The arrest of Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada, live | Joaquín Guzmán López shakes hands with the agents who arrested ‘El Mayo’ Zambada in El Paso

4 cases against ‘El Mayo’ Zambada that could land him a life sentence in the United States

Mexican gangster Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada faces at least four court cases in various courts across the United States that will carry sentences that could see him spend life behind bars.

Texas. In Texas, Zambada is one of 24 drug lords charged with 38 crimes in 2012. The prosecutor’s office accuses Zambada and Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, who is currently serving a life sentence in a United States prison, of directing the Sinaloa Cartel and being involved in cocaine trafficking, money laundering, kidnappings and murders. The charges describe them as “responsible” for “the importation and distribution of thousands of kilos of cocaine and marijuana” into the United States through various transport routes between 2000 and 2012, including the international bridge between Ciudad Juarez (Chihuahua, Mexico) and El Paso (Texas, USA). He also blamed Zambada and El Chapo as the intellectual authors of the 2009 murder of American smuggler Sergio Saucedo, who was allegedly kidnapped in Texas and taken to Mexico, where he was mutilated for having lost a shipment of marijuana.

NY. Last February, prosecutors updated the charge against Zambada in a court in the Eastern District of New York, where he is charged with 17 drug trafficking crimes. The US Justice Department has accused him of leading an organization called the Sinaloa Cartel, through which he has trafficked tons of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana and earned billions of dollars from this business. This is the only case against him that includes a new charge that the Justice Department is highlighting for its impact: the trafficking of fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid that has generated a serious crisis of overdose deaths in the United States and that has become the center of the authorities’ anti-drug policy. They also accused Zambada of hiring hitmen who carried out “hundreds of violent acts” to consolidate his power within the organization and punish betrayals and failures.

DC. In 2002, he was charged with the crime of drug trafficking in a court of the District of Columbia, along with one of his sons, Vicente Zambada Niebla, known as Vicentillo, and his former right-hand man Javier Torres Félix. Since 1992, according to the report signed by prosecutor Patrick Hearn, the defendants had conspired “with intent and knowledge” to import “five kilograms or more of a mixture containing cocaine” and to “manufacture and distribute five kilograms or more of a mixture containing cocaine” which would be illegally distributed in the United States. The document also mentions violations of the law due to collusion and forfeiture and describes collaboration between the Sinaloa Cartel and Colombian drug traffickers, who provided tons of cocaine by boat to Mexican smugglers until the end of 1997.

California. Since 2014, he has been charged in four cases in a California court, along with his two sons: Ismael Zambada Siqueiros, known as Mayito Flaco, who was never arrested, and Ismael Zambada Imperial, known as El Mayito Gordo, who was extradited to the United States in 2019 and released in 2022. In her writing, then-prosecutor Laura Duffy said that, since 2005, Mayo “participated in a criminal enterprise to knowingly violate” laws against drug trafficking. The co-founder of the Sinaloa Cartel may have conspired to smuggle or distribute more than 150 kilograms of cocaine, more than 100 kilograms of marijuana, more than one kilogram of heroin and more than 500 grams of methamphetamine in the United States.