The 4 Cases Against ‘El Mayo’ Zambada That Could Leave Him in Prison for Life in the U.S.
The Mexican kingpin Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada faces at least four legal cases in different courts in the United States, with penalties that could leave him behind bars for the rest of his life.
Texas. In Texas, Zambada is one of 24 drug lords indicted in 2012 for 38 crimes. The prosecution accuses Zambada and Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán, who is currently serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison, of running the Sinaloa Cartel and engaging in cocaine trafficking, money laundering, kidnappings, and murders. The indictment describes him as “responsible” for the “importation and distribution of thousands of kilos of cocaine and marijuana” to the United States between 2000 and 2012 through various transportation routes that included the international bridge between Ciudad Juárez (Chihuahua, Mexico) and El Paso (Texas, U.S.). It also holds Zambada and Chapo accountable as the masterminds behind the murder in 2009 of the American trafficker Sergio Saucedo, who they allegedly kidnapped in Texas and transported to Mexico, where he was mutilated for having lost a marijuana shipment.
New York. The prosecution updated the indictment against Zambada last February in a court in the Eastern District of New York, where he faces 17 charges for drug trafficking. U.S. authorities accuse him of leading the Sinaloa Cartel, through which he has trafficked several tons of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines, and marijuana, and of having made billions of dollars from this business. This is also the only case against him that includes a new charge that the Department of Justice is highlighting due to its impact: fentanyl trafficking, a powerful synthetic opioid that has caused a severe overdose death crisis in the United States and has become central to the authorities’ drug policy. It also accuses Zambada of hiring hitmen who have committed “hundreds of violent acts” to strengthen his power within the organization and punish disloyalties and failures.
Washington, D.C. In 2002, he was charged with a drug trafficking offense in a court in Washington, D.C., along with one of his sons, Vicente Zambada Niebla, known as the Vicentillo, and his former right-hand man Javier Torres Félix. Since 1992, according to a report signed by prosecutor Patrick Hearn, the defendants conspired to import “five kilograms or more of a mixture containing cocaine” and “manufacture and distribute five kilograms or more” of that mixture “with the intent and knowledge” that it would be illegally distributed in the United States. The document also mentions violations of the law by complicity and confiscation and narrates the collaboration between the Sinaloa Cartel and Colombian drug traffickers, which provided tons of cocaine by boat to Mexican traffickers until late 1997.
California. Since 2014, he has been charged with four counts in a California court along with two of his sons: Ismael Zambada Sicairos, known as the Mayito Flaco, who has never been arrested, and Ismael Zambada Imperial, known as El Mayito Gordo, who was extradited to the United States in 2019 and released in 2022. Since 2005, El Mayo “deliberately participated in a criminal enterprise to violate” drug trafficking laws, as pointed out in her document by then-prosecutor Laura Duffy. The co-founder of the Sinaloa Cartel allegedly conspired to traffic or distribute in the United States over 150 kilos of cocaine, over 100 kilos of marijuana, over one kilo of heroin, and over 500 grams of methamphetamines.