The U.S. Department of the Treasury has announced this Friday the adoption of sanctions against two prominent criminal organizations in Guatemala dedicated to drug trafficking.
As the institution has detailed, the "transnational terrorist group," headquartered in Guatemala, has been added to the 'blacklist' of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which oversees and blocks assets linked to illicit activities.
Likewise, the agency has applied the same measure against Los Mendoza, a criminal clan with a presence in Guatemala, Honduras and Belize, due to its relationship with the Sinaloa Cartel and its role in narcotics trafficking routes in the region.
Los Lorenzana get their name from their founder, Waldemar Lorenzana Lima, who died in 2021 while serving a sentence in the United States. The group, still led by members of the family, is in charge of facilitating the shipment of cocaine from South America and Central America to Mexico and the United States.
For their part, Los Mendoza, also based in Guatemala, are a family that amassed its wealth through smuggling and drug trafficking from the municipality of Morales, until it became one of the most influential narcotics trafficking structures in Central America, with several of its members also being identified for crimes of robbery, extortion and murder.