Following the trail of the pilot who delivered El Mayo Zambada to the US

Little by little the questions surrounding the murky capture and transfer to the United States of Ismael El Mayo Zambada, the last boss of the Sinaloa Cartel, two years ago are being cleared up. The FBI recently revealed it is in possession of the aircraft that carried El Mayo and claimed credit for the risky operation, which was carried out without the Mexican government’s knowledge. The FBI’s triumphant statement contradicted the official account given at the time by then-U.S. ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar, who flatly denied his government’s involvement. “It was not our plane, our pilot, or our operation,” he said then, and has repeated that denial after President Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration accused him of lying.

Whole some details had been revealed about the plane used in the operation — a 1970s Beechcraft King Air 200 — the mystery remained over the identity of the pilot who flew it on July 25, 2024. His name has been zealously protected by both governments, but Mexican authority reports and U.S. court documents point to Mauro Alberto Núñez Ojeda, El Jando, the trusted pilot of Los Chapitos, the clan that staged the ruse to capture Zambada, a former associate of Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán. EL PAÍS asked the foreign ministry, the attorney general’s office, the Secretariat of Citizen Security and the U.S. embassy for confirmation, but none responded.

Former ambassador Salazar’s version that Washington did not provide the pilot gains plausibility in light of the new evidence. However, the court documents reviewed by this newspaper show that, even if that were true, El Jando was still a key piece in the U.S. government’s major effort to win over protected witnesses from the Sinaloa Cartel. Last year Mexico detained El Jando but handed him over to the United States, which accuses him of drug trafficking. The pilot reached a plea deal in U.S. courts in April of this year.

Sheinbaum’s government believes Washington did play a role in the operation to extract El Mayo Zambada. The available documents appear to support that theory. One of Mexico’s complaints is that the move unleashed a no-holds-barred war inside the Sinaloa Cartel that has caused hundreds of deaths and disappearances. Joaquín Guzmán López, El Chapo Guzmán’s son, was the one who deceitfully led El Mayo Zambada to a location where he was subdued, sedated and forced onto the plane that took him to the U.S. The La Mayiza faction, made up of Zambada’s heirs, viewed that as a supreme act of treason and set out to exact revenge.

The other complaint, which has gained prominence in recent weeks, revolves around how often and since when U.S. agencies have been carrying out operations on Mexican soil without authorization from the federal government, as required by law.

Clues from Mexico

This Thursday, Mexico’s government gave its biggest clue yet about the identity of the mysterious pilot. In a press conference, the attorney general’s office said it had identified the man. It detailed that, according to information provided by the FBI, this man, once he finished the task of delivering El Mayo Zambada in New Mexico on the U.S. side of the border, “asked to be deported immediately to Mexico,” which, apparently, Washington promptly arranged.

The pilot had a criminal record, which led to his capture in Mexico a short time later and then to his return to the United States, David Boone de la Garza, head of the Specialized Regional Control Prosecutor’s Office, said. “The pilot was deported [to Mexico]. He continued operating, committing crimes in Mexico; he was arrested for weapons possession, and he was handed over under the National Security Law to the U.S. government,” he said.

Deliveries of suspects to the U.S. under the National Security Law match the mass transfers of criminal leaders that Sheinbaum’s government has implemented, and which follow a legal path that’s different from the traditional and time-consuming extradition model. The only pilot sent to the U.S. under the new and controversial procedure was El Jando, whom the Mexican government identified from the start as the trusted pilot of Iván Archivaldo Guzmán, another son of El Chapo who remains free in Mexico.

Six months after the El Mayo Zambada incident, on February 8, 2025, Mexican security forces captured El Jando in Sinaloa, saying they had responded to an armed attack. After his arrest, and later in August after his transfer to the U.S., Mexican Secretary of Security Omar García Harfuch maintained that El Jando had not been “directly” involved in the kidnapping and transfer of El Mayo Zambada, but the available evidence contradicts that claim.

