“The mountain is my home, my family, my protection, my land, the water I drink.” They are the words of top Sinaloa Cartel leader Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who was arrested in the United States on Thursday along with Joaquín Guzmán López, one of the sons of imprisoned drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera. In a 2010 interview in Sinaloa with the now-deceased Proceso magazine founder and journalist Julio Scherer, Zambada also said that he could be captured “at any moment, or never.
” Fourteen years later — and for the first time ever in his long criminal career — his time finally came. Zambada was born in 1948 in El Álamo, a town in the municipality of Culiacán, the capital of the state of Sinaloa. He was a poppy field worker and farmer before he began working for the Juárez Cartel in the 1980s.
Asked by Scherer how he first got involved in the world of drug trafficking, El Mayo simply — and repeatedly — responded “ nomás ,” or “I just did.” Toward the end of the ’80s, Zambada, Guzmán Loera and others formed the Sinaloa Cartel, also known as the Pacific Cartel. Over a period of decades, El Mayo, El Chapo and other Sinaloa Cartel members built a multi-billion-dollar empire on cocaine and heroin, among other drugs, as well as human trafficking.
A Sinaloa faction led (or formerly led) by Zambada is currently regarded as the top smuggler of fentanyl into the United States. In 2010, he told Proceso that he continued to work as.
