Mexican drug lord ‘El Mayo’ Zambada says he was ambushed and kidnapped before being taken to the US

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexican drug cartel leader Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada said he was ambushed and kidnapped when he thought he was going to meet the governor of the northern state of Sinaloa, then was taken against his will to the United States, according to a letter released Saturday by his lawyer.

In the two-page letter, Zambada said fellow drug lord Joaquín Guzmán López asked him to attend a meeting July 25 with local politicians, including Sinaloa Gov. Rubén Rocha Moya, from the ruling Morena party.

But he was led into a room where he was knocked down, a hood was placed over his head, he was handcuffed, and then taken in a pickup truck to a landing strip where he was forced into a private plane that finally took him and Guzmán López, one of the sons of imprisoned Sinaloa drug cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, to U.S. soil, according to the letter.

Zambada’s comments were released a day after the U.S. ambassador to Mexico confirmed that the drug lord had been taken to the United States against his will, when he arrived in Texas in July on a plane along with Guzmán López.

The letter raised question about links between drug traffickers and some politicians in Sinaloa, the Pacific coast state that is the home base of the Sinaloa cartel, but the governor denied any links to the criminals and said he was not in Sinaloa that day. After the arrests, he had said he was in Los Angeles.

“There is no complicity with crime,” Rocha said Saturday at an event in Culiacán alongside Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the country’s president-elect, Claudia Sheinbaum.

“We have all the confidence in the governor,” López Obrador said.

Referring to his rivals, Rocha said, “They want to make me a narco by force.”

“If they said I was going to be there (at the meeting), they lied, and if he (Zambada) believed them, he fell into the trap,” the governor said.

Zambada’s letter didn’t say Rocha was at the meeting place.

It did say that at the site was Héctor Melesio Cuén, a former local congressman, former mayor of Culiacan and former rector of Sinaloa University, whom he described as “a long-time friend.” Mexican officials have said Cuén was murdered the same day, and Zambada’s letter said he was slain at the meeting place.

The trafficker said one of his security guards, who is now missing, was a commander of the judicial police of Sinaloa.

In early August, Zambada, 76, made his second appearance in U.S. federal court in Texas after being taken into U.S. custody the week before.

Guzmán López apparently had been in negotiations with U.S. authorities for a long time about possibly turning himself in. Guzmán López, 38, has pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking and other charges in federal court in Chicago.

But U.S. officials said they had almost no warning when Guzmán López’s plane landed at an airport near El Paso. Both men were arrested and remain jailed. They are charged in the U.S. with various drug crimes.

Ken Salazar, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, said the plane took off from Sinaloa and filed no flight plan. He stressed that the pilot wasn’t American, nor was the plane.

The implication is that Guzmán López intended to turn himself in, and brought Zambada with him to procure more favorable treatment, but his motives remain unclear.

Zambada was considered the Sinaloa cartel’s strategist and was thought to be more involved in its day-to-day operations than his better-known and flashier boss, “El Chapo,” who was sentenced to life in prison in the U.S. in 2019.

Zambada’s faction of the Sinaloa cartel has been engaged in fierce fighting with another faction led by the sons of Guzmán.

Zambada was considered a good negotiator with his rivals and the most influential trafficker who “has been running extensive corruption networks across many administrations in Mexico,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow in the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Brookings Institution.

Zambada is charged in a number of U.S. cases, including in New York and California. Prosecutors brought a new indictment against him in New York in February, describing him as the “principal leader of the criminal enterprise responsible for importing enormous quantities of narcotics into the United States.”

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María Verza, The Associated Press