Conspiracy to traffic cocaine and marijuana, conspiracy to launder money, illegal possession of firearms and the murder of at least four drug traffickers while serving as one of the top leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel. These are just some of the 12 criminal charges that Ismael will have to answer for. The May Zambada in the United States. The 76-year-old drug lord returns this Thursday to the court of the western district of Texas, in the border city of El Paso, where his legal team will receive an update on the status of the judicial process. In the midst of a scandal over the doubts and contradictions surrounding his mysterious arrest, Zambada is scheduled to reappear in his second appearance in a US court, after declaring himself innocent last week. The prosecution asked that the case be recognized as “unusual and complex” and asked the judge on Wednesday for more time given the enormous volume of evidence, the delicate nature of the crimes involved and the high profile of the accused, according to a document to which this newspaper has had access.
Zambada was seen in a wheelchair at his first hearing last Friday, held just hours after he was detained at a rural New Mexico airport along with Joaquin Guzman Lopez, the son of El Chapo Guzman. The drug lord waived his right to be present at a preliminary hearing scheduled for Wednesday, in which an investigating magistrate ordered him to remain detained without bail. Thursday’s hearing does require El Mayo to appear in court, at least according to the court’s own calendar.
Zambada’s defense has had to deal with the start of the judicial process in the United States and, at the same time, has entered fully into the so-called media trial. Frank Pérez, his lawyer and legal representative of his son, Vicente Zambada Niebla Vicentillodropped a media bombshell last weekend by claiming that his client had been kidnapped and betrayed by Guzmán López to be handed over to the US authorities, after being subdued by around six men wearing military uniforms. He also claimed that his client had not reached any agreement with the United States to negotiate his surrender, after five decades of criminal career without setting foot in jail.
The federal court in El Paso, Texas, on July 31.ANDRES LEIGHTON (EFE)
Jeffrey Lichtman, the lawyer for El Chapo’s son, broke his silence and denied the allegations on Tuesday. “When lawyers try to score points with the media with accusations like these, I ignore them, because they don’t make sense,” said Lichtman, who also represented El Chapo in the so-called trial of the century in 2018. Guzman was sentenced to life in prison after Vicentillo and Jesus Rey Zambada, El Mayo’s brother, testified against him, among others. The lawyer also denied that Guzmán López reached an agreement to surrender, a point that at this point was practically taken for granted, according to the information shared by the governments of the United States and Mexico after the arrest.
The case became even more complicated on Wednesday after José Luis González Meza, who appeared before the media as the legal representative of the Guzmán family in Mexico, contradicted Pérez and Lichtman himself, stating that El Mayo and El Chapo’s heir turned themselves in voluntarily, after negotiating for four years with the US authorities, and affirming that there was neither betrayal nor kidnapping. González Meza said in a statement that the relationship between the families that run the Sinaloa Cartel “has been impeccable” and denied the possibility of an internal war breaking out in the criminal organization after the controversial arrest.
Hours earlier, another of the few certainties that existed regarding the arrest collapsed. The governor of Sonora, Alfonso Durazo, assured in a press conference that the plane in which El Mayo and Guzmán López traveled did not depart from Hermosillo, the state capital, as the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador had initially reported last week. Durazo, former federal Secretary of Security, said that there was no aircraft with the characteristics of the one that landed in New Mexico in the airport records. The Attorney General’s Office has opened an investigation to find out what really happened in the hours before the arrest.
In legal terms, the charges that El Mayo faces in Texas are just a fraction of a huge battery of accusations in different jurisdictions in the United States. The case opened in the El Paso court refers only to federal crimes committed on Texas soil or that affected that state. The case in question was opened in 2012 and deals with the war that the Sinaloa Cartel waged against the Juárez Cartel, on the border between the two countries.
It is established, for example, that El Mayo and El Chapo were involved, along with their lieutenants, in the torture and murder of three rival drug lords, identified only by their initials: RMV, his brother JMV and his uncle GMA. The murder was ordered in May 2010, after the three men were kidnapped at RMV’s wedding in Ciudad Juárez. Their bodies were found by police days later, after being abandoned in the back of a pickup truck. pick-up.
Both criminal bosses are also accused of the murder of SS, a trafficker who lost a shipment of 670 pounds (just over 300 kilos) after a seizure in Texas in August 2009. mode of operation It was similar, according to US authorities: SS was kidnapped by several men, interrogated and finally executed in Juarez. “The murders resort to extreme violence and public display of the victim, including the dismemberment of body parts in a ritualistic or symbolic manner, as well as the placing of messages with written warnings, known as ‘narco-banners’ or ‘narco-paints’,” the indictment describes.
Guzmán and Zambada, the men behind the Sinaloa Cartel criminal empire, one of the most powerful criminal organizations in the world, are seen as the top leaders: those who directed the export of illicit drugs, to whom the profits were reported, oversaw the laundering of money, coordinated the shipment of weapons and resources to their allies, and ordered the elimination of their rivals. The case involves 24 defendants, including both: eleven were extradited to the United States, three were killed in Mexico after the charges were filed, eight more pleaded guilty, and two more were sentenced to life in prison in 2021. It is understood, from the legal documents, that El Mayo was the last to fall.
The court document details that FBI and DEA agents were present at the arrest of Zambada and Guzmán López last Thursday, after they got off the plane. Nothing else is said about the arrest. The prosecution argued that the exceptional nature of the case will require extending the 70-day period they have to move forward with the judicial process and prepare for an eventual trial. The defense agrees with the extension, which will have to be ratified by the judge. There is still the possibility that El Mayo, whose health has deteriorated in recent months, will be transferred to another of the states where he is accused or that he may be offered some kind of collaboration agreement with the justice system. Between versions of betrayals and secret pacts, the future of one of the most elusive and feared Mexican drug lords in history is just beginning to be elucidated in the United States courts.
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