Co-founder and alleged leader of Sinaloa Mexican drug cartel in US custody, DOJ says

(CNN) — Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, co-founder and alleged current leader of the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel, is in US custody, according to the Justice Department.

Joaquin Guzman Lopez, son of cartel co-founder Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and another alleged leader of the cartel, is also in federal custody, said Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Both men are facing several charges for leading the cartel’s criminal operations, including it’s “deadly fentanyl manufacturing and trafficking networks,” Garland said.

A US diplomatic source with direct knowledge of the case had earlier confirmed Zambada was in US custody.

The Sinaloa Cartel, named after the Mexican state where the gang was formed, is one of the most powerful drug-trafficking groups in the world, known for trafficking fentanyl, methamphetamine and heroin into the United States.

The latest indictment against Zambada, one of the most notorious drug traffickers in Mexico’s history, was in February. It charged him with conspiring to manufacture and distribute a substance containing fentanyl, according to the US Justice Department.

Guzman’s name was removed from the superseding indictment filed this year due to his trial conviction in 2018, federal prosecutors said.

From 1989 to 2024, Zambada imported and distributed “massive amounts of narcotics,” generating billions of dollars in profits, according to the February indictment.

Federal prosecutors said he employed people to obtain “transportation routes and warehouses” to import and store narcotics, along with hit men, or sicarios, to carry out kidnappings and murders in Mexico “to retaliate against rivals who threatened the cartel.

Guzman Lopez’s father was convicted by a federal jury in Brooklyn in 2018 and sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years, the Justice Department said. However, Zambada had continued to evade capture while he ran the cartel.

The elder Guzman was arrested in 1993 on homicide and drug charges but escaped in 2001, reportedly by bribing prison guards to smuggle him out in a laundry truck. He was arrested again in 2014, and again escaped. Guzman was arrested for a third time in 2016 and then extradited to the United States.

Zambada’s son, Vincente Zambada Niebla, has admitted to passing along orders for murders and kidnappings and was sentenced to 15 years in 2019 by a federal judge in Chicago. He was a high-ranking leader in the cartel when he was arrested in Mexico in 2009 and extradited to the US in 2010 where he was imprisoned.

Zambada’s son began cooperating with the US government in 2011, prosecutors said in a May 2019 filing. They said he aided authorities in helping target members of the Sinaloa Cartel and a rival cartel, which lead to the “charging of dozens of high level targets and hundreds of their associates in indictments throughout the country,” CNN previously reported.

Past indictments detail targeted acts of violence

Zambada was also indicted by a US federal grand jury in April 2012, in Texas, along with other suspected top Sinaloa leaders and 22 people allegedly connected with the cartel, including Guzman. They were charged with murder and conspiracy connected with drug trafficking, money laundering and organized crime.

At that point, Guzman and Zambada had already been indicted on on drug trafficking and organized crime charges in several US federal courts. Officials were offering a $5 million reward for information leading to their capture.

The 2012 indictment in western Texas detailed two acts of violence federal prosecutors said were committed by members of the cartel; one took place during a 2010 wedding ceremony in Ciudad Juarez, when an American citizen and two members of his family were kidnapped because of their ties with the rival Juarez cartel.

The target was the groom and a resident of Columbus, New Mexico, whose body was found to be beaten, strangled and his hands had been “severed above the wrists and placed on his chest,” according to the indictment.

Police found the bodies of the groom, his brother and his uncle three days after the wedding in the bed of a pickup truck, the indictment stated.

Another incident detailed in the indictment related to the kidnapping, killing and mutilation of a Texas resident in 2009 “to answer for the loss of a 670-pound load of marijuana seized by the Border Patrol,” prosecutors said.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

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