Mexico after El Mayo

Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada García, the senior leader of the organisation known as the Sinaloa cartel, was arrested on 25 July, together with his godson Joaquín Guzmán López – one of ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán’s sons. The best Mexican coverage was informed by long experience, scepticism and sober realism. It was hard to believe the authorities had finally captured the man who never left the Sierra Madre. Across the border in the US, where the arrest took place, more than a few journalists appear to have cut their sociological teeth on the Netflix series Narcos: Mexico.

In both countries, there are two main versions of events. In Mexico – where the outgoing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has implemented a policy of ‘abrazos, no balazos’, which is likely to continue under his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum – most veterans favour the idea that El Mayo and his godson turned themselves in after years of negotiations.

The other story goes like this: Joaquín Guzmán, working with the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the DEA, tricked his aging and infirm godfather into meeting with politicians in Culiacán, Sinaloa. As they entered the mansion where the meeting was to take place, El Mayo’s four bodyguards were overpowered by six military men and Guzmán. They tied the 76-year-old up, hooded him, put him in the back of a truck, drove him north to an airport in Hermosillo, Sonora, and flew him to the US. But the governor of Sonora and Mexican reporters agree that most of this didn’t happen. For one thing, El Mayo would never have gone anywhere with only four bodyguards. That’s not how his security system worked: forty bodyguards would be more like it.

However they got on board, an aircraft carrying both men landed in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, not far from the DEA’s headquarters in El Paso, where Mayo was taken to court in a wheelchair – he has diabetes, gout and possibly cancer. He pleaded not guilty.

Guzmán was flown to Chicago, where his brother, Ovidio, who will stand trial in a few months time, is also being held. Oddly, Ovidio had been taken out of prison and flown to El Paso two days earlier, on 23 July, then returned to prison in time for the family reunion. Speaking fluent English, Joaquín pleaded not guilty. His lawyer issued a statement that there had been neither betrayal nor surrender. The DEA has now confirmed the obvious: they negotiated with Joaquín Guzmán. Their half-brother Iván Archivaldo Guzmán – according to a hitman who used to work for them, the most violent of the three – remains at large.

Betraying their confederates is the narcos’ only code of honour, yet it’s difficult to imagine any of El Chapo’s sons (Los Chapitos) outsmarting El Mayo Zambada. The US authorities almost certainly didn’t either, or at least not alone. The story becomes more plausible if we include two politicians: Rubén Rocha Moya, the governor of Sinaloa for López Obrador’s party, Morena; and Hector Melesio Cuén Ojeda, the former mayor of Culiacán, head of the Partido Sinaloense and a congressman-elect in coalition with the old ruling party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional. Once allies, they had since fallen out over control of Morena in Sinaloa, and Rocha Moya allegedly sought the help of El Mayo – a close friend of Cuén Ojeda – in mediating their dispute, at the centre of which lay the Autonomous University of Sinaloa, Cuén’s political stronghold (he had been rector). A meeting with Mayo and Ramón Mocha was arranged, to which Joaquín Guzmán may have been invited as a representative of Los Chapitos, to discuss a solution.

Mayo came down from the Sierra Madre a week earlier to seek treatment at the hospital in Culiacán (hence the rumours of cancer). It’s possible that Rocha Moya, in cahoots with Joaquín Guzmán, called in the DEA, FBI and Homeland Security. Guzmán is reported to have shaken hands with all the agents involved, and El Mayo’s lawyer told the Los Angeles Times that Joaquín tied his godfather’s legs to the seat of the plane, where he was tortured en route.

After waiting in vain for his lawyers to show up at a ranch outside town, Cuén Ojeda was murdered in a ‘robbery’ at a gas station on his way back to Culiacán that evening. Rocha Moya called for a federal investigation, yet if motive matters, he is one of the leading suspects.

Two of El Mayo’s sons and one of his brothers are in witness protection after testifying against El Chapo and General Genaro García Luna. Vicente Zambada, or Vicentillo, revealed that he had given the DEA his father’s contacts as well as the location of airstrips, ranches and safe houses, and that Sinaloa had bribed Vicente Fox, Felipe Calderón, and Ernesto Zedillo. Yet these revelations may pale in comparison to what comes out in El Mayo’s trial.

That will depend on the deal he reaches (or has already reached) with the US authorities, who need him to tell them what he knows about his rivals in organised crime, but are even more interested in what he knows about politicians, military and police officers, operations outside Mexico and US agencies such as the DEA. He is using Vicentillo’s lawyer.

El Mayo’s arrest is the biggest upheaval in Mexican organised crime since the death of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the head of the Juárez cartel, in 1997, after which Sinaloa’s predominance was consolidated. If El Mayo had been betrayed, war would have started between Los Chapitos and those loyal to El Mayo’s remaining son (‘Mayito Flaco’) in Tijuana, Sinaloa and Chiapas – where hundreds have been displaced across the border into Guatemala – for control of landing strips, labs, warehouses, retail drug sales and, most important, political protection. It hasn’t. (The fighting in Chiapas, Nayarit and Sonora involves different actors.)

Los Chapitos dominate the production and export of fentanyl, but El Mayo used to oversee the purchase of the precursors from China. Triads from Hong Kong, operating out of Mexico, launder money and do a booming trade in contraband seafood and human beings as well as chemical precursors. They are poised to advance in the face of any weakness from factional infighting among the Sinaloa networks.

Like the Spanish colonial silver circuit and the flotillas that sailed between Acapulco and Manilla for centuries, the post-Cold War narcotics circuit fosters trade, banking and investment across the Pacific. El Mayo’s network also runs Barranquilla and Cartagena in the Caribbean, Buenaventura in the Pacific and other coastal cities in Colombia and Ecuador. Iván Archivaldo has been seen visiting Medellín.

This business, which also includes crystal meth and Colombian cocaine, not to mention light and heavy artillery, is as big as it gets. Together with extreme violence and retail drug sales, the extortion of local populations is key to the control of territory. As corporate conglomerates, which increasingly run on a franchising model similar to Starbucks, these organisations are comparable to Google, Apple or Microsoft. Sinaloa operates in 74 countries worldwide. The head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime told reporters in 2009 that laundered drug money helped keep the global financial system solvent after the 2007-8 crash.

The only true rival to Sinaloa, and its equal in the use of lethal force, is the Cartel Jalisco New Generation (CJNG or ‘las cuatro letras’), led by Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, (‘El Mencho’), an alumnus of the US prison system. It could seek to take over Sinaloan territory, perhaps through alliances with one or another Sinaloan network, but more likely through total war. This is already happening in Tijuana, which has witnessed more than a thousand murders already in 2024, and in the old colonial mining centre of Zacatecas – just as violent. Lesser regional players, including the Familia Michoacana or the Gulf Cartel, are legion, and it remains to be seen which way they will tilt in the wars to come.

As El Mayo noted in the only interview he ever gave, the business will go on without him, though he may have a thing or two to say about it first.