‘Nada cambia’: Mexican drugs lord ‘El Mayo’ has been captured, but does targeting kingpins work?

They are the most significant arrests on the battlefield of global narco-traffic since that of the world’s most famous criminal, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán , leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, in 2016. This time it was the turn of Guzmán’s son, also called Joaquín – and the cartel’s co-founder Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada García .

El Mayo, who pleaded not guilty to charges of drug trafficking and money laundering at a special court in El Paso, Texas, on Friday, is the crucial figure in the Sinaloa syndicate, still among the biggest and most powerful in the world. He is the architect of the modern drug cartel as corporation .

Inasmuch as the Sinaloa cartel is a multinational corporate success, El Mayo is at once the co-founding CEO and the chief finance officer. The man who lived and worked in the shadows, while El Chapo stole the headlines; the man who never, until now, spent a minute within the walls of a cell. The man to whom Netflix devoted a World’s Most Wanted segment, but a supporting part (as Don Ismael) in the mass-market dramas.

Born in Culiacán in 1948, El Mayo’s professional journey began during the cocaine boom of the 1980s, as direct smuggling routes from Colombia into the United States, mainly through Miami, were closed down by law enforcement. Accordingly, the Mexican drug lord Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo adapted his Guadalajara cartel from heroin to capitalise on his country’s foremost criminal asset: a 2,000-mile border with the US. Zambada was Gallardo’s point man on the lucrative plaza smuggling drugs from Ciudad Juárez into El Paso, where he was arrested on Thursday.

Gallardo realised that he could act most lucratively as middle-man for the Colombians, charging commissions to transport cocaine into the US. But Gallardo’s cartel was battered by US and Mexican law enforcement after it tortured and killed a DEA agent, Enrique Camerena, in 1985. When Gallardo was arrested, two of his senior lieutenants – Guzmán and Zambada – proceeded on their own, founding the Sinaloa cartel.

The Guzmán-Zambada strategy was to increase cocaine transfer percentages exponentially, to bribe and “own” segments of the army, police and successive governments, and to control as much of the border as possible. By 2006, the Sinaloa cartel dominated, through sheer brutality, almost all the western and central borderlands, defeating rivals in Tijuana and Juárez. Their battle against the Gulf and Zetas cartels for the easternmost borderline of Tamaulipas detonated, from 2006, the carnage from which Mexico has yet to recover: with more than 350,000 dead, and some 80,000 disappeared.

While Colombia’s Pablo Escobar and Gallardo are the ancestors of modern narco-traffic, Guzmán and Zambada built the first real multinational, beyond even the transatlantic reaches of Sicily’s Cosa Nostra family clans. To build the planet’s most powerful criminal syndicate, they established ambassadorships, brokerages and distribution networks across the Americas – especially big cities in the US, centred on Chicago – and Europe. They adapted to the times: when the drug market expanded to include an increased share of synthetic products, the Sinaloa cartel built methamphetamine labs, thanks to Chinese contacts and control of Sinaloa’s Pacific ports for the import of ingredients.

They banked their billions with prestigious financial institutions: both Wachovia (now part of Wells Fargo) and HSBC admitted that they failed to monitor and report suspected money laundering activities for the Sinaloa Cartel – for which no banker has been prosecuted.

But while ambition and strategy bound the two men, their lifestyles could not have contrasted more. While El Chapo brandished his diamond-encrusted pistol , lived the narco-lord high life with daring appearances and prison escapes that became folklore, El Mayo lived simply, as a rural family recluse, more like an Italian capo , counting the money, courting the corridors of power. El Chapo made it on to the Forbes magazine rich list – but not El Mayo: he managed the fortune backstage. Javier Valdez Cárdenas, the Sinaloa journalist assassinated by the cartel in 2017 for his depth of knowledge, assured me repeatedly that “if El Chapo is the cartel’s military enforcer, El Mayo is its business strategist, and conduit to government”.

