Who Arrested Mayo’ Zambada and son of ‘El Chapo’?
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Arrest Details: Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, a leader of the Sinaloa cartel, was arrested in El Paso, Texas, on Thursday, July 25, 2024 ¹. He was taken into custody along with Joaquin Guzman Lopez, son of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman ².
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Charges: Zambada is facing multiple charges, including conspiracy to manufacture and distribute fentanyl, a deadly synthetic opioid ³. He has been charged in several U.S. cases and has been wanted by U.S. authorities for years ⁴.
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Cartel Leadership: Zambada co-founded the Sinaloa cartel with Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and is considered one of the most powerful drug traffickers in the world ¹. He has been the cartel’s strategist and has avoided the limelight, unlike El Chapo’s sons, who are known for their flamboyant lifestyles ⁴.
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Impact: Zambada’s arrest is a significant blow to the Sinaloa cartel, one of the most powerful drug trafficking organizations in the world ². The cartel is responsible for trafficking fentanyl, methamphetamine, cocaine, marijuana, and heroin, and has been linked to numerous deaths in the United States
Both Zambada and Guzman Lopez face several charges for allegedly leading the cartel’s criminal operations, including its “deadly fentanyl manufacturing and trafficking networks,” Garland said.
“Fentanyl is the deadliest drug threat our country has ever faced, and the Justice Department will not rest until every single cartel leader, member, and associate responsible for poisoning our communities is held accountable,” Garland said.
The sting operation to catch Zambada duped the alleged drug lord into flying to the US under false pretenses, two law enforcement officials familiar with the plot told CNN.
Zambada and Guzman Lopez boarded a plane purportedly en route to inspect a property in Mexico, the sources said, adding that at least one of the men was unaware they were headed to the US.
Timeline
1960s – Begins planting marijuana with his cousins.
1970s – Begins running drugs to major Mexican cities and the US border and working with major drug traffickers such as Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, leader of the Guadalajara Cartel.
1980s – Member of the Guadalajara Cartel. After the arrest of Felix Gallardo, the cartel splits into factions. Guzmán becomes leader of the Sinaloa Cartel Pacific coast faction.
February 1992 – Police find the bodies of six of Guzmán’s top lieutenants dumped along Tijuana highways; the six men had been tortured and shot.
November 1992 – Six people are gunned down at a discotheque in Puerto Vallarta by gunmen working for Guzmán, whose targets are traffickers in the Tijuana Cartel.
May 1993 – Gunmen with the Tijuana Cartel attempt to assassinate Guzmán in retribution, firing upon a vehicle at an airport. Guzmán escapes unharmed, but Cardinal Archbishop of Guadalajara Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampa is killed accidentally, along with six others.
June 9, 1993 – Wanted on charges of drug trafficking, murder and kidnapping, he is arrested in Guatemala and extradited to Mexico. Guzmán is subsequently sentenced to a minimum of 20 years in a maximum security prison.
Early 2000s – Violence across Mexico escalates as the Sinaloa Cartel attempts to encroach upon Tijuana and Gulf Cartel territory.
January 19, 2001 – Guzmán escapes the maximum-security Puente Grande prison in Jalisco, Mexico, in a laundry cart. The planned escape required bribes and cooperation allegedly costing him $2.5 million, according to Malcolm Beith’s book, “The Last Narco.”
2004 – The US government announces a $5 million reward for information leading to Guzmán’s arrest and conviction.
May 2008 – Guzmán’s son, Edgar, is murdered in a parking lot shootout near Culican, Mexico.
2009 – Guzmán and other cartel leaders are indicted on charges of conspiring to import more than 264,000 pounds of cocaine into the United States between 1990 and 2005.
August 2011 – Guzmán’s wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, who has dual US-Mexican citizenship, gives birth to twin girls in a hospital outside of Los Angeles.
2012 – The US Treasury Department uses the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act to freeze the US assets of his relatives.
February 22, 2014 – Guzmán is apprehended at a beach resort in Mazatlán, Mexico.
July 11, 2015 – Guzmán escapes the maximum-security Altiplano Federal Prison near Toluca, Mexico, by crawling through an opening in the shower area of his cell block leading to a nearly mile-long tunnel.
October 2015 – While on the run, he meets with movie star Sean Penn and Mexican actress Kate del Castillo. Penn’s interview with Guzmán subsequently runs in Rolling Stone magazine. “I supply more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world,” Guzmán is quoted in the interview.
