Mexico to bring charges against cartel leader — for turning over another drug lord to U.S.

The strange saga of how two Mexican drug lords were detained after landing in a plane in the United States in July just got stranger.  

The Mexican government now says it is bringing charges against Joaquín Guzmán López, but not because he was a leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel founded by his father, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

Instead, Mexican prosecutors are bringing charges against the younger Guzmán for apparently kidnapping Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada – an older drug boss from a rival faction of the cartel – forcing him onto the plane and flying to an airport near El Paso, Texas.

The younger Guzmán apparently intended to turn himself in to U.S. authorities, but may have brought Zambada along as a prize to sweeten any plea deal.

Federal prosecutors issued a statement saying “an arrest warrant has been prepared” against the younger Guzmán for kidnapping.

But it also cited another charge under an article of Mexico’s criminal code that defines what he did as treason. That section of the law says treason is committed “by those who illegally abduct a person in Mexico in order to hand them over to authorities of another country.”

That clause was apparently motivated by the abduction of a Mexican doctor wanted for allegedly participating in the 1985 torture and killing of Drug Enforcement Administration agent Kiki Camarena.

Nowhere in the statement does it mention that the younger Guzmán was a member of the Chapitos — “little Chapos” — faction of the Sinaloa cartel, made up of Chapo’s sons, that smuggles millions of doses of the deadly opioid fentanyl into the United States, causing about 70,000 overdose deaths each year. According to a 2023 indictment by the U.S. Justice Department, the Chapitos and their cartel associates used corkscrews, electrocution and hot chiles to torture their rivals while some of their victims were “fed dead or alive to tigers.”

The federal prosecutors’ statement also included an unusually harsh and revealing description about evidence presented by prosecutors in the northern state of Sinaloa that has since proved to be false.

Sinaloa state prosecutors were apparently trying to distance the state’s governor, Rubén Rocha, from the killing of a local political rival, Hector Cuén, who was at a meeting that was used as a pretext for luring Zambada to the abduction site. Zambada has said he expected the governor to be at that meeting; Rocha has said he made a trip out of the state that day.

To play down reports of the purported meeting, state prosecutors published a video of an apparent shooting during what they claimed was a botched robbery at a local gas station. They said Cuén was killed there, not at the meeting site, where Zambada said Cuén was murdered.

While federal prosecutors stopped short of saying the gas station video was a fake, they earlier noted that the number of gunshots heard on the video didn’t match the number of gunshot wounds on Cuén’s body.

On Wednesday, the federal prosecutors went further, saying the video “is unacceptable, nor does it have sufficient value as evidence to be taken into account.”

Zambada has said that Guzmán, who he trusted, had invited him to the meeting to help iron out the fierce political rivalry between Cuén and Rocha. Zambada was known for eluding capture for decades because of his incredibly tight, loyal and sophisticated personal security apparatus.

The fact that he would knowingly leave that all behind to meet with Rocha means that Zambada viewed such a meeting as credible and feasible. The same goes for the idea that Zambada, as the leader of the oldest wing of the Sinaloa cartel, could act as an arbiter in the state’s political disputes.

The governor has denied he knew of or attended the meeting where Zambada was abducted.

The whole case has been an embarrassment for the Mexican government, which didn’t even know about the detentions of the two drug lords on U.S. soil until after the fact.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has long viewed any U.S. intervention as an affront, and has refused to confront Mexico’s drug cartels. He recently questioned the U.S. policy of detaining drug cartel leaders, asking, “Why don’t they change that policy?”

Earlier this week, authorities said the murders of at least 10 people in Sinaloa appear to be linked to infighting in the dominant drug smuggling cartel there, confirming fears of repercussions from the detention of Zambada and Guzmán.

El Chapo, the Sinaloa cartel’s founder, is serving a life sentence in a maximum security prison in Colorado after being convicted in 2019 on charges including drug trafficking, money laundering and weapons-related offenses.

Last year, El Chapo sent an “SOS” message to Mexico’s president, alleging that he has been subjected to “psychological torment” in prison.