Mexico charges Capo, not for drugs, but for extraditing another drug lord to the US

MEXICO CITY – The strange saga surrounding the arrest of two Mexican drug lords after landing on a plane in the United States in July has become even stranger.

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

Instead, Mexican prosecutors are charging the younger Guzmán with apparently kidnapping Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, an older drug lord from a rival faction of the cartel, forcing him onto a plane and flying him 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 with him as a reward to sweeten any possible confession.

In a statement, the federal prosecutor's office said that “an arrest warrant for kidnapping had been prepared” against the younger Guzmán.

However, another charge was also cited in an article of the Mexican penal code that defines his act as treason. This section of the law states that treason is committed by those “who illegally kidnap a person in Mexico with the intention of handing him over to the authorities of another country.”

The reason for this clause was apparently the kidnapping of a Mexican doctor who was wanted for his alleged involvement in the torture and killing of Drug Enforcement Administration officer Kiki Camarena in 1985.

Nowhere in the statement does it mention that the younger Guzmán was a member of the “little Chapos” faction of the Sinaloa cartel, which consists of Chapo’s sons and smuggles millions of doses of the deadly opioid fentanyl into the United States, causing about 70,000 overdose deaths each year.

The federal prosecutors' statement also included an unusually sharp and revealing description of evidence presented by prosecutors in the northern state of Sinaloa that has since been proven false.

Prosecutors in the state of Sinaloa apparently sought to distance the state's governor, Rubén Rocha, from the murder of his local political rival, Hector Cuén. Cuén was at a meeting that served as a pretext to lure Zambada to the scene of the kidnapping. Zambada has stated that he was expecting the governor at that meeting; Rocha has stated that he was traveling out of the country that day.

To downplay reports of the alleged meeting, prosecutors released video of an apparent shooting during an alleged 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 did not go so far as to claim that the gas station video was a fake, they previously pointed out that the number of shots heard on the video did not match the number of gunshot wounds on Cuén's body.

On Wednesday, federal prosecutors went further, saying the video was “unacceptable and did not have sufficient evidentiary value to be considered.”

Zambada has said that Guzmán, whom he trusted, invited him to the meeting to resolve the bitter political rivalry between Cuén and Rocha. Zambada was known for evading arrest for decades because he had an incredibly tight, loyal and sophisticated personal security apparatus.

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

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

The whole case was an embarrassment for the Mexican government, as it only learned later of the arrest of the two drug lords on US soil.

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 imprisoning drug cartel leaders, asking, “Why don't they change that policy?”