January 8, 2016 – Guzmán is recaptured by Mexican authorities in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, after a raid leads to a shootout in which five people connected to Guzmán are killed.
May 9, 2016 – A judge in Mexico approves the United States’ request to extradite Guzmán, who faces charges in seven states. Once extradited, he will be sent to Brooklyn, New York, to stand trial on federal charges.
January 19, 2017 – Mexico’s Foreign Ministry turns Guzmán over to US authorities.
January 20, 2017 – Enters a plea of not guilty at his arraignment in the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York.
November 13, 2018 – Guzmán’s long-awaited criminal trial begins in a New York federal district court amid unprecedented security measures, including armed escorts for the anonymous and partly sequestered jurors, as well as heavily armed federal marshals and officers with bomb-sniffing dogs standing guard outside the courthouse.
February 12, 2019 – Guzmán is convicted of all 10 federal criminal counts against him, including engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, conspiracy to launder narcotics proceeds, international distribution of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and other drugs, and use of firearms.
February 21, 2019 – The US Justice Department announces Joaquin Guzmán Lopez and Ovidio Guzmán Lopez, sons of “El Chapo,” have been charged with conspiracy to distribute drugs to be imported into the US.
July 17, 2019 – Guzmán is sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years. He is also ordered to pay $12.6 billion in forfeiture.
February 22, 2021 – Guzmán’s wife is arrested at Dulles International Airport in Virginia. Coronel is facing charges of conspiracy to distribute 1 kilogram or more of heroin, 5 kilograms or more of cocaine, 1,000 kilograms or more of marijuana and 500 grams or more of methamphetamines for unlawful importation into the country, according to a news release from the Justice Department.
June 10, 2021 – Coronel pleads guilty to three counts: conspiracy to distribute heroin, cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine for importation into the United States; conspiracy to launder monetary instruments; and violating the Kingpin Act by engaging in transactions and dealings in property of Guzmán.
November 30, 2021 – Coronel is sentenced to three years in prison and four years of supervised release. She must forfeit $1.5 million and pay a $300 special assessment fine for each of the three counts to which she pleaded guilty. She is released from prison on September 13, 2023.
January 25, 2022 – A panel of appellate judges upholds the 2019 conviction of Guzmán, rejecting his assertions that he was treated unfairly. In their decision, the three judges rule that US District Judge Brian Cogan, who oversaw Guzmán’s federal case in Brooklyn, conducted the three-month trial “with diligence and fairness, after issuing a series of meticulously crafted pretrial rulings.”
January 5, 2023 – Mexican authorities arrest Ovidio Guzmán, son of “El Chapo,” in an operation in Sinaloa that leads to clashes around the city of Culiacán. The US Department of Justice announces his extradition to the United States on September 15. On September 18, he pleads not guilty to drug and money laundering charges.
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Arrest Details: Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, the alleged co-founder and leader of the powerful Sinaloa cartel, was arrested in El Paso, Texas, on Thursday, July 25, 2024 ¹. He was arrested alongside Joaquin Guzman Lopez, son of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman ¹.
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Charges: Zambada is facing multiple charges, including conspiracy to manufacture and distribute fentanyl, a deadly synthetic opioid ¹. He has been charged in several U.S. cases and has been wanted by U.S. authorities for years ¹.
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Cartel Leadership: Zambada co-founded the Sinaloa cartel with Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and is considered one of the most powerful drug traffickers in the world ¹. He has been the cartel’s strategist and has avoided the limelight, unlike El Chapo’s sons, who are known for their flamboyant lifestyles ¹.
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Impact: Zambada’s arrest is a significant blow to the Sinaloa cartel, one of the most powerful drug trafficking organizations in the world ¹. The cartel is responsible for trafficking fentanyl, methamphetamine, cocaine, marijuana, and heroin, and has been linked to numerous deaths in the United States
CNN REPORT
FBI agents arrested the two alleged drug kingpins after they landed in El Paso.
Among various criminal charges Zambada faces in the US, he was indicted by a northern Illinois grand jury in 2009, according to the US State Department.
While his whereabouts are unclear, CNN has learned that a US Justice Department aircraft frequently used for extraditions traveled from El Paso and landed at an airport near Chicago early Friday morning.
US authorities had sought Zambada’s capture for years and in 2021 raised the reward for information leading to his arrest to $15 million.
“Ismael Mario Zambada Garcia is the long-time leader of the Zambada Garcia faction of the Sinaloa Cartel. Zambada Garcia is unique in that he has spent his entire adult life as a major international drug trafficker, yet he has never spent a day in jail,” according to the US State Department.
