That 09/09/09 they caught him, he made a call and García Luna let him go. El Mayo’ built his legend through narco ballads, pacts, bullets and bills. These are the following eight records of ‘El Padrino’.
El Mayo Zambada and the day Genaro García Luna had to release him
They say that Mario Ismael Zambada García is the god of drugs, that he controls every gram and every dollar; that he trafficked arms to Nicaragua for the CIA; that he built his empire in Los Angeles; that he is a distrustful and manipulative rancher, with ears and eyes even under the rocks; that even before hiding out in Durango he used to live on one of his ranches, on the way to El Salado, Sinaloa, where he drank cold Pacifico beers; that he is a DEA informant; that García Luna let him go free; that he financed presidential campaigns; or that diabetes and cancer are killing him. Even now there is no reliable version of how he ended up in jail. To paraphrase Juan Villoro, narcos have no resumes, just legends.
ONE. One airport, two traffickers and two hypotheses. The first, that Mario Ismael Zambada Garcia and Joaquin Guzman Lopez, the son of his compadre El Chapo, have turned themselves in to one of the US agencies. The second, that the kid has tricked the old trafficker and he has been kidnapped in Culiacan. Then, or rather before, rewinding, the pilot of the King Air plane reverses with the clumsiness one acquires when time turns. The aircraft leaves the runway of the Santa Teresa airport in Texas and flies in reverse because this story starts in the past.
TWO. El Mayo, El Padrino, La Cocina, El Señor del Sombrero, El MZ, La Señora, El Quinto Mes. These are some of the aliases that have been given to Mexico’s main drug distributor, who has more than ten dates of birth and at least five false names. To this day it isn’t known if he’s really 76 years old.
Not much is known about his father either: they say he is a merchant, that he is a farmer, there is also the version that he is a Cuban in exile. What is certain is that he was born in El Alamo, an ejido 17 kilometers south of Culiacan; that his mother is a teacher; that he is the fifth of six children (three women and three men); that the nickname El Mayo derives from the diminutive of his first name; and that he studied elementary school in a school in the Rafael Buelna neighborhood, where his family moved to in the mid-fifties, according to information from the weekly Ríodoce.
When Zambada is a teenager, his father dies. This forces him to change school for the sugarcane fields. He meets Rosario Niebla Cardoza, Chayito, three years older than him. They stop seeing each other while he works as a driver for a sugar mill. But when he turned 17, he kidnapped her and then married her. Then came the children: Vicente Zambada Niebla El Vicentillo (1975), as well as María Teresa, Miriam Patricia (1971), Mónica del Rosario (1980) and Modesta (1982).
Around this time, some accounts link him to two important heroin and marijuana traffickers: Lamberto Quintero and José Inés Calderón, both relatives of Rafael Caro Quintero and acquaintances of then Sinaloa governor Leopoldo Sánchez Celis, one of several narco-politicians identified by academics as Luis Astorga. However, historian Frederick Venables places Cuban trafficker Antonio Cruz Vazquez as El Mayo’s mentor.
El Mayo’ meets the heroin bosses
THREE. A former Cuban police captain and spy for the shadowy CIA, Cruz Vazquez lives in New York in the late sixties with a false birth certificate. That’s why he doesn’t get arrested: he gets busted for fighting, then for selling drugs and, in 1970, for bringing in 270 kilos of marijuana. Although Cruz is sentenced to five years in prison, he is released early, in 1973, “for good behavior” and “emotional instability”.
He then moved to Culiacán, where he met the heroin bosses. He not only had an economic relationship with the Zambada family: he married Modesta, El Mayo’s older sister. This is how the still young Ismael began to perform tasks for his brother-in-law: “packing the brown heroin in suitcases” and “hiding the drugs in car tires,” according to Venables. The arrest in 1976 of Alberto Sicilia Falcon, another Cuban trafficker, will help Zambada and his brother-in-law fill the gap in the trafficking machine, which has since been run by politicians, military and police, in complicity with U.S. authorities.
On September 30, 1976, the Mexican army, with gringo financing, officially launched Operation Condor, which was more of a simulated campaign against poppy and marijuana cultivation in the famous Golden Triangle, the mountain range shared by Chihuahua, Sinaloa and Durango. Unlike the previous failed operations – Plan Condor (1975) and Plan Canador (1976) – this time many traffickers leave the nest. But Zambada and Cruz decide to stay.
