Mexican drug lord 'El Mayo' Zambada on US capture: Was ambushed, kidnapped

Mexican drug cartel leader Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada said he was ambushed and kidnapped when he thought he was going to meet the governor of the northern state of Sinaloa, then was taken against his will to the US, according to a letter released on Saturday (local time) by his lawyer.

In the two-page letter, Zambada said fellow drug lord Joaquin Guzman Lopez asked him to attend a meeting on July 25 with local politicians, including Sinaloa Governor Ruben Rocha Moya, from the ruling Morena party.

But he was led into a room where he was knocked down, a hood was placed over his head, he was handcuffed, and then taken in a pickup truck to a landing strip where he was forced into a private plane that finally took him and Guzman Lopez, one of the sons of imprisoned Sinaloa drug cartel leader Joaqu­n “El Chapo” Guzman, to US soil, according to the letter.

Zambada’s comments were released a day after the US ambassador to Mexico confirmed that the drug lord had been taken to the US against his will, when he arrived in Texas in July on a plane along with Guzman Lopez.

The letter raised questions about links between drug traffickers and some politicians in Sinaloa, the Pacific coast state that is the home base of the Sinaloa cartel, but the governor denied any links to the criminals and said he was not in Sinaloa that day. After the arrests, he had said he was in Los Angeles.

“There is no complicity with crime,” Rocha said on Saturday at an event in Culiacán alongside Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and the country’s president-elect, Claudia Sheinbaum.

“We have all the confidence in the governor,” Lopez Obrador said.

Referring to his rivals, Rocha said, “They want to make me a narco by force.”

“If they said I was going to be there (at the meeting), they lied, and if he (Zambada) believed them, he fell into the trap,” the governor said.

Zambada’s letter didn’t say Rocha was at the meeting place.

It did say that at the site was Hector Melesio Cuen, a former local congressman, former mayor of Culiacan and former rector of Sinaloa University, whom he described as “a long-time friend.” Mexican officials have said Cuén was murdered the same day, and Zambada’s letter said he was slain at the meeting place.

The trafficker said one of his security guards, who is now missing, was a commander of the judicial police of Sinaloa.

In early August, Zambada, 76, made his second appearance in US federal court in Texas after being taken into US custody the week before.

Guzman Lopez apparently had been in negotiations with US authorities for a long time about possibly turning himself in. Guzman Lopez, 38, has pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking and other charges in federal court in Chicago.

But US officials said they had almost no warning when Guzman Lopez’s plane landed at an airport near El Paso. Both men were arrested and remain jailed. They are charged in the US with various drug crimes.

Ken Salazar, the US ambassador to Mexico, said the plane took off from Sinaloa and filed no flight plan. He stressed that the pilot wasn’t American, nor was the plane.

The implication is that Guzman Lopez intended to turn himself in, and brought Zambada with him to procure more favourable treatment, but his motives remain unclear.

Zambada was considered the Sinaloa cartel’s strategist and was thought to be more involved in its day-to-day operations than his better-known and flashier boss, “El Chapo”, who was sentenced to life in prison in the US in 2019.

Zambada’s faction of the Sinaloa cartel has been engaged in fierce fighting with another faction led by the sons of Guzman.

Zambada was considered a good negotiator with his rivals and the most influential trafficker who “has been running extensive corruption networks across many administrations in Mexico,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow in the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Brookings Institution.

Zambada is charged in a number of US cases, including in New York and California. Prosecutors brought a new indictment against him in New York in February, describing him as the “principal leader of the criminal enterprise responsible for importing enormous quantities of narcotics into the US”.