Mexico on alert after two drug traffickers linked to ‘El Mayo’ Zambada murdered

The murder of two leading fentanyl traffickers linked to Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada has put the Mexican state of Sinaloa on alert. Tensions were already running high after Zambada — one of the main leaders of the Pacific cartel — was arrested at the end of July. The tortured bodies of the brothers Martín and Leobardo García Corrales were found Saturday morning on a rural road in the municipality of Elota, near Culiacán. A third body was found next to them.

The García Corrales brothers were wanted by the United States, which had offered a $4 million reward in exchange for information leading to the arrest of either one. The two were accused of conspiring to traffic fentanyl into the U.S. and the unlawful possession of automatic weapons. The indictment from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York — which the Department of Justice published months ago — reported on meetings that the two brothers held with their partners and employees to discuss the production of the powerful opiate, which causes tens of thousands overdose deaths every year in the U.S.

The indictment states that the brothers and two other partners were put under surveillance between August 2022 and February 2023. Although it does not explain how the information was obtained, it recounts in detail the operations of the brothers. For example, in August 2022, Leobardo García Corrales met with other associates on a ranch in Sinaloa to negotiate the sale of a ton of fentanyl north of the Rio Grande. Leobardo — who, according to the attorney, boasted of his good relationship with El Mayo Zambada and the former leader of the cartel, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán — offered to send the drugs to New York, at a rate of $15,000 per kilo.

In another meeting in September of that year, Leobardo explained to another member of his network, this time in a restaurant in Mexico City, that he intended to move his fentanyl laboratories to Oaxaca, on the South Pacific coast of Mexico. In October, U.S. authorities intercepted a delivery of 10 kilos of fentanyl in a parking lot in California.

His brother, Martín García Corrales, was involved in similar dealings, according to the indictment. In August of that year, he held a meeting with another of the accused, Humberto Beltrán Cuen, alias Don Chino, to discuss fentanyl sales in the U.S. In that meeting, the man said that he and his brother had helped El Chapo hide after his first prison escape in 2001.

The indictment also claims that Martín met with Beltrán Cuen to discuss the purchase of “hundreds” of automatic weapons, 50-caliber rifles and grenades. In a later meeting, the two men agree to the purchase of weapons, which Cuen says he will handle, in exchange for fentanyl. The account goes on to detail meetings in Austria for the purchase of the weapons, and in the United States for the delivery of fentanyl in exchange for the weapons, etc. Beltrán Cuen was arrested in Guatemala in March last year and later extradited to the United States.

It is not clear what role the García Corrales brothers played in the Sinaloa Cartel’s organization, although the large reward offered for their arrest and the fact that they could allegedly buy weapons and manufacture fentanyl hint at their power. The U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Department of Justice linked the two to Zambada and El Chapo, a connection they inferred from the brothers’ own statements.

In April last year, however, the same Attorney General’s Office and the DEA included them in the Los Chapitos network, the faction led by El Chapo Guzmán’s sons, of whom only two remain free: Iván Archivaldo and Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar. The other two sons are now behind bars: Ovidio Guzmán was arrested in January last year, and Joaquín Guzmán López reportedly handed himself over to U.S. authorities in July.

Guzmán López’s apparent surrender is at the center of great controversy. On July 25, Guzmán López landed near El Paso, Texas, with Zambada. U.S. authorities were waiting for them. Guzmán allegedly set a trap for his father’s old partner, telling Zambada that he would be attending a meeting in Culiacán, with the governor of Sinaloa, Rubén Rocha, from the ruling party Morena, and his political rival, Héctor Melesio Cuen Ojeda. Zambada’s role would be to mediate the meeting.

According to El Mayo, in a letter released from prison in the U.S., he had gone to the meeting with Rocha and Cuen, but then Guzmán and his henchmen kidnapped him, put him on a plane and took him to the U.S., where he has been wanted for years. In his letters, Zambada said that Héctor Cuen was killed right in front of him at the place he was kidnapped in Culiacán. This contradicted Sinaloa’s Attorney General’s Office, which claimed Cuen’s murder was the victim of a robbery that took place at a gas station in the city.

The contradiction led to fierce criticism of the Sinaloa Attorney General’s Office, and Sinaloa Attorney General Sara Bruna Quiñónez resigned last week after being grilled on her claims on the Cuen murder and her actions in the case.

The murder of the García Corrales brothers may be linked to the scandal over Zambada’s arrest. It has also heightened tensions in the already unstable region. Since the fall of El Chapo in 2016, conflicts between the different factions of the Sinaloa Cartel have intensified. His sons first confronted their father’s old lieutenant, Dámaso López, alias El Licenciado, who was arrested shortly afterward.

Since then, Los Chapitos have tried to take control of Sinaloa, and their father’s routes and connections. The decision to allegedly betray Zambada has placed the criminal group in uncharted territory, without veteran leaders. There are even questions now about whether the Sinaloa Cartel can be considered a minimally cohesive and organized entity.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition