A new era is dawning for Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa Cartel with the arrest by U.S. authorities of the country’s last remaining drug trafficker, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada.
Experts believe that while Zambada could provide a wealth of information to U.S. prosecutors, his arrest will likely spark a new wave of violence in Mexico.
Zambada, who eluded the authorities for decades and never served time in prison, was known for being a shrewd strategist, skilled at bribing officials and able to negotiate with anyone, including rivals.
Experts say removing him from the criminal world could spark an internal battle for control of a drug cartel with global influence and lead to more violent tendencies among a younger generation of Sinaloa traffickers, as has happened with the arrests and killings of other leaders.
With that in mind, the Mexican government sent 200 special forces to Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state, on Friday.
“There’s great potential for an escalation of violence across Mexico,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Stroebe Talbot Center for Security, Strategy and Technology.
“That would be bad for Mexico and bad for the United States, and it could allow the even more vicious (Jalisco New Generation Cartel) to assume even greater importance.”
So while Zambada’s arrest may be considered a “major tactical success,” it is strategically problematic, Felbab-Brown said.
Details are still scarce, but a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Zambada was tricked into traveling to the United States and was arrested along with Joaquin Guzman Lopez, the son of notorious Sinaloa leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
Guzman’s father is serving a life sentence in the United States.
The small plane left Hermosillo in northern Mexico on Thursday morning with only one American pilot on board and headed to an airport in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, near El Paso, Texas.
Mexico’s Security Secretary Rosa Isela Rodriguez said Friday that one had left Hermosillo and three had arrived in New Mexico.
The plane stopped communicating its altitude and speed for about 30 minutes over the mountains of northern Mexico before resuming its route to the United States, according to flight tracking site Flight Aware.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a vocal critic of the strategy to take down drug lords, said Friday that Mexico was not taking part in the U.S. operation and was not aware of it, but considered the arrests a “step forward.”
Later, President Lopez Obrador spoke Friday about where Sinaloa and Jalisco drug cartels are battling for control of smuggling routes along the Guatemalan border, and downplayed the violence that has caused nearly 600 Mexicans to flee to Guatemala this week.
The president, as he has said many times before, said his political opponents were trying to make it look like violence in Mexico was out of control.
But these cartels were already fighting each other in many parts of Mexico before Zambada’s arrest.
Zambada’s lawyer, Frank Perez, told The Associated Press that his client “did not come to the United States voluntarily.”
Jose Revélez, author of several books on drug cartels, said it appeared that “El Chapo” Guzman’s sons had somehow ensnared Zambada.
The so-called Chapitos, or Little Chapos, made up a faction within the Sinaloa Cartel that was often at odds with Zambada during drug trafficking operations.
Guzman Lopez, who was also arrested Thursday, “is not a friend or an associate,” Reveles said.
He is considered the least influential of the four brothers who make up the Chapito Brothers, believed to be one of the main exporters of the synthetic opioid fentanyl to the United States.
Joaquin Guzman Lopez is the second suspect to be detained in the US. Their head of security was arrested by Mexican authorities in November.
Guzman Lopez is accused of being a conduit for the cartel to import raw chemicals used to make fentanyl from Asia and set up labs to manufacture the drug, Reveles said.
Drug Enforcement Administration Administrator Anne Milgram said Zambada’s arrest “striks to the heart of the drug cartels that are killing Americans across the country with fentanyl, methamphetamine and other drugs.”
Under Mexico’s current administration, whose term ends on September 30, the country has been unable to control violence in the country.
President Lopez Obrador’s decision to focus on mitigating what he sees as the root causes of violence rather than confronting drug cartels head-on has increased tensions with U.S. authorities, particularly the DEA.
Felbab-Brown said the measures have also allowed drug cartels to accumulate power “unprecedented in Mexican history.”
Zambada, who faces charges in multiple U.S. federal courts, could provide a wealth of information about cartel operations if he decides to cooperate.
Felbab-Brown said he was the cartel’s most skilled corrupt operative and most influential trafficker, “running an extensive network of corruption in many of Mexico’s political branches across a vast geographic area, from the highest levels of the Mexican government to local municipalities.”
“The most important thing to watch is how much information El Mayo is willing to provide going forward and how much evidence they’re willing to offer in exchange for better terms,” she said.
