Luis Chaparro (@LuisKuryaki) December 14, 2024
López Serrano, 37, turned himself in to the United States Drug Enforcement Administration in 2017, fearing that he could be murdered by the sons of former Sinaloa Cartel kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
On Saturday, Chaparro reported on his Substack site SAGA that “according to sources in the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service, López Serrano was arrested at his home in Washington, Virginia, around 6 p.m. on December 12, by approximately 20 federal agents executing a warrant against him.”
“… Sources within the FBI told SAGA that the investigation, which included intercepted phone calls, videos, and at least three informants posing as López Serrano’s associates, began at least eight months ago. Authorities uncovered evidence that ‘El Mini-Lic’ was part of a group trafficking fentanyl from Sinaloa to the United States,” the journalist wrote.
López Serrano’s father — a close associate of “El Chapo” who studied law and was a prison director before turning to a life of crime — is in jail in the United States on trafficking charges.
With reports from El Financiero and Expansón Política
