A United States federal court has sentenced drug trafficker Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, to life imprisonment after pleading guilty last year to charges related to drug trafficking and organized crime as part of a deal to avoid the death penalty.
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“Ismael Zambada García spent nearly four decades poisoning American communities to earn billions of dollars in profits and ordering the murder of anyone who stood in his way. Today, that chapter is definitively closed,” said the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Joseph Nocella.
This sentence, he assured, was made possible “thanks to the tireless bilateral cooperation between law enforcement agencies of the United States and Mexico.” “We hope that today’s sentence brings some justice to the countless victims of drug trafficking and violence of the Sinaloa Cartel,” he said, according to a statement released by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Federal Judge Brian Cogan read the sentence at a hearing held this Monday before the federal court in Brooklyn, the same court where Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán—his predecessor at the head of the Sinaloa Cartel—was sentenced to life imprisonment on drug trafficking charges.
Zambada pleaded guilty to leading a criminal enterprise for activities between January 1989 and January 2024, as well as participating in conspiracies for money laundering, murder, and drug trafficking, and for violations of state laws related to homicide and kidnapping, for acts occurring between January 1, 2000, and April 11, 2012.
The former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel faced formal charges in six different federal jurisdictions in the United States, although under the plea agreement he consented to transfer the case to the Eastern District Court of New York.
Zambada was arrested on July 25, 2024, at an airport in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, near El Paso, after arriving on a private plane with Joaquín Guzmán López, son of the capo Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who had a deal with U.S. authorities and was the one who handed him over.
The drug trafficker stated in a letter in August 2025 that he was “kidnapped” by Guzmán, who handed him over against his own will to the United States. The alleged kidnapping reportedly began when he was deceived into attending a meeting at a ranch on the outskirts of the city of Culiacán where he was supposedly going to settle differences between local politicians.
After being personally received by “El Chapo’s” son, he explained that they made him enter a “dark room” where he was immediately “ambushed” by a group of men who put a hood over his head after beating him and handcuffed him onto the plane where, accompanied by Joaquín Guzmán, he ended up being handed over to U.S. authorities in El Paso (Texas).
Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, recently stated that Washington’s “alleged involvement” in the arrest of “El Mayo” Zambada caused conflicts within the Sinaloa Cartel, with betrayals and internal divisions that generated waves of violence in the Latin American country. The Mexican Prosecutor’s Office is investigating how that betrayal was orchestrated.
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