How the U.S. Arrest of Drug Lord ‘El Mayo’ Fueled Violence in Mexico

The Washington Post / Mary Beth Sheridan

16:49 JST, November 17, 2024

CULIACAN, Mexico – When a Mexican drug lord was bundled aboard a small Beechcraft jet and secretly flown to the United States in July, the U.S. government called it a major blow to fentanyl traffickers.

“We should be celebrating what happened in Sinaloa,” U.S. Ambassador Ken Salazar said recently.

But the capture of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada has ignited an all-out battle for control of the Sinaloa cartel, one of the world’s most famous drug gangs. Homicides have exploded in Sinaloa state, with around 400 people killed in the last two months, quadruple the number during the same period last year. The capital, Culiacan, has become a ghost town at night, its residents locked indoors as gunmen throw up flaming barricades and trade shots in the streets.

The violence has revived a long-simmering debate: Does the U.S. pursuit of kingpins cripple organized crime groups or simply set off power fights that leave Mexico awash in blood?

The question is especially critical as President-elect Donald Trump promises to escalate the battle against Mexican drug gangs. Trump told the NewsNation cable network last month that “we need a military operation” against the traffickers, although he’s provided few details.

JD Vance, the incoming vice president, told a recent campaign rally that hundreds of thousands of U.S. military personnel “are pretty pissed off at the Mexican cartels. I think we’ll send them in to do battle with the Mexican drug cartels.”

For years, U.S. administrations have pressed Mexico to capture and extradite drug bosses, providing billions of dollars in security assistance. But traffickers continue to send massive amounts of fentanyl, cocaine, methamphetamines and other drugs over the U.S. border. Many Mexicans say the “kingpin strategy” has helped turn their country into a killing field, as members of fractured cartels brawl for power.

Mexico’s government is so angry that Washington didn’t share information on Zambada’s flight that it “closed the door” to antidrug cooperation, Salazar said Wednesday. Mexico’s popular ex-president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has gone so far as to blame the U.S. government for the surge in bloodshed. “If we are confronting a situation in Sinaloa of instability, of clashes, it’s because they made that decision” to work with Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán’s sons in pursuing Zambada, he said in September, shortly before leaving office.

Mexican analysts say the situation is more complicated than that. Crime groups have increasingly penetrated the country’s politics, economy and society, becoming a sort of shadow state. Critics accuse López Obrador of failing to check their growth, with an antidrug policy centered on social programs. In Sinaloa, the cartel is now so powerful that a split in its leadership undermined the entire social order.

“Zambada was something more than a criminal,” political scientist Carlos Pérez Ricart wrote in the daily Reforma. “He was a factor of stability.”

The Sinaloa cartel goes to war

Culiacan, a sunbaked city of about 1 million, is the company town for the Sinaloa cartel, a place of gritty streets and gleaming pickup trucks, boutiques selling T-shirts and roadside stands where shoppers sort through piles of plastic jugs and bins – essentials for meth labs.

For years, the Sinaloa cartel maintained a low profile. It built Catholic chapels, paid students’ tuition and donated toys to children at Christmas. After Guzmán, its storied leader, was captured in 2016, the business passed to his four sons – the “Chapitos” – as well as his longtime partner, Zambada.

Their alliance shattered in late July, with the startling news that Zambada was under arrest in Texas. The 76-year-old trafficker later said that he’d been betrayed by Guzmán’s son Joaquín, whom he accused of kidnapping him and forcing him onto a U.S.-bound jet, apparently as part of a deal with U.S. agents.

By September, Culiacan was aflame.

Gunmen from the Zambada and Guzmán factions have seized hundreds of cars from motorists and traded blasts in busy downtown streets. Residents wake up to news of piles of bodies dumped along highways or outside Splash Club, a much-loved water park.

Hundreds of people have fled the city. Parents have been so alarmed they’ve kept their children home from school and little league baseball games. Restaurants, stores and even movie theaters shut by 7 p.m.

The government has sent around 2,000 troops to Sinaloa since September, bringing the total number of armed forces to more than 10,000, but violence continues unabated.

“We never imagined we’d live this war,” said Guadalupe Gress, 54, a department store manager. “The schools are closed, people can’t work – and where’s the government?”

One recent evening, Gress called her 24-year-old son Haziel and got no answer. She tried again. “Something is wrong,” she said to herself. Within a half-hour, her older son contacted her with the news. Armed men had dragged Haziel away from his job in a currency exchange shop. “I felt my body dissolve in a thousand pieces,” she said.

Miguel Taniyama, a prominent chef, is also suffering the collateral damage of the cartel war. As the economy has shriveled, he’s had to close two of his three restaurants. He’s taken to selling his famed ceviche at stop lights.

Culiacan was always a safe city, he said. But not because of the police.

“The person who kept the order was El Mayo,” he added. “Security should have been provided by the government. They didn’t do it.”

Miguel Calderón, coordinator of the State Council on Public Security, a citizens’ group that works with the government, said authorities had systematically underinvested in law enforcement. Sinaloa, with 3 million residents, has less than 1,000 state police, he said. There are around 1,200 municipal police in Culiacan. For their part, many residents tolerated or profited from the traffickers’ presence – singing along to narco-corridos, or selling fancy cars and apartments to buyers flush with cash.

It’s easy to blame the violence on the United States, Calderón said; It is, after all, the source of most of the traffickers’ weapons. But “the list of what we haven’t done as a government and society is very long.”

The unintended consequences of busting kingpins

The U.S. government has revealed little about Zambada’s capture. One U.S. official told The Washington Post that agents persuaded Ovidio Guzmán, a son of El Chapo who is jailed in Chicago, to reach out to his brother Joaquín in Culiacan, and help him entrap Zambada.

U.S. authorities were understandably delighted to arrest a man whose organization was the No. 1 supplier of deadly fentanyl to the United States. But the subsequent cartel war has highlighted the unintended consequences of seizing a kingpin.

“There is plenty of statistical evidence that if you take out kingpins, you tend to cause a fight for supremacy between the seconds-in-command,” said Benjamin T. Smith, a historian and author of “The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade.”

The U.S. government “must have known this was going to happen.”

Arturo Sarukhan, a former Mexican ambassador to Washington, said the fallout from the Zambada arrest underscores a bigger problem. U.S. and Mexican strategies haven’t evolved to destroy the trafficking groups’ ability to operate, he said – allowing the flow of drugs to continue when a capo is caught. “The paradigm is still overwhelmingly tilted toward a supply-driven strategy and the Blackhawks and go-fast boats that go with it,” he said.

Security analysts say a broader approach is needed, including reducing demand for drugs, attacking the traffickers’ finances and targeting the middle tiers of the organizations, to prevent cartels from quickly reconfiguring. Mexican officials have warned that any unilateral U.S. military intervention would shred the relationship between the United States and its top trading partner – and probably wouldn’t work.

In Culiacan, residents see little hope for a quick end to the cartel war. Taniyama, the chef, said that many entrepreneurs had moved out of the city – to San Diego, Tucson or other parts of Mexico. Recently, his family sat down to discuss what to do.

“We decided, we’ll stay through Christmas, the end of winter, and then we’ll see,” he said. “In 54 years here, I’ve never felt fear. Now I do.”

Marcos Vizcarra in Culiacan, Gabriela Martinez in Mexico City and Nick Miroff in Washington contributed to this report.