MEXICO CITY, July 27, (AP): A new era is coming for Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa cartel in the wake of the capture by US authorities of Ismael "El Mayo” Zambada, the last of the grand old Mexican drug traffickers.
Experts believe his arrest will usher in a new wave of violence in Mexico even as Zambada could potentially provide loads of information for US prosecutors.
Zambada, who had eluded authorities for decades and had never set foot in prison, was known for being an astute operator, skilled at corrupting officials and having an ability to negotiate with everyone, including rivals.
Removing him from the criminal landscape could set off an internal war for control of the cartel that has a global reach - as has occurred with the arrest or killings of other kingpins - and open the door to the more violent inclinations of a younger generation of Sinaloa traffickers, experts say.
With that in mind, the Mexican government deployed 200 members of its special forces Friday to Culiacan, Sinaloa state’s capital.
There is "significant potential for high escalation of violence across Mexico," said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow in the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Brookings Institution. That "is bad for Mexico, it's bad for the United States, as well as the possibility that the even more vicious (Jalisco New Generation cartel) will rise to even greater importance."
For that reason, Zambada’s arrest could be considered a "great tactical success,” but strategically problematic, Felbab-Brown said.
While details remain scarce, a United States official who spoke on condition of anonymity said Zambada was tricked into flying to the US, where he was arrested along with Joaquín Guzmán López, a son of the infamous Sinaloa leader Joaquín "El Chapo” Guzmán. The elder Guzmán is serving a life sentence in the United States.
A small plane left Hermosillo in northern Mexico on Thursday morning with only an American pilot aboard, bound for the airport in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, near El Paso, Texas. Mexican Security Secretary Rosa Icela Rodríguez said Friday that while one person left Hermosillo, three people arrived in New Mexico.
The flight tracking site Flight Aware showed the plane stopped transmitting its elevation and speed for about half an hour over the mountains of northern Mexico before resuming its course to the US.