Mexican drug cartel leader Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada said he was ambushed and kidnapped while he thought he was on his way to meet the governor of the northern state of Sinaloa, then taken to the US against his will, according to a letter released by his lawyer on Saturday (local time).
In the two-page letter, Zambada said his fellow drug lord Joaquin Guzman Lopez had asked him to attend a meeting on July 25 with local politicians, including Sinaloa Governor Ruben Rocha Moya of the ruling Morena party.
But he was taken to a room where he was stripped, a hood was placed over his head, he was handcuffed, and then driven in a pickup truck to a landing strip where he was forcibly placed on a private plane that eventually took him and Guzmán López, one of the sons of imprisoned Sinaloa drug cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, to U.S. soil, according to the letter.
Zambada’s comments came a day after the U.S. ambassador to Mexico confirmed the development. The drug lord was taken to the US against his will. when he flew to Texas with Guzman Lopez in July.
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 ties to the criminals and said he was not in Sinaloa that day. After the arrest, he said he was in Los Angeles.
“There is no complicity in the crime,” Rocha said Saturday at an event in Culiacan with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the country’s newly elected president, Claudia Sheinbaum.
“We have full confidence in the governor,” López Obrador said.
“They want to force me into becoming a narco,” Rocha said, referring to his rivals.
“If he said I would be there (at the meeting), he was lying, and if he (Zambada) believed him, he fell into a trap,” the governor said.
Zambada’s letter did not say that Rocha was at the meeting site.
It said that present at the location was Héctor Melecio Cuén, a former local congressman, former mayor of Culiacán, and former rector of the University of Sinaloa, whom it described as “a longtime friend.” Mexican authorities have said that Cuén was assassinated that same day, and Zambada’s letter states that he was murdered at the meeting place.
The smuggler 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 a second appearance in a US federal court in Texas since he was taken into US custody a week earlier.
Guzman Lopez has long been in talks with US authorities about possibly surrendering. Guzman Lopez, 38, has pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking and other charges in federal court in Chicago.
But US officials said they had received almost no warning when Guzman Lopez’s plane landed at an airport near El Paso. Both men were arrested and are in jail. They face various drug charges in the US.
US Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar said the plane had taken off from Sinaloa and had not filed a flight plan. He stressed that the pilot was not American, nor was the plane American.
This implies that Guzmán López intended to surrender, and that he had brought Zambada with him to obtain more favourable treatment, but his purpose still remains unclear.
Zambada was considered the Sinaloa Cartel’s strategist and was believed to be more involved in its day-to-day operations than his better-known and glamorous boss, “El Chapo,” who was sentenced to life imprisonment in the US in 2019.
The Zambada faction of the Sinaloa Cartel is engaged in a fierce war with another faction led by Guzman’s sons.
Wanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Brookings Institution, said Zambada was considered a good negotiator with his rivals and one of the most influential smugglers who “ran a vast corruption network across multiple administrations in Mexico.”
Zambada has been charged in multiple U.S. cases, including in New York and California. Prosecutors filed a new indictment against him in New York in February, describing him as “the principal leader of a criminal enterprise responsible for the importation of large quantities of narcotics into the United States.”