Ishmael May Zambada García, the legendary leader of the Sinaloa cartel, was arrested this Thursday in El Paso, Texas. The arrest of the emblematic drug trafficker, who had not set foot in a prison in decades of criminal life and whose head had a reward of 15 million dollars, took place at a private airport in the border city. The arrest was announced by the weekly Zeta from Tijuana and confirmed by two sources of the operation to the Reuters agency. The authorities also have in custody Joaquín Guzmán López, one of the sons of Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán, for whom a reward of five million dollars was offered.
“The Department of Justice has in its custody two alleged leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel, one of the most violent and powerful organizations in the world,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security, framed the operation within the efforts of the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris Administration in the fight against fentanyl. Anne Milgram, the acting director of the DEA, has considered the operation as “a blow to the heart of the cartel.” Neither of the authorities mentions the Mexican government in either statement. It has also remained silent after the fall of one of its most famous bosses.
El Mayo, born in Culiacán 76 years ago, had been wanted by U.S. authorities for decades. His name appears in at least five extensive legal cases opened between 2003 and 2016 in federal courts in the country. In all of them, he is accused of facilitating the trafficking of cocaine and marijuana into U.S. territory and of inheriting the criminal empire once Joaquín was arrested and prosecuted. El Chapo Guzmán, who has been serving a life sentence in a maximum-security prison in Colorado since 2019.
The hunt for the drug lord has intensified with the crusade that U.S. authorities have launched to combat the arrival of fentanyl in the country. Washington has targeted large Mexican organizations, especially the one operating in Sinaloa, for trafficking the powerful opioid that has caused a health emergency with more than 100,000 deaths in the last year. In February, prosecutors opened a new case against Zambada for the manufacture and distribution of the drug, which has become the leading cause of death for people between 18 and 45 years old.
“Fentanyl is the deadliest drug our country has ever faced, and the Department of Justice will not rest until all cartel bosses, members and associates pay for poisoning our communities,” Garland said.
El Mayo and Guzmán López join a growing list of Sinaloa cartel leaders and other members who are facing justice in the United States. The DEA has particularly targeted Los Chapitos, the cell that inherited the cartel’s operations after El Chapo’s arrest in 2016. These include Ovidio Guzmán López, extradited to the United States last September, and Néstor Isidro Pérez Salas, known as The NEET, considered one of the organization’s chief hitmen.
On Thursday, some media outlets reported that Ovidio Guzmán, 34, stopped appearing in the federal Bureau of Prisons system on July 23. His lawyer, Jeffrey Lichtman, confirmed to Morning Express that Guzmán López has been transferred to a different prison that is not administered by that institution, but that he remains in the custody of the authorities. His brother Joaquín will appear before a federal court in Chicago in the coming days. It is not clear to which judicial district Zambada will be taken.
Despite his long criminal record, the US anti-drug agency highlighted something unique about Mayo Zambada. “Despite the fact that he has dedicated his entire adult life to being a major drug trafficker, he has not spent a single day in prison,” the organization said. Fourteen years ago, the DEA was offering a $5 million reward.
This life of leaps and bounds is the stuff of legend. In April 2010, Zambada had journalist Julio Scherer, one of the deans of the Mexican press and founder of the magazine ProcessThe meeting took place in a rustic house lost in the mountains and was far from being an interview, as the drug trafficker was reluctant to answer the 83-year-old reporter’s questions. “He is over 1.80 meters tall and has a body like a fortress,” Scherer wrote in his notebook. Zambada gave some details of his personal life. He had a wife, five women, 15 grandchildren and a great-grandson. And he also shared one of his greatest fears. “I’m terrified of being locked up,” he confessed.
One of his sons, Vicente Zambada Niebla, was arrested by Mexican authorities in 2009 on charges of organized crime and was extradited to Chicago in 2013. Vicentillo, as he is known, pleaded guilty and cooperated with authorities. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison in May 2019. His testimony was key to prosecutors being able to sentence El Chapo Guzmán to prison. In April 2021, prison authorities admitted that Zambada Niebla has already left prison in the United States.
Drug trafficking has been a family business for the Zambadas. Another of El Mayo’s sons, Isamel Zambada Imperial, known as El Mayito Gordo, is in prison after pleading guilty to drug trafficking in a California federal court in 2021. Ismael Zambada Sicairos, nicknamed Mayito Flaco, remains at large.
El Mayo established himself at the top of the organization, alongside El Chapo and Juan José Esparragoza, known as El Azul, thanks to his contacts with Colombian drug lords, who entrusted him with cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines to move them to the largest market on the continent, the United States. Prosecutors say that these operations have generated a fortune of several “billion dollars.”
During El Chapo’s trial, Zambada Niebla explained that among his tasks was meeting with high-ranking Army officers, including Generals Roberto Miranda and Marco Antonio de León Adams. Under oath, he declared that his father had a budget of up to a million dollars to pay bribes and kickbacks to Mexican authorities. In his testimony, he pointed out that General Humberto Antimo Miranda visited El Mayo at the beginning of Felipe Calderón’s government (2006-2012).
Zambada was considered the organization’s strategist, an old-school boss who, unlike other cartel members, avoided acting with a hot head. His use of violence was not as widespread as that of other drug traffickers. He ordered kidnappings and murders to send a clear message to his rivals and colleagues.
Sign up for the free Morning Express Mexico newsletter and to WhatsApp channel and receive all the latest news on current events in this country.
