Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, 76, the alleged co-founder and leader of the powerful Sinaloa cartel, was arrested in El Paso, Texas, Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.
Another alleged cartel leader, Joaquin Guzman Lopez, 38, was also arrested, he said. Guzman is a son of the cartel's infamous co-founder and former boss Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, 69, who is serving a life sentence in a US prison after he was convicted five years ago on multiple charges.
Zambada boarded a plane with Guzman Lopez, believing they were inspecting property in Mexico near the US border, the law enforcement official said.
But Zambada didn't know US investigators had exploited a rift in the Sinaloa cartel and Guzman Lopez was helping with Zambada's capture, the official said.
The plane instead landed near El Paso and FBI agents arrested both men, in one of the biggest victories for US law enforcement against the cartels.
"Two individuals got off the plane ... and were calmly taken into custody," by federal agents who were waiting, a worker at the Santa Teresa airport near El Paso told Reuters. "It seemed like a pretty calm, arranged thing," the man, who declined to share his name out of concern for his safety, said.
Mexican officials were informed of the arrests during a phone call from the US Embassy in Mexico Thursday afternoon, Mexico's secretary of security, Rosa Icela Rodriguez, said Friday.
"The Mexican government did not participate in this detention or surrender," Rodriguez said during President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's daily news conference, adding Mexico is waiting for more information from the US government.
Based on information from Mexico's National Immigration Institute, Rodriguez said, it is believed the men traveled in a Cessna 205 from Hermosillo, Mexico, to the Santa Teresa airport in Texas.
Zambada has four active arrest warrants in Mexico for organized crime and other unlawful acts, Rodriquez said.
In the US, both Zambada and Guzman Lopez face several charges for allegedly leading the cartel's criminal operations, including its "deadly fentanyl manufacturing and trafficking networks," Garland said.
"Fentanyl is the deadliest drug threat our country has ever faced, and the Justice Department will not rest until every single cartel leader, member, and associate responsible for poisoning our communities is held accountable," Garland said.
Among various criminal charges Zambada faces in the US, he was indicted by a northern Illinois grand jury in 2009, according to the US State Department.
While his whereabouts are unclear, CNN has learned that a US Justice Department aircraft frequently used for extraditions traveled from El Paso and landed at an airport near Chicago early Friday morning.
US authorities had sought Zambada's capture for years and in 2021 raised the reward for information leading to his arrest to $15 million.
"Ismael Mario Zambada Garcia is the long-time leader of the Zambada Garcia faction of the Sinaloa Cartel. Zambada Garcia is unique in that he has spent his entire adult life as a major international drug trafficker, yet he has never spent a day in jail," according to the US State Department.
FBI Director Christopher Wray said Zambada and Guzman Lopez had "eluded law enforcement for decades" and "will now face justice in the United States."
The pair allegedly oversaw the trafficking of "tens of thousands of pounds of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and fentanyl into the US along with related violence," Wray added.
Drug Enforcement Administration chief Anne Milgram said the pair's arrests strike "at the heart of the cartel that is responsible for the majority of drugs, including fentanyl and methamphetamine, killing Americans from coast to coast."
Powerful cartel
The Sinaloa Cartel, named after the Mexican state where the gang was formed in the late 1980s, is one of the most powerful criminal groups in the world, raking in billions of dollars annually by trafficking drugs into the US and around the globe.
Notorious cartel boss Guzman, better known as "El Chapo," was arrested in Guatemala in 1993 on homicide and drug charges and extradited to Mexico. But he escaped Mexican prison in 2001, reportedly by bribing prison guards to smuggle him out in a laundry truck. He was arrested again in 2014, but escaped again, this time through a tunnel.
Guzman was arrested for a third time in 2016 and then extradited to the United States.
In a major trial, he was convicted by a federal jury in Brooklyn in 2018 and sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years, according to the Justice Department.
Guzman was found guilty on 10 federal criminal counts, which included engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, conspiracy to launder narcotics proceeds, international distribution of cocaine, heroin, and marijuana, and use of firearms.
During the trial, Guzman's lawyers argued that Zambada was the real kingpin of the cartel who bribed the Mexican government to frame Guzman and remain free to run the criminal organization.
In the latest in a string of US indictments against him, Zambada was charged in February with conspiring to manufacture and distribute fentanyl, an extremely potent synthetic opioid that has killed tens of thousands of Americans in an epidemic of overdoses.
Fentanyl "was largely unheard of when [Zambada] founded the Sinaloa Cartel more than three decades ago and today is responsible for immeasurable harm," said Breon Peace, US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, in the indictment.
Since 1989, Zambada has imported and distributed "massive amounts of narcotics," generating billions of dollars in profits, according to the 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."
Zambada's son, Vicente Zambada Niebla, admitted during testimony at Guzman's 2018 trial to passing along orders for murders and kidnappings and was sentenced to 15 years in 2019 by a federal judge in Chicago.
He 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 gang, which led to the "charging of dozens of high-level targets and hundreds of their associates in indictments throughout the country," CNN previously reported.
The younger Zambada had known "El Chapo" since he was 15 years old, he testified at the kingpin's trial in 2018. The younger Zambada frequently referred to "El Chapo" as "mi compadre," or "my buddy," during his testimony and said the drug lord was godfather to his youngest son.
A history of violence
"El Mayo" 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 drug trafficking and organized crime charges in several US federal courts.
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 whose 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.
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