Mexico to File Charge Against Capo, Not for Drugs, But for Extraditing Another Drug Lord to the United States

MEXICO CITY (AP) — The bizarre saga of how two Mexican drug lords were detained after landing by plane in the United States in July just got weirder.

Mexican authorities said they were filing charges against Joaquín Guzmán López, but not because of his leadership of the Sinaloa drug cartel that was founded by his father, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

Instead, Mexican prosecutors charged the younger Guzmán with allegedly kidnapping Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada — a senior drug lord from a rival faction of the cartel — and forcing him to board a plane and fly to an airport near El Paso, Texas.

Guzmán, being the younger man, was apparently planning to turn himself in to U.S. authorities but may have taken Zambada with him as a reward to sweeten his chances of a plea deal.

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

But he also cited another charge from an article in the Mexican penal code that defines what he did as treason. That part of the law says treason is committed by “those who illegally kidnap a person in Mexico for the purpose of handing him over to the authorities of another country.”

The clause was apparently justified by the kidnapping of a Mexican doctor wanted for his alleged involvement in the torture and murder of Drug Enforcement Administration agent Kiki Camarena in 1985.

Nowhere in the statement was it mentioned that Guzmán Jr. was a member of the “little Chapos” faction of the Sinaloa Cartel, made up of Chapo’s sons, which smuggles millions of doses of the deadly opioid fentanyl into the United States, causing an estimated 70,000 overdose deaths a year.

The statement by federal prosecutors also included an unusually sharp and revealing description of evidence presented by prosecutors in the northern state of Sinaloa that later turned out to be false.

Sinaloa state prosecutors apparently tried to dissuade state governor Rubén Rocha from killing a local political rival, Hector Cuén, who was at a meeting that was used as a pretext to lure Zambada to the kidnapping site. Zambada said he expected the governor to be at the meeting; Rocha said he had left the state that day.

To downplay reports of the alleged meeting, state prosecutors released video of a shooting during what they said was a botched robbery of a local gas station. They said Cuén was killed there, not at the meeting point where Zambada said Cuén was murdered.

While federal prosecutors have not gone so far as to say the gas station recording is fake, they have previously noted that the number of shots heard on the recording does not match the number of gunshot wounds to Cuén’s body.

On Wednesday, federal prosecutors went further, saying the recording “is inadmissible and does not have sufficient evidentiary value to be considered.”

Zambada said Guzmán, whom he trusted, had invited him to the meeting to help resolve the bitter political rivalry between Cuén and Rocha. Zambada was known to evade capture for decades thanks to his extremely tight, loyal and sophisticated personal security apparatus.

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

The governor denied knowing about or participating in the meeting where Zambada was kidnapped.

The whole case turned out to be embarrassing for the Mexican government, which had no idea until the facts about the arrest of two drug lords on US territory were revealed.

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