After more than four decades leading international drug trafficking networks, Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada declared himself guilty of two of the main positions that weighed on him in a federal court in New York, which implies the final fall of the brain in the shadow of the Sinaloa cartel.
Zambada (El Alamo, 75 years) was born and grew in Sinaloa, a state that, together with Durango and Chihuahua, forms the so -called golden triangle, a region of steep and fertile lands that, for more than half a century, has been the epicenter of the production of poppy and marijuana in Mexico.
The May, who has always been considered “one more peasant”, was consecrated as a key figure of drug trafficking worldwide, operating from the underground of its multiple shelters in the mountains of the Mexican Northwest.
“The mountain is my house, my family, my protection, my land, the water I drink,” he told the magazine Process who, for many researchers, was the true leader of the Sinaloa cartel.
Coming from a family of farmers and a father orphan from the age of 12, Zambada began working as a child in the countryside and as Lavacoches, at a time -among the sixties and seventy -seventy -in which the mining industry began to decline in Sinaloa. In 1969 he made the jump to drug trafficking, the business that would mark and define the course of his life for the next 56 years.
Forged in the semi -arid climate of the Sinaloa mountains, between cattle and plantations, May always adopted a low profile that hindered its capture by Mexican and American authorities for more than four decades.
Soser context: Ismael ‘May’ Zambada declares himself guilty in the United States
If other figures such as ‘El Chapo’ roamed their luxury farms, high -end cars, or even connecting with Hollywood stars or fashion artists who were in charge of ‘narcocorridos’ in their honor, Zambada preferred to remain in anonymity.
The impulse of the DEA and the plastic surgeries
The surname Zambada first appeared in American judicial files in 1977, with the arrest of his brother -in -law, the Cuban Antonio Cruz, who introduced him to the world of drug trafficking and with which he began collaborating by moving cocaine between Miami or Los Angeles and border states on Mexican soil.
They were the operations of the DEA -in articulating its decisive blows against the powerful Guadalajara poster in the late 1980s that finally promoted the promotion of El Mayo.
The May, who began to monopolize even more headlines after the first arrest of El Chapo in 1993, retreated in the mountains surrounded by a men’s checkpoint and a narrow circle of trust. In addition, he chose to occasionally submit plastic surgeries to become unrecognizable every time he left his lairies in Sinaloa.
By then he had already allied with Guzmán Loera, Héctor ‘El Güero’ Palma and the Beltrán Leyva brothers to found the Sinaloa cartel.
“De (Pancho) Villa said the same, that he was a terrorist … now the United States will tell us terrorists, and with that justification they will then want to put a bomb,” Mayo told Mexican journalist Diego Enrique Osorno in 2021. It was the second and last interview of his life to date.
That year, EU promised to reward with 15 million dollars who would provide sensitive information that led to the capture of the ‘capo’.
Informate: Sheinbaum says there is no concern for what ‘May’ Zambada declared in the US
Since the recapture and subsequent extradition of El Chapo (2016-2017), he served as a supreme leader of the Sinaloa cartel, but at the same time he accumulated coup after the coup of the authorities in his family and criminal structure.
“Panic” to EU prisons and suicide risk
“I can no longer talk to him, I cry for him,” he confessed in the 2010 interview, after the arrest, a year before, his son Vicente Zambada Niebla, ‘El Vicentillo’, who would later be extradited to the United States, would declare himself guilty and end up testifying in the trial against El Chapo.
The times have changed – and much – in the Sinaloa poster since May was delivered to the US authorities, after landing on a track near Texas aboard a plane. Everything indicates that it was a betrayal orchestrated by Joaquín Guzmán López, son of El Chapo, who also traveled in the aircraft.
Zambada, who also in 2010 admitted that he had “panic” in the face of the idea of being locked in the US and did not rule out suicide, he has finally declared himself guilty today, but already in that interview he warned: “If they catch me or kill me, nothing changes (…) the drug is in society, rooted as corruption.”
With EFE information.
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