For almost 40 years Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada García eluded authorities while the Sinaloa cartel he co-founded grew into one of the world’s most powerful drug trafficking empires. But that luck ran out in dramatic fashion last month at a country ranch in northern Mexico.
Zambada says he was ambushed before a meeting with Joaquín Guzmán, whose father, fellow Sinaloa co-founder Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, has been jailed in the US. A hood was thrown over his head before he was bundled on to a private jet and tied down — allegedly by the younger Guzmán himself — on the three-hour flight to the airport outside El Paso, Texas, where he was arrested by US officials, according to a statement from his lawyer to the media.
US authorities have cast the detentions as a victory for both countries, although they have denied American resources were used in the operation.
But the incident has left Mexico — which has borne the brunt of the violence unleashed by drug cartels — reeling at the possibility it will complicate relations with the US, expose corruption and unleash more brutality. Officials are aggrieved, and President Andrés Manuel López Obrador this week said “who knows” if US agents were involved. They say they are taking action to find out what really happened.
“They have that temptation of wanting to rule everywhere, put their noses in everywhere,” López Obrador said of the US government. “I just want to remind people that Mexico is an independent, free, sovereign country.”
The two nations, which share a 2,000-mile-long border, have long sparred over US anti-drug operations in Mexico. Security co-operation was already dented under López Obrador, a leftist nationalist who has frustrated US officials by taking a hands-off approach to criminal groups that murder and extort the population.
The US account of El Mayo’s arrest raised eyebrows among security analysts and the Mexican media, with the latter joking darkly that the notorious drug lord simply “fell from the sky” into US territory.
“I believe they were involved . . . we don’t know to what point or when,” said Raúl Benítez Manaut, a professor at Mexico’s National Autonomous University. The US likely did not tell Mexico because of how senior Zambada was, he speculated: “To avoid a leak . . . they didn’t want to play with fire.”
Mexico’s attorney-general opened an investigation for treason into whoever handed Zambada to a foreign power, and said in a statement that US authorities had not shared information it requested since about the plane.
It is not the first time a cross-border arrest has stirred controversy in Mexico. In 2020 it reacted furiously when US authorities detained former defence minister Salvador Cienfuegos as he arrived for a family holiday on drug charges. After threats to withdraw co-operation, the US dropped the charges and released him back to Mexico.
This time, authorities have been quick to tamp down talk of any rupture. The US ambassador to Mexico, Ken Salazar, said co-operation was “unprecedented”.
“The work we do here we do with full respect for Mexico’s sovereignty and we will keep working as partners,” he said in a news conference on Friday.
Salazar’s statement sought to allay fears that embarrassed Mexican intelligence services could withhold cross-border co-operation. Some officials are also hopeful that a reset is possible when the country’s incoming president, Claudia Sheinbaum, takes office in October.
“In general it shows the poor state of US-Mexico security co-operation, where you don’t even have a . . . similar version of events,” said Cecilia Farfán-Méndez, researcher at the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. “Depending on who is in the White House and . . . who is in the US embassy in Mexico, that could create potentially a clean slate or not.”
The US has put away one Sinaloa kingpin, El Chapo, and its move to capture its other leaders has intensified as his children rose up the ranks and shifted the cartel towards the manufacturing of fentanyl, a deadly opioid that is the leading cause of death for young people in the US.
Zambada is a particularly valuable target for US agents because he was known as a key political and financial operator, two of the most sensitive areas of the cartel’s operation. US prosecutors are seeking to try him in Brooklyn federal court, the same one where El Chapo was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
It was one of a rash of recent arrests in recent years targeting Sinaloa operatives. Another of the “Los Chapitos” — as Guzmán’s sons are known — Ovidio Guzmán was detained in 2019 but quickly freed by the Mexican government as cartel gunmen took over the city of Culiacán in response. He was subsequently detained again and extradited to the US last year.
Mexico’s organised crime groups operate with protection from, and sometimes in partnership with, local and federal authorities, fresh details of which have been exposed during recent cartel-related prosecutions in the US.
In his letter after his arrest, Zambada said a Sinaloa police officer accompanied him to the meeting and that state governor Rubén Rocha had also been expected to attend. Rocha, who is from the ruling Morena party, denied this and both López Obrador and Sheinbaum have backed him.
“Imagine everything he knows or can tell,” said Farfán-Méndez. “I don’t mean stories of narcos per se, but how actors at different levels of government benefited and helped.”
The focus on Sinaloa may help the other large international drug trafficking group in Mexico: the Jalisco New Generation cartel, which security consultants say is driving much of the violence. The US and Mexico say they are pursuing both groups, but it has had more visible success with the former.
“The Jalisco cartel is licking its lips, because they’ll have the whole table for themselves now,” Benítez Manaut said. “It’s like taking Pepsi out of the competition with Coca-Cola, the whole market is for Coca-Cola.”
In Sinaloa, the situation has been tense for months, and the army sent 200 special forces and paratroopers to state capital Culiacán after the arrests.
For the US, arresting and imprisoning cartel leaders can make a dramatic statement. But Mexican security experts and politicians frequently complain that arrests of big-name kingpins do little to halt the flow of drugs and just get Mexicans killed either via carrying out the arrests or provoking conflict.
Zambada has called for calm during the apparent rift between himself and El Chapo’s sons, but some say that may not last. “It’ll be a cold war that could last months or years,” said Eduardo Guerrero, a security expert at Lantia Consultores. “It will be a highly fragile equilibrium.”
Additional reporting by Joe Miller
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