Monterrey, Mexico – It was a dramatic fall for 2 high-ranking members of Mexico’s notorious Sinaloa cartel.
On July 25, the USA introduced it had arrested 76-year-old Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and 38-year-old Joaquin Guzman Lopez at a rural airport close to El Paso, Texas.
One was the cartel’s co-founder. The opposite was the son of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, one other co-founder within the drug-trafficking syndicate.
However whereas the US has hailed the arrests as a victory in its efforts to cease cross-border smuggling, specialists in Mexico concern what occurred could unleash a wave of instability, each by way of worldwide relations and native safety.
Two weeks later, a lot stays unclear. Even the circumstances surrounding the sudden arrests are shrouded in thriller.
Talking anonymously, US officers have advised journalists that Guzman Lopez lured Zambada onto a small propeller aircraft underneath the guise of inspecting clandestine airstrips in northern Mexico.
However, the officers defined, it was a lure: Guzman Lopez deliberate to give up to US officers and wished to deliver Zambada down with him.
Zambada’s legal professional, Frank Perez, has contested this account, alleging that Guzman Lopez as a substitute kidnapped his shopper. Perez additionally rejected hypothesis that Zambada willingly surrendered.
Each males have since pleaded not guilty to drug-trafficking costs in US court docket.
Whereas the circumstances that introduced Zambada to the US are unlikely to have any bearing on the legal costs he faces, Falko Ernst, a senior safety analyst on the Worldwide Disaster Group, mentioned the scenario may probably injury cross-border relations with Mexico.
The Mexican authorities, in spite of everything, voiced frustration on the shock nature of the arrests.
“That might very properly backfire by way of additional curbing belief between each nations, by way of collaborating on issues of safety,” Ernst mentioned. “We’ll see to what diploma Mexico will attempt to depart clear that they aren’t followers of this kind of factor changing into a normalcy.”
The cross-border relationship, Ernst added, is a crucial one to each nations. “Safety is just one pillar of a really advanced bilateral relationship that additionally consists of commerce, commerce, manufacturing, the vitality sector and migration, amongst different issues.”
Already, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and Rosa Icela Rodriguez, the nation’s safety secretary, have known as for the US to disclose the circumstances surrounding the arrests.
“You ask if it was a supply, if it was seize,” Icela Rodriguez said in an interplay with reporters through the president’s morning press convention on July 26. “That’s a part of the investigation and a part of the data that we might expect from the federal government of the USA.”
On August 2, Mexico’s Overseas Secretary Alicia Barcena additionally defined that she had requested her US counterpart, Antony Blinken, for an in depth report in regards to the aircraft that transported the drug traffickers, together with its takeoff location.
The arrests come at a pivotal second within the bilateral relations between the US and Mexico. The US is within the midst of a heated presidential race, and immigration is a high election subject.
Ernst identified that there’s a rising discourse in Washington, primarily amongst Republicans, that aggressive navy motion is required to confront the cartels and cease them from trafficking fentanyl and different medication.
Figures like former President Donald Trump have known as on the US to “wage war on the cartels”. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis even threatened to “send in the Coast Guard and the Navy” if Mexican ports weren’t secured.
“These extra hardline voices have been gathering steam,” Ernst mentioned.
All of the whereas, he added, bilateral relations have deteriorated, and there’s a rising sense that persistence is dwindling. “We’ve seen a stagnation and inertia in defining safety cooperation and safety coverage in Mexico.”
However the tensions following Zambada and Guzman Lopez’s arrests should not solely on the worldwide scale.
Andres Villarreal, a journalist based mostly in Culiacan, Sinaloa, warns the occasions of July 25 may intensify violence in particular areas of Mexico itself.
The journalist described an uneasy calm within the northwestern state of Sinaloa, because the arrests have put the inhabitants on edge. “It’s like that calm that occurs after a storm — or earlier than a storm,” he mentioned.
Within the months previous the arrests, Sinaloa had already skilled a sequence of upheavals in its eponymous cartel, Villarreal defined.
Federal forces had intensified their presence in sure areas, resulting in arrests, captures and even deaths amongst key members of the drug-trafficking organisation.
These assaults on the cartel’s hierarchy have heightened the uncertainty amongst residents who concern violent reprisals.
Iliana Padilla Reyes, a professor on the Nationwide Autonomous College of Mexico who has studied violence and peace-building in her dwelling state of Sinaloa, defined to Al Jazeera that the cartel operates inside a well-established construction, ruled by violence.
Key figures in each authorized and unlawful spheres dictate the foundations inside this method.
“This coverage of going after the heads of organised crime is what has precipitated these violent breaches of agreements, and that generates a variety of instability,” Padilla Reyes mentioned.
One potential consequence of those arrests, given the elimination of a key chief like Zambada, is a succession dispute.
The extent to which this might set off infighting amongst Sinaloa cartel factions stays unsure. Villarreal famous that, whereas hypothesis abounds, it’s seemingly the arrests will provoke important turbulence throughout the organisation and its broader ecosystem.
The journalist predicts the turmoil may have an effect on the drug “switch routes, what the enterprise itself represents, who it covers, who’s across the enterprise [and] the cells which might be scattered all through the nation”.
“As a result of we aren’t simply speaking in regards to the state of Sinaloa,” Villarreal mentioned, pointing to the worldwide community the cartel controls.
Ernst, the safety analyst, echoed that commentary. He believes the results of Zambada’s arrest will stretch throughout Mexico and past.
“The Sinaloa cartel has a presence in nearly all of Mexico’s states. So the ripples might be felt actually all through Mexico but in addition past Mexico, seeing how the Sinaloa cartel does have a presence in Central America, South America and different components of the world as properly,” he mentioned.
That instability, he defined, is one consequence of focusing on high-level drug lords with out confronting the entire cartel construction.
That strategy — often known as the “kingpin technique” — has lengthy been a cornerstone of the US’s so-called “warfare on medication”. The thought is that, by attacking the management, the remainder of the cartel is left in disarray.
However critics like Ernst mentioned the “kingpin technique” has not dismantled main drug-trafficking organisations in Mexico however has fairly fragmented them.
“This has actually left the nation with a really, very excessive variety of extremely violent feuds between a larger variety of smaller or medium-sized legal teams that emerged from splintering off from far greater and extra cohesive legal organisations,” mentioned Ernst.
He added that flashy arrests centered on big-name criminals usually engender a simplistic “good versus evil” narrative, obscuring the intricate nature of legal networks and their connections to the federal government.
“It’s politically handy to have the ability to focus and to sign out the stereotypical unhealthy guys and perpetuate that story of the omnipotent legal actor and cartel that exists independently from state energy, which isn’t the case,” Ernst defined.
Specialists like Ernst and Padilla had been adamant that the July arrests won’t disrupt the movement of narcotics into the US, irrespective of how vital Zambada and Guzman Lopez had been to Mexico’s drug commerce.
Padilla defined that earlier arrests of El Chapo and his different son Ovidio Guzman Lopez in 2023 additionally didn’t halt the manufacturing and trafficking of drugs like cocaine and fentanyl.
Villarreal went additional, quoting Zambada’s phrases from a 2010 interview with the late Mexican journalist Julio Scherer: “In the event that they catch me or kill me … nothing adjustments.”
“He himself establishes that nothing is definitely going to occur,” Villarreal defined.
Zambada could have been the Sinaloa cartel’s most up-to-date figurehead, however Villarreal believes his function as chief will simply be stuffed by one other.
“Proper now his identify is Ismael, and tomorrow he might be known as Andres, Juan, Francisco, no matter it might be. It is going to be somebody very comparable who will take management of the organisation.”