Mexican baron’s arrest likely to spark violent power struggle

MEXICO CITY (AP) — A new era is dawning for Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa cartel following the capture by U.S. authorities of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, the last of Mexico’s big drug traffickers.

Experts believe his arrest will spark a new wave of violence in Mexico, while Zambada could potentially provide a wealth of information to U.S. prosecutors.

Zambada, who eluded authorities for decades and never went to prison, was known for his cunning, ability to bribe officials and ability to negotiate with anyone, including rivals.

Experts say removing him from the criminal world could spark an internal war for control of the global cartel — similar to those that have seen the arrests or killings of other barons — and open the door to the more violent tendencies of a younger generation of Sinaloa traffickers.

With that in mind, the Mexican government on Friday sent 200 members of its special forces to Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state.

“There is significant potential for a high escalation of violence across Mexico,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Brookings Institution. That’s “bad for Mexico, bad for the United States, and there’s also the potential for an even more vicious (Jalisco New Generation cartel) to become even more influential.”

For this reason, Zambada’s arrest could be considered a “major tactical success” but strategically problematic, Felbab-Brown said.

Although details are scarce, a U.S. official who asked not to be identified said Zambada was tricked into flying to the U.S., where he was arrested along with Joaquín Guzmán López, the son of infamous Sinaloa leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. The elder Guzmán is serving a life sentence in the United States.

The small plane took off from Hermosillo in northern Mexico on Thursday morning with an American pilot on board, bound for an airport in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, near El Paso, Texas. Mexican National Security Secretary Rosa Icela Rodríguez said Friday that while one person flew out of Hermosillo, three people arrived in New Mexico.

Flight tracking website Flight Aware showed the plane did not report altitude or speed over the mountains of northern Mexico for about half an hour before resuming its course toward the United States.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a staunch critic of the drug lords’ crackdown, said Friday that Mexico had no involvement in or knowledge of the U.S. operation, but added that he viewed the arrests as a “promotion.”

Later, speaking Friday about the battle between the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels for control of smuggling routes along the Guatemalan border, López Obrador downplayed the violence that has forced nearly 600 Mexicans to seek refuge in Guatemala this week.

He said, as he often did, that it was his political opponents who were trying to make the violence in Mexico seem unchecked. But the cartels were already fighting each other in many places in Mexico before Zambada’s arrest.

Frank Pérez, Zambada’s lawyer, told The Associated Press that his client “did not come to the U.S. voluntarily.”

It appears that “El Chapo” Guzmán’s sons somehow fell into Zambada’s trap, said José Reveles, author of several books on the cartels. The so-called Chapitos, or Little Chapos, are a faction within the Sinaloa cartel that has often been at odds with Zambada, even when it was involved in the drug trade.

Guzmán López, who was also arrested Thursday, “is not his friend or collaborator,” Reveles said.

He is considered the least influential of the four brothers who make up the Chapitos, who are considered major exporters of the synthetic opioid fentanyl to the United States. Joaquín Guzmán López is now the second of them to be taken into U.S. custody. Their security chief was arrested by Mexican authorities in November.

Guzmán López was accused of having ties to the cartel, importing precursor chemicals from Asia used to produce fentanyl and setting up laboratories to produce the drug, Reveles said.

Anne Milgram, head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), said Zambada’s arrest “strikes at the heart of a cartel responsible for most of the drugs, including fentanyl and methamphetamine, killing Americans from coast to coast.”

Mexico has been unable to control violence in the country under Mexico’s current administration, which ends Sept. 30. López Obrador’s decision to focus on mitigating what he sees as the root causes of violence rather than directly confronting the cartels has raised tensions with U.S. authorities, particularly the DEA.

Felbab-Brown also said this has allowed the cartels to amass power that is “unprecedented in Mexican history.”

Zambada now has a wealth of information to offer about the cartel’s operations if he decides to cooperate. He faces multiple charges in U.S. federal courts.

He was the cartel’s most experienced corruption agent and most influential trafficker, who “ran extensive corruption networks across multiple administrations in Mexico, across vast geographic areas, from the highest levels of the Mexican government to municipal institutions,” Felbab-Brown said.

“The most important thing to watch is how much intelligence El Mayo will now provide and how much evidence in exchange for better conditions,” she said.

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Durkin Richer reported from Washington. Associated Press journalists Christopher Sherman, Alexis Triboulard and Martín Silva in Mexico City contributed to this article.