Arrest of Mexican drug lord likely to trigger violent power struggle

A new era is dawning for Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa cartel following the arrest of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, the last of the great old Mexican drug traffickers, by US authorities.

Experts believe his arrest will trigger a new wave of violence in Mexico, even though Zambada could potentially provide U.S. prosecutors with a wealth of information.

Zambada, who had evaded authorities for decades and never set foot in a prison, was known as a shrewd puppet master with the ability to corrupt officials and negotiate with anyone, including his rivals.

His removal from the criminal scene could trigger an internal power struggle for control of the cartel that has global reach – as has happened with the capture or killing of other drug lords – and open the door to more violent tendencies for a younger generation of drug traffickers in the Sinaloa region, experts say.

Against this background, the Mexican government sent 200 members of its special forces to Culiacán, the capital of the state of Sinaloa, on Friday.

There is “significant potential for an escalation of violence across Mexico,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy and Technology. That “is bad for Mexico, it’s bad for the United States, and there’s a chance that the even more vicious (Jalisco New Generation cartel) will become even more prominent.”

For this reason, Zambada’s arrest could be described as a “great tactical success,” but it was strategically problematic, said Felbab-Brown.

While details are still scarce, a U.S. 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 notorious 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 one American pilot on board, bound for Santa Teresa, New Mexico, near El Paso, Texas. Mexican Security Minister Rosa Icela Rodríguez said Friday that one person had left Hermosillo but three had arrived in New Mexico.

Flight tracking site Flight Aware showed that the plane stopped transmitting altitude and speed data for about half an hour over the mountains of northern Mexico before resuming its course toward the United States.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a vocal critic of the strategy to dismantle the drug lords, said on Friday that Mexico had neither participated in the US operation nor had it known about it, but he viewed the arrests as “progress.”

Later on Friday, López Obrador spoke of Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels battling to control smuggling routes along the border with Guatemala, downplaying the violence that drove nearly 600 Mexicans to seek refuge in Guatemala this week.

He said, as he often does, that it was his political opponents who were trying to let the violence in Mexico spiral out of control. But these cartels were already fighting each other in many places across Mexico before Zambada’s arrest.

Frank Pérez, a lawyer for Zambada, told the Associated Press that his client “did not come to the United States voluntarily.”

It seemed as if the sons of “El Chapo” Guzmán were somehow involved in Zambada’s trap, said José Reveles, author of several books on the cartels. The so-called Chapitos, or Little Chapos, form a faction within the Sinaloa cartel that was often at loggerheads with Zambada over drug trafficking.

Guzmán López, who was also arrested on Thursday, “is neither his friend nor his collaborator,” Reveles said.

He is considered the least influential of the four Chapito brothers, who are among the main exporters of the synthetic opioid fentanyl to the USA. Joaquín Guzmán López is now the second of them to end up in US custody. Their security chief was arrested by Mexican authorities in November.

Guzmán López is accused of being the cartel’s liaison responsible for importing the chemical precursors used to produce fentanyl from Asia and for setting up the laboratories to produce the drug, Reveles said.

Anne Milgram, the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said Zambada’s arrest was “a blow to the heart of the cartel responsible for the majority of the drugs, including fentanyl and methamphetamine, that are killing Americans from coast to coast.”

During the current Mexican administration, which ends on September 30, Mexico has failed to bring the violence in the country under control. López Obrador’s decision to focus on tackling what he sees as the underlying causes of the violence rather than confronting the cartels directly has led to tensions with US authorities, particularly the DEA.

Felbab-Brown said this also allowed the cartels to amass power that was “unprecedented in Mexican history.”

Zambada could now provide vast amounts of information about the cartel’s activities if he decides to cooperate. He will have to answer to several US federal courts.

He was the cartel’s most skilled corruption agent and its most influential drug trafficker. “He operated extensive corruption networks in many administrations in Mexico, across vast geographic areas, from the top of the Mexican government to municipal institutions,” said Felbab-Brown.

“The most important thing is to see how much intelligence El Mayo will now provide and how much evidence in exchange for better terms,” ​​she said.