The narcocorrido that García Luna doesn’t want to hear
FOUR. The official version tells that on September 9, 2009 (09/09/09), at noon, a Bolivian evangelist pastor, José Marc Flores Pereira hijacked Aeromexico flight 576 that took off from Cancun, to alert the country of an earthquake. He used a ‘bomb’ made of two cans, earth and Christmas lights, according to Genaro García Luna, then Federal Secretary of Public Security during Felipe Calderón’s administration and main actor in the supposed rescue of passengers, now imprisoned in the United States.
However, Cachuy Rubio, a Sinaloan narcocorrido singer, tells me a parallel story that contradicts García Luna. In reality, El Mayo was on that plane that landed in Mexico City and they were trying to arrest him. “At that time, some people who worked with ‘señor’ [Zambada] gave me a corrido for us to record in the studio. It’s called Se quedaron con las ganas,” Rubio said via WhatsApp.
“He told me that it was authorized by ‘señor’, that he wanted to give it to him as a gift and we recorded it for him. Rubio put it to music, added a fistful of heroism and included the song in one of his albums. “The lyrics are very direct: through an informant, García Luna knew that ‘el señor’ was traveling on that plane and wanted to stop him to show off,” he says. “But the gentleman made some calls and García Luna had to release him against his will.” The U.S. authorities then offered a reward of 10 million dollars for his head.
“It was a mega operation installed by the Sedena,
700 elements in that air terminal,
For the report of a snitch that wanted to win some money,
The report was correct, a man in his fifties.
And of very notorious importance, fair skinned and very well preserved,
Who was the boss of bosses with the nickname of Mayo.
Genaro García Luna was already taking it for granted,
They divided the money before milking the cow,
They returned the promotions, they were left wanting more”.
Flores Pereira was declared unimpeachable for “mental health. But he was released in 2014 and gave interviews to talk about the end of the world. He has not been heard from since.
This is how the legend of the drug god begins
FIVE. Zambada moves to Los Angeles in 1977, apparently his brother-in-law Cruz recruits him to operate the heroin trafficking network. That is: to send by air ‘the product’ to Tucson and to store ‘the chiva’ in Las Vegas, before selling it in New York and New Jersey. He was in Los Angeles when he learned of the murder of the trafficker Pedro Aviles, by orders of the DEA, the agency conceived by Richard Nixon to found and control criminal organizations, which they baptize as cartels. This is the case with the organizations of Caro Quintero, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, Manuel Salcido and other Sinaloa bosses that the agency calls the Guadalajara Cartel. According to the late José Alfredo Andrade Bojorges, former lawyer of Amado Carrillo, the creation of the cartel was possible thanks to the protection of the highest officials of the time, among them, General Francisco Amaya Rodríguez, the governor of Jalisco, Flavio Romero; or the director of the Federal Security Directorate (DFS), Javier García Paniagua.
SIX. Cruz develops a gambling addiction to Caesars Palace: losses of almost three million dollars speak of his compulsive gambling. Partying and bad decisions take their toll on him on January 28, 1978: he and his driver are arrested for heroin trafficking. The article “A smuggler’s last bet”, published on November 7, 1978 in the Washington Post, tells how he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for trafficking nearly 270 kilos of heroin. In his absence, El Mayo takes over the business.
According to El Extraditado, a book by journalist Juan Carlos Reyna, in those years Zambada met Benjamín Arellano Félix, another Mexican trafficker living in Los Angeles, with whom he formed a confidant. In 1982, the compadres moved with their families to Tijuana (including El MZ’s second wife, Leticia Ortiz, with whom he has Serafin and Teresa). They were together, but weren’t united. El Mayo and Benjamin traffic several tons of cocaine, the drug that has overtaken marijuana and heroin. Some kilos are crossed through the border with impunity, others are smuggled through airports, after bribes, and many, many more kilos are trafficked through tunnels that start in houses in Tijuana and exit in warehouses in San Ysidro.
