Two of the highest-ranking members of the Mexican drug cartel Sinaloa, including its co-founder Ismael Zambada Garcia, have been arrested in Texas, the US Department of Justice said.
"Ismael Zambada Garcia, or 'El Mayo', a co-founder of the cartel, and Joaquin Guzmán López, the son of its other co-founder, were arrested today in El Paso, Texas," Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.
Zambada and Guzmán López have been indicted on several charges for allegedly directing the cartel's criminal operations, including "deadly fentanyl production and trafficking networks," Garland said.
"Fentanyl is the deadliest drug threat our country has ever faced, and the Department of Justice will not rest until every single cartel leader, member, and associate responsible for poisoning our communities is brought to book." responsibility," Garland said.
The operation to capture Zambada prompted the alleged drug lord to fly to the United States under false pretences, two law enforcement officials familiar with the operation told CNN.
Zambada and Guzmán López boarded a plane purportedly travelling to inspect a property in Mexico, the sources said, adding that at least one of the men did not know they were headed to the United States.
FBI agents arrested the two drug lords after they landed in El Paso.
US authorities have been trying to capture Zambada for years and in 2021 increased the reward for information leading to his arrest to $15 million.
Ismael Mario Zambada Garcia is a longtime 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 but has never spent a day in prison," according to the US State Department.
FBI Director Christopher Wray said Zambada and Guzmán López "have eluded law enforcement for decades" and "will now face justice in the United States."
The pair allegedly controlled the trafficking of "tens of thousands of kilograms of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and fentanyl into the United States, as well as the associated violence."
Drug Enforcement Administration Director Anne Milgram said the pair's arrests strike "at the heart of the cartel that is responsible for the vast majority of drugs, including fentanyl and methamphetamine, killing Americans from coast to coast."
The Sinaloa cartel, named after the Mexican state where the gang was founded in the late 1980s, is one of the most powerful criminal groups in the world, earning billions of dollars a year from drug trafficking in USA and around the world.
Notorious cartel boss Guzmán, better known as "El Chapo," was arrested in Guatemala in 1993 on murder and drug charges and extradited to Mexico. But in 2001, he escaped from a Mexican prison, reportedly bribing guards to smuggle him out in a laundry truck. In 2014, he was arrested again, but escaped again, this time through a tunnel.
In 2016, Guzmán was arrested for a third time and then extradited to the United States.
He was convicted by a federal jury in Brooklyn in 2018 in a grand jury and sentenced to life plus 30 years in prison, according to the Department of Justice.
Guzmán was found guilty of 10 federal charges that included participation in a continuing criminal enterprise, conspiracy to launder drug proceeds, international distribution of cocaine, heroin and marijuana, and use of firearms.
During the trial, Guzmán's lawyers argued that Zambada was the real head of the cartel, who bribed the Mexican government to indict Guzmán and remain free to lead the criminal organization.
In the latest in a series of charges brought against him in the US, Zambada was charged in February with conspiring to manufacture and distribute fentanyl, an extremely powerful synthetic opioid that has killed tens of thousands of Americans in an overdose epidemic.
Fentanyl "was largely unheard of when [Zambada] founded the Sinaloa cartel more than three decades ago, and today it is responsible for immeasurable harm," Breon Peace, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in the indictment.
Since 1989, Zambada imported and distributed "vast quantities of narcotics," generating billions of dollars in profits, the indictment said.
Federal prosecutors say he hired people to provide "transportation routes and warehouses" to import and store drugs, as well as hired killers to carry out kidnappings and murders in Mexico "to take revenge on rivals who threatened the cartel.".
Zambada's son, Vicente Zambada Nibla, admitted during testimony at Guzmán's 2018 trial that he had passed orders for the murders and kidnappings, and was sentenced to 15 years in 2019 by a federal judge in Chicago.
He began cooperating with the U.S. government in 2011, prosecutors said in May 2019. They said he helped authorities target members of the Sinaloa cartel and a rival gang, which led to "the filing of charges against dozens of high-profile targets and hundreds of their accomplices in indictments across the country."
The younger Zambada had known "El Chapo" since he was 15, he testified at the king's trial in 2018. During his testimony, the younger Zambada often referred to "El Chapo" as "mi compadre" or "my friend " and says that the drug lord is the godfather of his youngest son.
"El Mayo" Zambada was also indicted by a US federal grand jury in April 2012 in Texas along with other suspected top Sinaloa executives and 22 people allegedly associated with the cartel, including Guzmán. They were charged with murder and conspiracy related to drug trafficking, money laundering and organized crime.
At the time, Guzmán and Zambada were already charged with drug trafficking and organized crime in several US federal courts.
The 2012 indictment in West Texas detailed two acts of violence that federal prosecutors say were committed by cartel members; one took place during a wedding ceremony in Ciudad Juarez in 2010, when an American citizen and two of his family members were kidnapped because of their ties to the rival Juarez cartel.
The target was the newlywed, a resident of Columbus, New Mexico, whose body was found beaten, strangled and whose hands had been "cut off above the wrists and placed on the chest," according to the indictment.
Police found the bodies of the groom, his brother and uncle three days after the wedding in a pickup truck, the indictment said.
Another incident detailed in the indictment is related to the kidnapping, murder and mutilation of a Texas resident in 2009 "for the loss of a 670-kilogram shipment of marijuana seized by the Border Patrol," prosecutors say. | BGNES