The U.S. move

The timeline of several key events strengthens the trail that leads to El Jando. Sheinbaum’s government maintains that on July 23, 2024 Ovidio Guzmán, El Ratón, El Chapo’s son detained in the U.S., agreed to cooperate as a protected witness. Two days later, according to that account, Washington modified Ovidio Guzmán’s “precautionary measure” without consulting Mexico. That same day, El Mayo Zambada was captured and handed over.

This sequence of events, together with the fact that months later the United States would facilitate the entry into its territory of relatives of the Guzmán clan to provide them protection, has led Sheinbaum’s government to argue that Zambada’s capture was part of a plan orchestrated from Washington, and not, as Salazar insisted until the end, simply “a hostile action carried out by a member of one cartel against another,” meaning Joaquín Guzmán López against El Mayo, his godson.

On February 4, 2025 — four days before his arrest in Mexico — the U.S. attorney’s office filed a narcotics indictment in U.S. courts against Mauro Alberto Núñez Ojeda, identified by the aliases Jando or Jondo. The document, however, was not made public at the Department of Justice’s request.

That document is revealing. The U.S. government asked the judge to keep the indictment sealed “in order to protect the safety of cooperating witnesses and not jeopardize the investigation.” The request briefly outlined El Jando’s criminal background, saying the Sinaloa Cartel financed his training to become a pilot, as stated there. El Jando then worked as a pilot not only for Iván Archivaldo but also for his brother Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar, another son of El Chapo who is also free in Mexico.

“The defendant is currently in custody in Mexico,” the filing says. The Department of Justice explains why secrecy was important: “The United States needs an opportunity to ensure the safety of its witnesses. It also needs to give law enforcement the chance to extradite the defendant from abroad before he becomes aware of the charges filed against him in [this country]. The United States may also need time to ensure the safety of additional witnesses and their family members.”

The U.S. government’s request for secrecy was granted. One month later, on May 9, 2025, 17 relatives of Ovidio Guzmán, including his mother, walked across a border crossing into the United States carrying luggage. At the time, Secretary García Harfuch confirmed the transfer and said it was part of a negotiation between Ovidio Guzmán and U.S. authorities. His brother Joaquín Guzmán López, who arrived in the U.S. on the same plane piloted by El Jando the previous year, was already cooperating with U.S. authorities.

El Jando was finally handed over to Washington on August 12, 2025 along with 25 other criminal leaders from various cartels. The following day, U.S. authorities authorized making the indictment against the pilot public.

El Jando’s criminal life

Court documents recount Núñez Ojeda’s criminal life, from his beginnings as an enforcer for Óscar Medina Noe González, Panu, a mid-level leader in the Los Chapitos faction, below the hierarchy of El Chapo’s sons. El Jando acted directly as a liaison between that Panu and Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar. El Panu was killed in December last year in Mexico City.

After his training to “pilot private planes and helicopters in service of the Sinaloa Cartel’s operations,” El Jando oversaw “a fleet of aircraft and personnel working for the cartel, including mechanics, pilots and maintenance workers.” According to the charges, El Jando personally flew plane loads of hundreds of kilos of cocaine from countries such as Ecuador and Costa Rica to Mexico, from where the drugs were sent to the United States. He also transported weapons shipments used to wage fights against “belligerent subgroups within the Sinaloa Cartel.”

The documents directly link El Jando to Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar, whom he served as a pilot and from whom he received orders to carry “numerous shipments of cocaine.” For a single trip the cartel paid him $200,000. El Jando concealed his identity using the passport of a cousin named Alejandro Ojeda Ávila. The U.S. prosecutor’s office says that, during his work as a pilot, he operated several types of aircraft, for example Caravan, Piper, Cessna 206 and King Air. A pilot from Los Chapitos aboard a King Air of that last model delivered El Mayo Zambada to the United States nearly two years ago.

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