Jesús El Rey Zambada told in his testimony before a gringo court that such is the amount of cocaine that his brother moves, that Felix Gallardo asks him for help to save his empire, at risk after the arrest of Caro Quintero and Fonseca Carrillo for the kidnapping and murder of DEA agent Enrique Camarena in 1985. This help to Gallardo makes El Mayo not only the principal cocaine buyer for the Rodriguez Orejuela brothers. He is also Pablo Escobar’s biggest Mexican client. And it is here, right here, where the legend of the drug god begins.
Rivals who declared war on ‘Mayo’ Zambada
El Mayo and El Chapo had a bloody feud with the Arellano Felix brothers.
SEVEN. Unlike other profligate traffickers, El Mayo invests in agriculture and cattle ranching to launder his profits. So he founded the Nueva Industria de Ganaderos de Culiacán in 1988, according to information to be released by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2007. More businesses would follow: dairies, a kindergarten, a water park, money exchange houses…. With legal businesses, however, rivalries also appear.
In 1989, according to journalist Jesus Blancornelas, in the middle of Zambada’s birthday celebration in Tijuana, one of the Arellano brothers, Ramon — the most violent of all time — murdered Armando El Rayo Lopez, a friend of Joaquin El Chapo Guzman, a trafficker on the rise with whom El Mayo had a certain friendship. That same year, after Gallardo’s arrest, Zambada was left in control of Sinaloa in a distribution of territories made by the government itself. Amado Carrillo, Chapo’s boss, summons them to the then Federal District and they agree that Ramon has to be killed because he has broken the rules, according to the diary written by El Vicentillo, published by journalist Anabel Hernandez in 2019.
But who El Chapo Guzmán and his gunmen try to kill in 1990 is Benjamín, the other brother, while driving through the streets of Tijuana. “Get down, compadre!” he reaches to pull Zambada, who is riding shotgun. For two years, the Arellanos and El Chapo will try to assassinate each other so many times with failed car bombs that they will end up sounding cartoonish. In Vicentillo’s diary, we read that his father manages to make peace with Benjamin, who not only demands loyalty.
Also, that he pay him more than $20 million that he owes him as “right to operate,” which Zambada refuses, as he had already worked his routes.
EIGHT. In the fall of 1992, according to repeated press accounts, Zambada invites Benjamín Arellano to Puerto Vallarta to celebrate his 40th birthday. According to Reyna’s book, it is Benjamín who “plans to take a vacation” and who “shares his itinerary. El Mayo lends his plane for Benjamin’s second wife and two children, who flies alone, in a private plane. His brothers Ramon, Pancho, Carlos and Javier, who is nicknamed El Tigrillo and who grew up playing with El Vicentillo, arrive separately, with hitmen included.
Once they are distributed in different hotels and farms, Benjamin talks to Zambada. He apologizes for not attending the celebratory dinner at Carlos O’Brians restaurant. “I had a jale,” he told him. After dinner, Benjamín asks his brother Pancho to take him back to where he is staying, but not before ordering his other brothers to go to sleep, but why the hell would they listen to him?
At about 1 a.m., an uneasy Benjamin asks his escorts to look for his brothers. Nothing. Soon after, a Tigrillo gunman appears and says that they have all been killed by more than 200 hired killers, dressed as soldiers. In reality, there have been 40 gunmen brought by El Chapo and Hector El Guero Palma from Nayarit, who broke into Christine, a disco inside the Krystal Hotel. And they have sent them, with Zambada’s endorsement, to assassinate Ramon. The only thing the thugs have achieved, however, is the retention of Tigrillo. Benjamin communicates with El Mayo and Carrillo. “If El Chapo’s people do anything to my brother, I’m going to be very angry,” he warns them. Before dawn, the youngest Arellano is released in Tepic.
Benjamin responds with a car bomb that explodes outside the house of Leticia, Zambada’s second wife, while they celebrate Serafin’s second birthday. From this point on, the war will have no turning point.
Many years later, El Mayo will hear his compadre El Chapo, his son El Vicentillo and other witnesses at the Brooklyn trial (2018, 2019) testify that he, El Jefe de Jefe, “is the real leader of the Sinaloa Cartel.
And as you read this, it is likely that Ismael Zambada Sicairos, El Mayito Flaco, is already in charge of the operations of the main criminal organization.
Source: Milenio
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