The Pandora’s Box That ‘El Mayo’ Could Open In Brooklyn

The U.S. Attorney’s Office added to its team a new prosecutor who in 2023 secured a plea deal for a Colombian drug lord to plead guilty and accept a 45-year prison sentence.

In November 2018, during the first hearing of the famous trial against Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán in federal court in Brooklyn, New York, the drug lord’s defense attorney made a reckless assertion: the real leader of the Sinaloa Cartel was Ismael El Mayo Zambada and he had been responsible for delivering bribes to two former Mexican presidents.

Three years later, in the trial initiated against the former Secretary of Security, Genaro García Luna, several collaborating witnesses and lawyers pointed out – before the same court and before the same judge, Brian Cogan – that the Sinaloa cartel, hand in hand with El Mayo, had been able to bribe the highest level authorities in Mexico, including the Army.

These were allegations that made the front pages of the newspapers, but remained in the air. However, the recent arrest of El Mayo and the decision of the U.S. Department of Justice to initiate proceedings against him in the Brooklyn court opens the door for him to respond to those accusations and for prosecutors to provide new information.

Something similar happened a few years ago when, in the trial initiated against El Chapo, testimonies and reports were revealed that implicated García Luna, who eventually ended up being criminally prosecuted. The case against El Mayo is the third chapter of the same story.

On August 7 of last year, the U.S. government informed the Brooklyn court that it would add to its team of prosecutors Francisco J. Navarro, an expert in drug trafficking and corruption-related prosecutions, who just last year succeeded in getting a Colombian drug lord to plead guilty and be sentenced to 45 years in prison.

Navarro’s appointment coincided with the news reported by several media outlets and confirmed by El Mayo’s lawyer, Frank Perez, that the drug lord will soon be transferred to Brooklyn to begin the criminal proceedings against him for the indictment filed before Judge Cogan.

MILENIO reported yesterday that in February of this year, the prosecution updated the charges against El Mayo for a total of 17 crimes, including money laundering in the amount of $14 billion dollars, as well as fentanyl production and trafficking. An indictment that surpasses El Chapo’s in terms of the number of crimes.

The loose ends

On November 13, 2018, during the opening arguments that kicked off the long-awaited trial against El Chapo Guzmán, his defense attorney Jeffrey Lichtman argued that the “real” leader of the Sinaloa Cartel was Ismael El Mayo Zambada, and it was he who coordinated the criminal group’s main operations.

And he noted that among those operations was the delivery of “hundreds of millions of dollars” in alleged bribes to then-President Enrique Peña Nieto and former President Felipe Calderón. That same day, Mexico’s presidential spokesperson and Calderón himself denied the allegations on his social networks.

The allegations were left in the air and El Chapo ended up being convicted. But what did move forward were the accusations made in that trial against the former head of security in Calderon’s government, Genaro Garcia Luna, who in 2022 was arrested and in early 2023 was subjected to his own trial.

In the development of this trial, Calderon’s name came up again after one of the prosecution’s witnesses, former Nayarit prosecutor Edgar Veytia, testified under oath that in 2011 the then governor of Nayarit, Ney Gonzalez, told him that President Calderon had instructed him to protect the operations of the Sinaloa cartel.

Following these accusations, and as happened previously, former President Calderon denied in his social networks having ordered such criminal protection.

In that same trial, another of the criminal witnesses that the prosecution presented as witnesses, Sergio Villarreal, alias El Grande, argued several times that the Sinaloa Cartel under the command of El Mayo and El Chapo had bribed all kinds of authorities and that it was “deeply colluded” with the Mexican Army through its various factions, including that of Mayo Zambada.

He even said that the Beltran Leyva faction, to which he belonged, leaked information to sources in the Mexican Army to arrest El Mayo’s brother, Jesus El Rey Zambada, but that it was the military who later betrayed them and allegedly “sold” the information to El Mayo.

Rey Zambada himself was a witness in this same trial and, among other things, testified that he not only gave bribes to García Luna but also to security authorities of the Mexico City government, during a period that corresponds to Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s term in office.

Cesar de Castro, García Luna’s lawyer, wanted to insist on this point during cross-examination, but the judge did not allow it. President López Obrador publicly reproached the litigant for having tried to tarnish the presidential investiture with that statement.

The two routes: trial or plea bargain

Once Zambada is arraigned in Brooklyn court and the charges against him are made official, he will have the opportunity to plead guilty or not guilty. 

If he chooses the latter, he will begin proceedings to prepare for his trial, which, given the complexity of the charges and evidence, could take several months or even more than a year.

From there, there are two routes for the drug lord. One is the one El Chapo and Genaro Garcia Luna have followed so far, which is to reject any agreement with U.S. prosecutors and try to win the trial before a jury. Neither has worked and both have ended up convicted.

The other route for El Mayo is to reach a plea bargain with U.S. prosecutors in exchange for a reduced or lesser sentence. This is the same route his son, Vicente Zambada Niebla, and brother, Jesus Zambada Garcia, opted for.

The prosecutor appointed this week to the case, Francisco J. Navarro, has proven experience in prosecutions of this nature. In August of last year, he led the team that secured a guilty plea in the same Brooklyn court from Colombian drug trafficker Dairo Antonio Úsuga David, alias Otoniel, former head of the Clan del Golfo criminal and paramilitary group.

The agreement was considered a success by the U.S. Department of Justice, as the drug trafficker accepted a 45-year prison sentence and a forfeiture payment of US$216 million.

Source: Milenio