By EFE
26 Jul 2024, 19:54 PM EDT
Mexican drug lord Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, arrested Thursday in El Paso, Texas, in one of the biggest drug busts in decades, faces at least four legal cases in different US courts with sentences that could leave him behind bars for the rest of his life.
That’s what the indictments against the Sinaloa Cartel co-founder say, filed in Texas, New York, the District of Columbia and California. All of the cases could be consolidated into one at the federal level.
Texas
In Texas, Zambada is one of 24 drug lords charged with 38 crimes in 2012. The suspect appeared before a judge on Friday where he pleaded not guilty.
Prosecutors accuse Zambada and Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who is serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison, of leading the Sinaloa Cartel and engaging in cocaine trafficking, money laundering, kidnappings and murders.
The indictment accuses him of being “responsible” for the “importation and distribution of thousands of kilos of cocaine and marijuana” to the United States between 2000 and 2012 through various transportation routes that included the international bridge between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso.
It also holds Zambada and El Chapo responsible for the 2009 murder of American drug trafficker Sergio Saucedo, who was kidnapped in Texas and taken to Mexico, where he was mutilated for losing a shipment of marijuana.
NY
Last February, prosecutors updated the charges against Zambada in a court in the Eastern District of New York, where he is charged with 17 drug trafficking offenses.
The US justice system accuses him of leading the Sinaloa Cartel, an organisation through which he has trafficked several tons of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines and marijuana, and has earned billions of dollars from this business.
It is also the only case against him that includes a new charge that the Justice Department is highlighting for its impact: trafficking in fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid that has generated a serious crisis of overdose deaths in the United States and has become the focus of the authorities’ anti-drug policy.
He also accuses Zambada of having hired hitmen who have committed “hundreds of violent acts” to strengthen his power within the organization and punish disloyalties and failures.
D.C.
In 2002, he was charged with drug trafficking in a District of Columbia court along with one of his sons, Vicente Zambada Niebla, known as El Vicentillo, and his former right-hand man Javier Torres Félix.
Since 1992, according to the report signed by prosecutor Patrick Hearn, the defendants had conspired to import “five kilograms or more of a mixture containing cocaine” and “manufacture and distribute five kilograms or more” of said mixture “with the intention and knowledge” that it would be distributed illegally in the United States.
The document also mentions violations of the law for complicity and confiscation and describes the collaboration between the Sinaloa Cartel and Colombian drug traffickers who supplied tons of cocaine by boat to Mexican traffickers until the end of 1997.
California
Since 2014, he has been charged with four counts in a California court along with two of his sons: Ismael Zambada Sicairos, known as Mayito Flaco, who has never been arrested, and Ismael Zambada Imperial, known as El Mayito Gordo, who was extradited to the United States in 2019 and released in 2022.
Since 2005, Mayo “deliberately participated in a criminal enterprise to violate” drug trafficking laws, then-prosecutor Laura Duffy said in her brief.
The co-founder of the Sinaloa Cartel is alleged to have conspired to traffic or distribute in the United States more than 150 kilos of cocaine, more than 100 kilos of marijuana, more than one kilo of heroin and more than 500 grams of methamphetamine.
Keep reading:
• “El Mayo” Zambada pleads “not guilty” to drug trafficking in Texas
• Father and teenage son “drug dealers” charged in New Jersey: 3 dead from cocaine overdose with fentanyl
• The betrayal that led to the capture of El Mayo Zambada and El Chapo’s son in Texas