Co-founder of the Sinaloa cartel “El Mayo” on trial for international drug trafficking

Alleged co-founder of the Sinaloa cartel, Ismael Zambada Garcia, also known as El Mayo, was arraigned in New York City on Friday on charges of fentanyl trafficking and a number of related counts. Photo provided by the US Drug Enforcement Agency

The new charges, the fifth against the once powerful cartel boss, relate, according to prosecutors, to his “decades-long leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel, one of the most violent and powerful drug trafficking organizations in the world,” as well as the conspiracy to produce and distribute fentanyl.

A day after his transfer from the Western District of Texas, he appeared in court in Brooklyn and was ordered remanded in custody pending trial.

U.S. authorities allege that El Mayo and co-defendant Joaquin Guzman Loera, also known as El Chapo, jointly ran the cartel from their headquarters in Mexico from 1989 until El Chapo's arrest in 2016. The latter was convicted in New York in 2019 and sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years.

“El Mayo, the co-founder and leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, was indicted for overseeing a multi-billion dollar conspiracy to flood American communities with narcotics, including the deadly fentanyl,” said Attorney General Merrick Garland.

“We allege that El Mayo built and for decades directed the Sinaloa Cartel's network of manufacturers, assassins, traffickers and money launderers. This network is responsible for kidnappings and murders in the United States and Mexico and has imported lethal quantities of fentanyl, heroin, meth and cocaine into the United States.

“Now El Mayo joins the ranks of numerous other Sinaloa cartel leaders who have been charged in an American court for causing immeasurable harm to families and communities across the country,” Garland said.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the latest indictment against El Mayo reflects the “dedicated work of courageous Department of Homeland Security investigators and their federal partners” who are succeeding in “disrupting and dismantling drug trafficking around the world.”

According to prosecutors, El Mayo used a complex and multi-layered organization involving thousands of people in South and Central America, Mexico and the United States to distribute the cartel's drugs, generating billions of dollars in revenue that was laundered and sent back to Mexico.

He used groups of “sicarios,” or hitmen, to carry out kidnappings and murders on his orders in Mexico, the United States and elsewhere to protect his drug trafficking and to exact retribution on rivals and people suspected of working with the U.S. government, officials say.

By 2012, El Mayo had expanded the cartel's interests to include the production and distribution of fentanyl and was “responsible for the distribution of many thousands of kilograms of fentanyl into the United States,” prosecutors said.

He is also said to have expanded the power and influence of the Sinaloa cartel by bribing judges and politicians for millions of dollars each year and “regularly carrying out campaigns of brutal violence, including reprisal killings that are said to have been carried out on his orders just weeks before his arrest.”