But Zambada’s model grew so big, it faced a dilemma: the cartel needed pyramidal control, but also to operate as “the federation” – as it styled itself – to achieve reach. The structure and story of the Sinaloa cartel since 2012 has been one whereby some strengths became weaknesses, in a federation expansive enough to become the behemoth it was, but wherein no one really knew whom they could trust. The Zetas held the Gulf of Mexico; Sinaloa faced the ascendant cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación, under Mexico’s new narco-kingpin Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes. El Mayo urged Guzmán that cartel control needed to be invested in capable lieutenants from the next generation, including El Chapo’s own sons, as the founding fathers aged and reeled from arrests and extraditions.

When El Chapo was arrested for the third and final time in 2016, he was reportedly with Zambada, who somehow got away. They had escaped a raid on a home in Los Mochis, deep in El Mayo territory, by fleeing through a sewer and then hijacking a car (lore has it that El Mayo ensured its owner kept her purse) before being arrested on a highway. Valdez Cárdenas and sources in the DEA speculated that El Mayo may have engineered the capture, furious about a meeting between Guzmán and Sean Penn , arranged through the Mexican actress Kate del Castillo, to discuss a potential biopic. For El Mayo, this is business, not show business. As the cartel’s ambassador to power, Zambada has military connections such as to remove Guzmán’s protection. And there was a strange connection to the Penn meeting behind last week’s drama: the Observer has learned that the man in whose house it was held, a former university dean, was shot dead while Zambada was arrested.

El Mayo’s brother, Jesús Zambada, and his son Vicente, both jailed in the US, testified against El Chapo at his trial in New York in 2019; the former did so with the aplomb of a businessman because that’s what he was, detailing wholesale and street prices for different US cities, and thereby vast profit margins. Vicente testified that his father accounted for a “bribery budget” of over $1m a month. Now, there is speculation that Joaquín Guzmán Jnr reciprocated by enticing El Mayo aboard the plane that flew them to Texas last week.

Whatever: the American plan was for the Sinaloa cartel to implode after El Chapo’s arrest. But it didn’t; Zambada held the helm. When I was working in Tumaco, Colombia, in 2018, the waterfront there, through which a quarter of Colombia’s cocaine is exported, operated under a vice-grip of the Sinaloa cartel, with Colombian militias – criminal bands and ex-Farc guerrillas – fighting for access to it. The cartel’s reach extends into Bolivia, Ecuador and beyond in South America. El Mencho’s rise accompanied that of the entry of fentanyl into the drug market ; El Mayo’s response was to train up El Chapo’s sons to create their own network producing and distributing the killer synthetic opiate throughout the US.

The cartel mustered sufficient firepower in the state capital of Culiacán to force a unit of the Mexican army to release El Chapo’s son Ovidio after a raid in November 2019 – a humiliating surrender on the government’s part (Ovidio was later rearrested ).

Importantly, another son, Archivaldo, was the star student of his year at the Guadalajara campus of the Tec de Monterrey business school; known as Archie, he is reportedly in line to inherit the “chief finance officer” and government liaison roles from his mentor, El Mayo. So there is one important caveat to any triumphalism over Zambada’s arrest. It fits within the US strategy of a war targeting “kingpins”, on the premise that the best way to undermine a cartel is to decapitate it. El Mayo begs to differ.

Among the many things he shares with Guzmán is that each granted only one press interview. In April 2010, Zambada told Julio Scherer, publisher of Proceso magazine, that he harboured a lifelong fear of incarceration, but pondered: “One day I may decide to turn myself in, so they can shoot me, and there’ll be general euphoria. But we all know that at the end of the day, if they catch me or kill me, nada cambia – nothing changes.”

El Mayo may have walked into a law enforcement trap last week, but he has never misjudged the narco-traffic market of Mexico yet.

Ed Vulliamy is the author of Amexica: War Along the Borderline , published by Vintage