MEXICO CITY – A new era is coming for Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa cartel in the wake of the capture by U.S. authorities of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, the last of the grand old Mexican drug traffickers.
Experts believe his arrest will usher in a new wave of violence in Mexico even as Zambada could potentially provide loads of information for U.S. prosecutors.
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Zambada, who had eluded authorities for decades and had never set foot in prison, was known for being an astute operator, skilled at corrupting officials and having an ability to negotiate with everyone, including rivals.
Removing him from the criminal landscape could set off an internal war for control of the cartel that has a global reach — as has occurred with the arrest or killings of other kingpins — and open the door to the more violent inclinations of a younger generation of Sinaloa traffickers, experts say.
With that in mind, the Mexican government deployed 200 members of its special forces Friday to Culiacan, Sinaloa state’s capital.
There is “significant potential for high escalation of violence across Mexico," said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow in the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Brookings Institution. That “is bad for Mexico, it's bad for the United States, as well as the possibility that the even more vicious (Jalisco New Generation cartel) will rise to even greater importance."
For that reason, Zambada’s arrest could be considered a “great tactical success,” but strategically problematic, Felbab-Brown said.
While details remain scarce, a United States official who spoke on condition of anonymity said Zambada was tricked into flying to the U.S., where he was arrested along with Joaquín Guzmán López, a son of the infamous Sinaloa leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. The elder Guzmán is serving a life sentence in the United States.
A small plane left Hermosillo in northern Mexico on Thursday morning with only an American pilot aboard, bound for the airport in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, near El Paso, Texas. Mexican Security Secretary Rosa Icela Rodríguez said Friday that while one person left Hermosillo, three people arrived in New Mexico.
The flight tracking site Flight Aware showed the plane stopped transmitting its elevation and speed for about half an hour over the mountains of northern Mexico before resuming its course to the U.S.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a vocal critic of the strategy of taking down drug kingpins, said Friday that Mexico had not participated or known about the U.S. operation, but said he considered the arrests an “advance.”
Later, López Obrador, while talking about where the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels are battling for control of smuggling routes along the Guatemala border on Friday, downplayed the violence that had driven nearly 600 Mexicans to seek refuge in Guatemala this week.
He said, as he often has, that it’s his political adversaries who are trying to make Mexico’s violence appear to be out of control. But those cartels were already fighting each other in many locations throughout Mexico before Zambada’s arrest.
Frank Pérez, a lawyer for Zambada, told The Associated Press that his client “did not come to the U.S. voluntarily.”
It appeared the sons of “El Chapo” Guzmán were somehow in on the trap for Zambada, said José Reveles, author of a number of books about the cartels. The so-called Chapitos, or Little Chapos, make up a faction within the Sinaloa cartel that was often at odds with Zambada even while trafficking drugs.
Guzmán López, who was also arrested Thursday, “is not his friend nor his collaborator,” Reveles said.
He is considered to be the least influential of the four brothers who make up the Chapitos, who are considered among the main exporters of the synthetic opioid fentanyl to the United States. Joaquín Guzmán López is now the second of them to land in U.S. custody. Their chief of security was arrested by Mexican authorities in November.
Guzmán López has been accused of being the cartel’s link for importing the precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl from Asia and for setting up the labs that produce the drug, Reveles said.
Anne Milgram, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration chief, said that Zambada’s arrest “strikes at the heart of the cartel that is responsible for the majority of drugs, including fentanyl and methamphetamine, killing Americans from coast to coast.”
During the current Mexican administration, which ends Sept. 30, Mexico has been unable to control the country’s violence. López Obrador’s decision to focus on alleviating what he sees as the root causes of violence instead of head-on confrontation with the cartels has caused tensions with the U.S. authorities, in particular the DEA.
Felbab-Brown said it has also allowed the cartels to accumulate power that “is unprecedented in Mexico's history."
Zambada could now offer reams of information about the cartel’s operations if he decides to cooperate. He faces charges in multiple U.S. federal courts.
He was the cartel’s most skilled agent of corruption and the most influential trafficker who “has been running extensive corruption networks across many administrations in Mexico, across vast geographic spaces, from the top of the Mexican government to municipal institutions," Felbab-Brown said.
“The most important thing to watch is how much intelligence El Mayo will now provide and how much evidence in exchange for better terms," she said.
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Durkin Richer reported from Washington. Associated Press journalists Christopher Sherman, Alexis Triboulard and Martín Silva in Mexico City contributed to this story.