Santiago.- President Leonel Fernandez said that the of types of crimes which occurred recently in the central cities Santiago and Jarabacoa leads people to believe that there are links to Mexican drug cartels in the country, while National Drugs Control Agency chief Rolando Rosado revealed that it’s the Sinaloa Cartel.

Fernandez, speaking in the “Civic Encounter for Security” held Saturday in Santiago, said that the execution of three Colombians and a Venezuelan in that city and the decapitation of a Dominican in Jarabacoa are actions of groups which belong to those organizations.

For Rosado, the Sinaloa Cartel is helped by groups of Dominican criminals centered in the Cibao zone to acquire chemicals used to make narcotics, supervise its drug trafficking activities and in contract killings. “They are groups in the Cibao zone which the Mexican cartels have contracted to put them at their service and of course their activities extend to the entire national territory. We had noticed it because we have dismantled some of those structures and have charged them.”

He said controls have been placed on the transactions with chemicals with ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, used in the pharmaceutical industry, but are also the same components used to make narcotics.

The DNCD chief affirmed the Mexican cartels’ violence is expressed in the contract killings, in addition to that several narcotics traffickers linked to those cartels have been arrested. “The seal of the murders for hire shows that the Mexican cartels are here, more than the Colombians. They don’t have to physically be present to make sure their instructions are complied with, but they are helped by local groups. That’s what they’ve been doing, essentially in the zone of Cibao.”

Rosado had confirmed a report published by newspaper El Dia July 17 on the presence of cells of the bloody Sinaloa cartel, headed by Joaquin Guzmán Loera (El Chapo Guzmán).