Ismael ‘Mayo’ Zambada, the great Mexican drug lord and founder of the Sinaloa Cartel who never set foot in prison, arrested in Texas

Ismael Mayo Zambada Garcia, the legendary leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, has been arrested in El Paso, Texas. The apprehension of the notorious drug trafficker, who had not set foot in a jail in decades of criminal life and who had a $15 million bounty on his head, took place at a private airport in the border city. The arrest was reported by the Tijuana weekly Zeta and confirmed to Reuters by two sources from the operation. The authorities have also detained Joaquín Guzmán López, one of Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán’s sons.

“The Justice Department has taken into custody two additional alleged leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel, one of the most violent and powerful drug trafficking organizations in the world,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a press release.

El Mayo, born in Culiacán in January 1948, had been wanted by U.S. authorities for decades. His name appears in at least five wide-ranging legal cases opened between 2003 and 2016 in U.S. federal courts. In all of them, he is accused of aiding the trafficking of cocaine and marijuana into U.S. territory and of inheriting the criminal empire once Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán was arrested and prosecuted.

The hunt for the drug lord intensified with the crusade by U.S. authorities to combat the arrival of fentanyl in the country. Washington has targeted large Mexican organizations, especially the one operating in Sinaloa, for trafficking the potent opiate that has caused a health emergency with more than 100,000 deaths in the past year. In February, prosecutors opened a new case against Zambada for manufacturing and distributing the drug, which has become the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 18 and 45.

“El Mayo and Guzmán López join a growing list of Sinaloa Cartel leaders and associates who the Justice Department is holding accountable in the United States,” said the Department of Justice. These include Ovidio Guzmán, extradited to the United States last September, and Nestor Isidro Perez Salas, known as El Nini, who is considered one of the organization’s top hitmen.

Despite his long criminal history, the U.S. anti-narcotics agency noted something unique about Mayo Zambada. “He has spent his entire adult life as a major international drug trafficker, yet he has never spent a day in jail,” the organization notes on the page offering a multimillion-dollar reward to anyone who provides information leading to his capture.

His life on the run is legendary. In 2010, Zambada had journalist Julio Scherer, one of the deans of the Mexican press, brought to his house. The meeting took place in a rustic house lost in the woods and was far from an interview, as the drug trafficker was reluctant to answer the 83-year-old reporter’s questions. “He is over six feet tall and has a body like a fortress,” Scherer wrote in his notebook. Zambada gave some details of his personal life. He had a wife, five women on the side, 15 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

One of his sons, Vicente Zambada Niebla, was arrested by Mexican authorities in 2009 on organized crime charges and extradited to Chicago in 2013. Vicentillo, as he is known, pleaded guilty and cooperated with authorities. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison in May 2019. His testimony was key to prosecutors being able to sentence El Chapo Guzman to prison. In April 2021, prison authorities admitted that Zambada Niebla had already left prison in the United States.

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