US role in kidnapping of ‘El Mayo’ Zambada by Los Chapitos placed under scrutiny

Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada was a living legend of organized crime in Mexico, and also a ghost. From Sinaloa, he transformed his cartel into a multi-billion dollar international empire generated by trafficking cocaine, methamphetamine, fentanyl, and other illicit drugs. Despite a $15 million bounty on his head, he remained a fugitive for more than 50 years, until his arrest in July 2024. The backstory to his surprise detention at the Santa Teresa airport in El Paso, Texas, alongside Joaquín Guzmán López — son of his former partner Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán — was the subject of rumors and speculation until Monday, when Guzmán López, upon pleading guilty to two counts of drug trafficking and organized crime in Chicago, admitted to kidnapping the 77-year-old drug lord and handing him over to U.S. authorities. Guzmán López’s testimony raises several questions and puts the United States’ involvement in the operation under scrutiny. This is despite the White House’s denial of any participation in events and the insistence by both the previous and current Mexican governments that Washington must provide answers.

A clean capture

In his guilty plea, El Chapo’s son told the judge how he kidnapped Zambada. After luring him to a meeting, he led him into a room where he was ambushed by several men, who tied him up, put a bag over his head, and loaded him into a pickup truck. They then took him to a nearby airstrip and forced him onto a private plane. Guzmán López gave him a drink laced with sedatives, and the plane took off with both drug lords aboard. El Mayo had never set foot in prison during his criminal career. In the court statement, the 39-year-old drug trafficker acknowledges that the United States government “did not solicit, induce, sanction, approve, or condone the kidnapping.”

However, even though the U.S. government did not request the kidnapping, agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) appear to have been aware of the plan. The capture of El Mayo, in which the FBI also participated, was clean: not a single shot was fired. Mike Vigil, former head of International Operations for the DEA, said in an interview with Insight Crime that Guzmán López’s younger brother, Ovidio Guzmán, was already in custody and actively negotiating with the U.S. Attorney’s Office. “It was through him that they must have learned about the planned kidnapping,” he stated.

Ken Salazar, who was the U.S. ambassador to Mexico at the time, said the plane had taken off from Sinaloa and had not filed a flight plan. He emphasized that neither the pilot nor the aircraft was American. However, according to two sources familiar with the case — cited by The New York Times — U.S. authorities knew on July 25, 2024, that Zambada was on the plane as it approached the border between the two countries.

According to the newspaper Reforma, citing an FBI source, Guzmán spoke to his contact 15 minutes after takeoff. He told him he had El Mayo with him. By the time the aircraft flew over the border, U.S. authorities already knew it was El Chapo’s son aboard, and not an intruder or a terrorist threat.

For their part, journalists Ricardo Ravelo and José Luis Montenegro maintain in their book La Cuarta Transformación del crimen organizado (or, The Fourth Transformation of Organized Crime) that the plane carrying Guzmán López and Zambada had only one pilot on board, provided by the FBI. “Only the Americans and Joaquín know the man’s name,” a source from their investigation stated.

Where is the pilot?

The two arrests sparked a torrent of questions in Mexico, where the government claimed it had no involvement and was unaware of the events until the U.S. Embassy notified it. At a press conference on July 29, 2024, then-secretary of security Rosa Icela Rodríguez shared a report sent by the U.S. government. She publicly identified the pilot as a U.S. citizen named Larry Curtis Parker.

However, Parker assured The New York Times that he had no connection to Guzmán López and Zambada. “I’m just a clean-cut, hardworking American,” he said. U.S. federal authorities had to confirm that Parker was indeed not the pilot.

On August 12, 2024, then-Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador urged the Attorney General’s Office (FGR) to continue pressuring the United States because they had received conflicting accounts of the incident. “For example, we don’t know what happened to the pilot. Where is he from?” the president asked during his morning press conference.

On October 30, 2024, the then-attorney general, Alejandro Gertz Manero, announced that information regarding the pilot involved in the flight that transported Guzmán López and Zambada had been requested on three occasions: once through Interpol and twice through International Legal Assistance. However, as of that date, Mexican authorities had not received a response.

Over the following weeks, it also came to light that the aircraft used to transport El Mayo presented irregularities, including a counterfeit and altered registration number and serial number. The FGR discovered that the plane’s registration had been changed several times. In 2019, the original registration was changed in Colombia. In 2021, it obtained another registration in the United States. However, the registration used to transport Zambada was allegedly false. “Why did [El Mayo] arrive in a cloned plane? Why wasn’t the pilot arrested under these circumstances, given that there is no protocol explaining how he entered the country?” asked Gertz on October 30, 2024.

Last February, Secretary of Public Security Omar García Harfuch announced the arrest of Mauro N., alias “El Jando,” a civilian pilot and key operative within the Los Chapitos organization. This alleged member of the Sinaloa Cartel was accused of participating in the operation that led to the kidnapping and subsequent arrest of El Mayo. However, last August, Harfuch himself ruled out the pilot’s direct involvement in the aforementioned flight. “He did not participate directly in the transfer — that is, physically — but it is confirmed that he is a private pilot and a trusted associate of one of the leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel, Iván Archivaldo,” the secretary stated.

Mauro N was transferred to the U.S. in August along with 25 other cartel members as part of the security cooperation to which the Mexican government has committed.

The shadow of drug trafficking over Rocha Moya

López Guzmán’s testimony before the judge in Illinois has once again raised concerns about Sinaloa Governor Rubén Rocha Moya, who has been accused of having ties to drug trafficking. It was Zambada himself, in a letter penned from prison, who claimed he was betrayed after being summoned to a meeting with Los Chapitos, Rocha, and opposition leader Héctor Cuén on the day he was kidnapped. According to the drug lord, the meeting’s objective was to smooth over tensions between the governor and the former rector of Sinaloa’s main university. Although he didn’t mention names, according to the Illinois court document, Guzmán López told Zambada that his presence was necessary “to resolve a disagreement he had with others.”

The governor never showed up, and Cuén was murdered at the Huertos del Pedregal ranch, where El Mayo was kidnapped. The controversy engulfed Rocha. The governor denied any knowledge of the meeting and said that the drug trafficker had been lied to about his attendance, at an event where he received support from Claudia Sheinbaum and López Obrador.

The journalists Ravelo and Montenegro go further, asserting that the only way López Guzmán could obtain guarantees from the U.S. was by surrendering himself and handing over someone high up in the cartel. “Rocha never showed up, and that was part of the plan [...] because he knew what was going to happen,” a source explains in the book.

According to the plea agreement, Guzmán López coordinated and carried out the kidnapping of Zambada in the hope of receiving cooperation credit from the U.S. government for himself and his brother, Ovidio. “The United States did not induce or condone the kidnapping, and Guzman Lopez will not receive any cooperation credit for it,” the U.S. Department of Justice clarified in a statement.

The criticism directed at López Obrador and Sheinbaum questioned how López Guzmán was able to kidnap El Mayo and smuggle him out of the country without any Mexican authorities noticing. “How is this possible? Who was governing Sinaloa? How could Rocha have participated in all of this? They owe us a major explanation, because all of this unleashed the war in Sinaloa,” said Carolina Viggiano, an opposition senator. More than a year later, the confirmation of Ismael Zambada’s kidnapping has once again raised questions about the operation.

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