By Ricardo Lezama 
The family of Joaquin Guzman Loera, the once high ranking boss of a Sinaloa faction based in Culiacan, Sinaloa, has now turned themselves into the FBI, according to the Mexican press. 17 family members made their way to a US-Mexico border entry. The son of El Chapo, Ovidio Guzman, plead guilty instead of fighting a trial of accusations via jury. This may be the needed precedent for additional negotiations that would lead to more disclosures around contemporary drug routes. Nonetheless, the value of the information is unknown as these agreements with the Departmen of Justice tend to be confidential.
Experts React
Goverment employees on both the Mexican and US side of the border could be implicated by this critical guilty plea. The Guzman family included both the current of El Chapo Guzman and the mother of Ovidio Guzman. The plea deal does not leave clear whether Ovidio will have some protective status because he was not a particularly high ranking. In fact, Ovidio was not the head of his brothers collective of drug traffickers, which is the domain of Archivaldo Guzman, the eldest of all of Guzman Loera’s male heirs.
Information gained from this guilty plea could be useful for US based prosecution efforts, but the scope could pale in comparison with what could emerge from El Mayo Zambada. Zambada is also coming to a confidential agreement with the US Department of Justice per the 6th District court in Brooklyn, New York. The fact remains that most of the analysts on the subject hold that Zambada is simply negotiating with the United States. He was not, in fact, captured through a clever ruse, but much has been made about testimonies alleged to have been given to Luis Chaparro, a well known and credible journalist in his own right.
Emma Coronel, the most recent wife of El Chapo, was at one point subject to a DOJ plea deal. Typically, the DOJ relocates testifying collaborators and hides them away from their general nucleus of criminal activity. In the most extreme cases, as has happened with Italian Mafia and other criminals, there is some semblance of a pardon as they are allowed to keep illicit gains and protection in exchange for high amounts of quality information.