'World's Most Wanted': Who is 'El Mayo', mastermind behind Sinaloa Cartel who has evaded arrest for 2 decades?
As the presumed head of Mexico's vast Sinaloa Cartel, Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada García is one of the most powerful narco-traffickers on the planet. But you wouldn't get that picture if you scrolled through his Wikipedia page, which seems devoid of any information of a man who is likely worth billions.
While the likes of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, his former partner at the Sinaloa Cartel, Pablo Escobar, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, and a number of other drug lords have earned infamy for their draconian and Machiavellian schemes to seize and maintain power, El Mayo has remained a ghost; a malicious influence who only operates from the shadows and is so feared, his lieutenants cannot even utter his real name.
"El Señor" is what he goes by to the umpteen Sicarios – the term used for hitmen who work for the cartel – under his command, as well as the hundreds, if not thousands, of U.S. federal agents who have attempted to capture him over the past two-and-a-half decades. But such is his paranoia or meticulousness if you choose to look at it that way, that the authorities don't have as much as a voice recording of him.
It is all by design, of course. The low profile has allowed him to successfully avoid jail and death, something his contemporaries cannot say for themselves. The few who know him say he is still a man of his roots – a humble ranchero from La Sierra who, despite his wealth, drives nothing more luxurious than a Ford truck.
He also ensures he has the support of locals in Sinaloa, as well as the other Mexican states where his cartel is trying to wrest control of drug operations, by displaying his philanthropic side. He builds churches, football fields, schools, hospitals, and more, buying loyalty and a vast network of informants in a way the police never could.
A combination of these factors has meant that, at the age of 71 or 72, he is still a free man. That he continues to elude capture is a source of great frustration for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), who have been trying to quell the influence of Mexican cartels in the US since the 'War on Drugs' unfolded in the 80s. They know Zambada's capture will be key to hurting the Sinaloa Cartel's operations, which is currently so vast it encompasses the largest supply of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, fentanyl and marijuana in the US, and is believed to be a driving force in the opioid epidemic that has devastated the country in the past decade.
The scale is global, too. According to an El Paso Times report, the cartel also controls seaports to get drugs and precursor chemicals shipped in from around the globe, employs labs and chemists to process them, engineers multimillion-dollar tunnels to smuggle their product, hires money launderers and front corporations to "clean" their money, and bribes corrupt cops and politicians to ensure the drugs do not meet roadblocks.
It's the last of those that likely sabotaged the last major attempt to apprehend Zambada on February 13, 2014. Acting off a tip, DEA agents and Mexican federal authorities raided a home in the Sinaloa Mountains with the belief that he would finally be captured. As with their previous attempts, they were ultimately left empty-handed, with the drug lord seemingly tipped off by someone in the chain of information.
And while it was always known that Zambada had paid off police officials and politicians, the true extent of it only became apparent when officials started targeting his brother, Reynaldo 'El Rey' Lambada, who was controlling the drug trafficking through Mexico City's international airport.
When officials cornered him at a home in the city's Linda Vista neighborhood on October 20, 2008, a fierce shootout followed, and during the ensuing chaos, it emerged that El Rey had called the Chief Research Officer of the country's anti-narcotics federal unit for help. In an audio recording of the call, the officer can be heard deferring to El Rey as "Sir" and promising to intervene on his behalf.
Any doubts remaining about Zambada's vast corrupting influence, and his unimaginable power, were erased during one of the darkest days in Mexico's history in October 2019. Having received actionable information about the whereabouts of Ovidio Guzmán Lopez, one of Guzmán's sons, in Culiacán, Mexican authorities had acted and pulled off what many felt at the time was a major coup.
But the celebrations were short-lived. Acting on the command of Zambada, as proven by footage uploaded by Sicarios in the city where they can be seen asking for El Señor's approval, masked cartel members unleashed a campaign of terror on the city. They set up roadblocks, prowled the streets with heavy gunfire machinery, indiscriminately shot at the police, and took over the city, demanding Ovidio's release.
Terrified that the violence would escalate further, Mexico's president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, ordered that Ovidio be freed, with footage from the ground in Culiacán showed police officers and the Army meeting with cartel members and shaking their hands. It proved what most had feared until that point, but had refused to believe: that Zambada was untouchable.
Zambada's story will now be the subject of an episode of Netflix's 'World's Most Wanted,' which will premiere on the streaming platform on August 5. A multimillion-dollar bounty on his head remains and is likely to go unclaimed.