FBI Director Christopher Wray said Zambada and Guzman Lopez had “eluded law enforcement for decades” and “will now face justice in the United States.”
The pair allegedly oversaw the trafficking of “tens of thousands of pounds of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and fentanyl into the US along with related violence,” Wray added.
Drug Enforcement Administration chief Anne Milgram said the pair’s arrests strike “at the heart of the cartel that is responsible for the majority of drugs, including fentanyl and methamphetamine, killing Americans from coast to coast.”
Powerful cartel
The Sinaloa Cartel, named after the Mexican state where the gang was formed in the late 1980s, is one of the most powerful criminal groups in the world, raking in billions of dollars annually by trafficking drugs into the US and around the globe.
Notorious cartel boss Guzman, better known as “El Chapo,” was arrested in Guatemala in 1993 on homicide and drug charges and extradited to Mexico. But he escaped Mexican prison in 2001, reportedly by bribing prison guards to smuggle him out in a laundry truck. He was arrested again in 2014, but escaped again, this time through a tunnel.
Guzman was arrested for a third time in 2016 and then extradited to the United States.
In a major trial, he was convicted by a federal jury in Brooklyn in 2018 and sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years, according to the Justice Department.
Guzman was found guilty on 10 federal criminal counts, which included engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, conspiracy to launder narcotics proceeds, international distribution of cocaine, heroin, and marijuana, and use of firearms.
During the trial, Guzman’s lawyers argued Zambada was the real kingpin of the cartel who bribed the Mexican government to frame Guzman and remain free to run the criminal organization.
In the latest in a string of US indictments against him, Zambada was charged in February with conspiring to manufacture and distribute fentanyl, an extremely potent synthetic opioid that has killed tens of thousands of Americans in an epidemic of overdoses.
Fentanyl “was largely unheard of when [Zambada] founded the Sinaloa Cartel more than three decades ago and today is responsible for immeasurable harm,” said Breon Peace, US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, in the indictment.
Since 1989, Zambada has imported and distributed “massive amounts of narcotics,” generating billions of dollars in profits, according to the indictment.
Federal prosecutors said he employed people to obtain “transportation routes and warehouses” to import and store narcotics, along with hit men, or sicarios, to carry out kidnappings and murders in Mexico “to retaliate against rivals who threatened the cartel.”
Zambada’s son, Vicente Zambada Niebla, admitted during testimony at Guzman’s 2018 trial to passing along orders for murders and kidnappings and was sentenced to 15 years in 2019 by a federal judge in Chicago.
He began cooperating with the US government in 2011, prosecutors said in a May 2019 filing. They said he aided authorities in helping target members of the Sinaloa Cartel and a rival gang, which lead to the “charging of dozens of high-level targets and hundreds of their associates in indictments throughout the country,” CNN previously reported.
The younger Zambada had known “El Chapo” since he was 15 years old, he testified at the kingpin’s trial in 2018. The younger Zambada frequently referred to “El Chapo” as “mi compadre,” or “my buddy,” during his testimony and said the drug lord was godfather to his youngest son.
A history of violence
“El Mayo” Zambada was also indicted by a US federal grand jury in April 2012, in Texas, along with other suspected top Sinaloa leaders and 22 people allegedly connected with the cartel, including Guzman. They were charged with murder and conspiracy connected with drug trafficking, money laundering and organized crime.
At that point, Guzman and Zambada had already been indicted on drug trafficking and organized crime charges in several US federal courts.
The 2012 indictment in western Texas detailed two acts of violence federal prosecutors said were committed by members of the cartel; one took place during a 2010 wedding ceremony in Ciudad Juarez, when an American citizen and two members of his family were kidnapped because of their ties with the rival Juarez cartel.
The target was the groom and a resident of Columbus, New Mexico, whose body was found to be beaten, strangled and whose hands had been “severed above the wrists and placed on his chest,” according to the indictment.
Police found the bodies of the groom, his brother and his uncle three days after the wedding in the bed of a pickup truck, the indictment stated.
Another incident detailed in the indictment related to the kidnapping, killing and mutilation of a Texas resident in 2009 “to answer for the loss of a 670-pound load of marijuana seized by the Border Patrol,” prosecutors said.
This story has been updated with additional developments. CNN’s Kathleen Magramo, Fidel Gutierrez, Sahar Akbarzai, Evan Perez, Josh Campbell, Mark Morales and Hannah Rabinowitz contributed reporting.
