‘El Mayo’ Zambada’s $15 billion forfeiture: A difficult bounty to collect
The drug lord’s guilty plea includes the disclosure of his assets to the courts, although experts consider it unlikely that they will be recovered
An astronomical $15 billion. That’s the sum Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada has agreed to hand over to the United States as part of his guilty plea on charges of racketeering and running a continuing criminal enterprise as the boss of the Sinaloa Cartel. An amount that seems unlikely to actually materialize. With the case set for sentencing in early January 2026, the septuagenarian Zambada also accepted a deal to spend the remainder of his life in prison and to reveal all his assets to the courts. Experts consulted believe this is a message for other targets: it’s better to surrender than to be captured.
“As part of the plea agreement, Zambada García also agreed to the entry of a $15 billion forfeiture money judgment,” the plea agreement reads. “If he fails to pay the full amount of the money forfeiture judgment, he consents to the forfeiture of any other property he owns up to the amount of the unpaid money forfeiture judgment.” That is, any property, accounts, or assets that can be found will be seized up to that amount.
The $15 billion award is a court estimate based on the total profits and earnings the Sinaloa Cartel generated under El Mayo’s leadership during half a century of drug trafficking and other crimes.
“U.S. money laundering, organized crime, and terrorism laws specifically allow for the seizure of money derived from illicit activities related to these three areas,” explains Luis Pérez de Acha, a lawyer specializing in money laundering. “This is done regularly, but such enormous amounts are unusual.” Pérez de Acha speculates that Zambada accepted this forfeiture because the United States has identified his hidden accounts in tax havens, among other assets, and if he doesn’t comply, his assets will be seized.
The sentence handed down to Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, El Mayo’s former partner, contained similar figures. In 2019, Judge Brian Cogan, the same man who will decide Zambada’s fate, sentenced El Chapo to life in prison and ordered him to pay $12.6 billion in damages. That figure also came from the calculation of the Sinaloa Cartel’s profits, which in Zambada’s case includes an increase of $2.4 billion over the past six years.
At her press conference Wednesday, President Claudia Sheinbaum explained that these calculations made by the Department of Justice do not mean that the money will be recoverable, but she took the opportunity to request a portion of it should be made available. “If there were a seizure of resources, we would obviously be asking, given the damage caused to the population in Mexico, that it be distributed to the people, to the most vulnerable,” she said.
There’s no public information on how much money was ultimately handed over (or seized) in the El Chapo case, and when Bloomberg recently asked a spokesman for Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella, he declined to answer. The closest thing to an official figure is the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture Program, but these are general statistics.
In 2019, the fund obtained $2.07 billion from cash and property seizures; this figure dropped to $1.693 billion in 2020 and $1.42 billion in 2021, only to rise again to $1.749 billion the following year, reaching a record for this period of $3.184 billion in 2023. By 2024, it was $2.002 billion. Not even the sum of all seizures — criminal, civil, and administrative — over those five years comes close to the figure in Zambada’s plea deal.
“The United States government pulls off this media coup, but there’s no follow-up on how much was paid,” notes Víctor Manuel Sánchez Valdés, a research professor at the Autonomous University of Coahuila and a security specialist. “Even assuming El Mayo had that amount of money, it seems very unlikely to happen.”
Quantifying the fortunes of drug lords is a complex task. El Chapo had the unusual honor of being the only one included on Forbes magazine’s list of billionaires. From 2009 to 2012, the publication listed him as having a fortune of $1 billion. In 2013, due to inaccurate data, he was removed from the list.
“I understand this as part of their legal strategy: accept whatever amount they are told and then try to prove with their team that they tried hard, but only got a much smaller amount,” reasons Sánchez Valdés, who believes that $15 billion seems like a punitive figure. “We mustn’t forget the strange conditions under which Zambada was captured.”
According to a letter issued by El Mayo from prison in the United States, he was the victim of a trap organized by his own godson, Joaquín Guzmán López, one of El Chapo’s sons. In the drug lord’s version of events, he went to mediate in a conflict between the governor of Sinaloa, Rubén Rocha, and the powerful local politician Héctor Cuén. Upon arriving at the meeting, Guzmán López kidnapped him and put him on a plane to the United States. There, both were arrested on the outskirts of the border city of El Paso. The Attorney General’s Office revealed shortly afterward that Cuén was murdered at the same location where Zambada was kidnapped.
The United States’ treatment of El Mayo contrasts sharply with that of Guzmán López, who has maintained a low profile since his surrender. “It’s a warning and seeks to send a message to the criminal elite,” Sánchez Valdés concludes. “There are more benefits for those who surrender voluntarily than for those who are captured.”
Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition