The End of ‘El Mayo’ Is Only the Beginning

By Joshua S. Treviño

Thursday, July 23, 2026

 

‘Violence should stop in Mexico,” said the tired old man. “Too many lives are lost. It destroys families. It thrusts youths into a life without future. Nobody will win this war.”

 

Then, having spoken, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada García, one of the most fearsome cartel bosses in all of Mexican history, went silent to await his sentencing. The sentence was handed down on Monday: life in prison without the possibility of parole. As an end for a man who moved drugs and people across America’s southern border for decades, and who was directly and indirectly responsible for uncounted deaths and lives destroyed at the hands of his Sinaloa Cartel, the sentence was arguably somewhat less than he deserved. But the death penalty had been taken off the table some time ago, and Zambada García is reported to have been spared the worst possible federal lockup in ADX Florence, where his erstwhile Sinaloa partner Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán now permanently resides.

 

The question is why he was granted these mercies, small as they are. The Department of Justice knows, but — likely for good reasons — isn’t talking. The conspiratorial hypothesizing that seems to attach to nearly every element of Mexican civics rushes in with explanations, many of them genuinely plausible.

 

One theory is that the circumstances of El Mayo’s rendition to the United States are sufficiently radioactive that the DOJ has a positive interest in keeping them unknown, and therefore in keeping the prisoner from disclosing them. To be sure, the known facts of the case raise significant questions. On July 25, 2024, a small aircraft from Mexico arrived at the grandiosely named Doña Ana County International Jetport, a modest airport in Santa Teresa, N.M., just across the Texas state line. On board were El Mayo and a Chapito — one of El Chapo’s sons, in this case Joaquin “El Güero” Guzmán Lopez. The Mexican authorities had no knowledge of the flight or the passengers, but American authorities clearly did, as both men were arrested by federal agents upon arrival.

 

The tales of the two prisoners, both eminences within the Sinaloa Cartel, swiftly diverged. The Chapito was quickly charged — not by the Americans, but by the Mexicans, whose Fiscalía General de la República (FGR), their DOJ equivalent, indicted El Güero for treason. Tellingly, the Mexican authorities chose to immediately credit at face value Zambada García’s assertion, issued through his lawyer, that he was kidnapped by the Chapito and hustled onto the plane after being lured to a meeting at which Sinaloa Governor Ruben Rocha Moya was supposed to be present. (Rocha Moya is, of course, now at the center of the DOJ’s April 2026 indictments of Mexican senior officeholders.) The story eventually turned out to be true — or was at least accepted by U.S. authorities as a presentable narrative — when El Güero admitted to the kidnapping in his guilty plea last December.

 

El Güero was charged by the Americans, too — along with his brother Ovidio “El Raton” Guzmán Lopez, who had been arrested and extradited more conventionally the preceding year — for his own role in the Sinaloa Cartel’s leadership. Yet something curious then happened in the Familia Guzmán Lopez, come May 2025: That month, 17 Guzmán Lopez relatives voluntarily crossed from Mexico into the United States, hauling their luggage and a reported $70,000 in cash across the San Ysidro border crossing from Tijuana to San Diego — all under the watchful eyes of American agents and at least one U.S.-side sniper. Again, the Mexican authorities were kept in the dark: The story was broken by the intrepid crime journalist Luis Chaparro and picked up in the U.S. press by the Los Angeles Times. As for El Raton, his sentencing has been deferred to October 2026. El Güero has not yet had a sentencing date set. So much for the Chapitos.

 

The ambit of Mexican governance has responded poorly to this entire sequence of events. The abrupt removal of El Mayo and two of the Chapitos from the Sinaloan chessboard sparked a sanguinary war of succession that continues to wrack the erstwhile territories of that cartel. Those territories extend not just across Sinaloa proper, but in various forms across much of Mexico. Having long tolerated one species of violence in the reign of its Sinaloa-cartel (probable) allies, the ruling Morena regime now blames the Americans for incepting a different phase of killing. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has asked, pointedly, why — if the Sinaloa Cartel is a U.S.-designated Foreign Terror Organization — that same United States is apparently making deals with some of its leadership. Sheinbaum’s claim is a rich bit of turnabout: Having been a de facto ally of the Sinaloans for years, the Morena hierarchy now gets to accuse the Americans of the same.

 

Yet it is this probable Mexican state–cartel alliance that leads to another theory about the small mercies extended to El Mayo. The old cartel lord has been in the business for a very long time; he has worked alongside infamous traffickers including El Chapo, Felix Gallardo, El Señor de los Cielos, Beltran Leyva, and even the Colombians of the Medellin and Cali heydays. He was venerable and senior when, in 2006, what would become Morena’s original political core allegedly first formed its alliance with the Sinaloa Cartel. El Mayo was not removed from that activity: His own younger brother, Jesús Reynaldo “El Rey” Zambada García, has testified twice at trial in the U.S. that Sinaloa provided funding to Morena that year. The Chapitos aren’t the only ones who can be candid, for transactional purposes, with American prosecutors. Could the comparative leniency accorded to El Mayo — who is easily as malevolent in record and character as El Chapo — be a signal that he will share what he knows about Mexico’s corrupted political class? His lawyer is insisting it is not so, but to paraphrase Mandy Rice-Davies, he would say that.

 

The prospect clearly has Morena rattled, which is why Sheinbaum has tried to preempt the narrative by ordering the FGR to reopen the case about El Mayo’s removal from Mexico, and further accusing former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar of having lied about the episode. Already stricken with a quiet panic over the American indictments of the Sinaloa governor and one of the state’s federal senators, among others, they (probably correctly) suspect it to be both a result of the Chapito and El Mayo’s cooperation — and a harbinger of things to come. For his part, Salazar (who as ambassador was regarded by much of the Biden White House as far too close to Morena) has stated that the whatever took El Mayo and El Güero to American soil was “not our plane, not our pilot, and not our operation.”

 

Yet the plane is on public display in a small museum at the very same Doña Ana County International Jetport at which the drug lords passed into the custody of the United States, courtesy of the FBI’s El Paso field office. “Nobody will win this war,” said El Mayo — but though crime will always be with us, there is a side that is presently winning. Sinaloa’s cartel is decapitated and has collapsed into civil war. Sinaloa’s political leadership is hiding and under American indictment. The Mexican political class that has profited for so long from cartel partnerships is wondering what’s next — and scrambling to cut deals to save itself.

 

The sentencing of the old jefe de narco is not an end. It is merely part of the beginning. Known and unknown, public and secret, there are more deals to come in the unfolding American war upon Mexico’s narco estado.