The InSight Take: After El Mayo’s Sentencing, is the Godfather Era of the Sinaloa Cartel Over?

Deborah: [00:00:00] A federal judge in Brooklyn just sentenced Ismael Zambada Garcia, also known as El Mayo, to life in prison without the possibility of parole, closing the legal chapter on one of the longest criminal careers in the history of the Mexican underworld. Prosecutors called him the most prolific drug trafficker in modern history, and his sentence really does close an era in Mexican organized crime that, in many ways, is already a thing of the past.

Deborah: [00:00:28] I’m Deborah Bonello, managing editor of InSight Crime, and I’m joined this week by Victoria Dittmar, who’s covered the Sinaloa Cartel and its factions closely for us. Victoria, thanks for joining me.

Victoria: [00:00:40] Thanks for having me, Deb.

Deborah: [00:00:41] So let’s start with what actually happened in the courtroom yesterday. Vic, walk us through it.

SEE ALSO: The Sinaloa Cartel Profile

Victoria: [00:00:46] Yes. So El Mayo had actually already pleaded guilty back in August 2025 to being the principal leader of a continuing criminal enterprise in the Eastern District of New York, where he was eventually sentenced, and he had already also pleaded guilty to a RICO charge. Rico is, of course, this law in the United States that targets organized crime, that was covered under the Western District of Texas, but was transferred to Brooklyn for the plea deal and the sentencing purposes. So yesterday, Judge Brian Cogan, who also handled the case of El Chapo, handed down the sentence, which, as you mentioned, carried, life without parole, a $15 billion forfeiture figure, which was already built into the plea deal agreement.

[00:01:37] And it’s notable, I think, how much ground these two charges cover, because the count in New York addressed his role in the Sinaloa Cartel all the way back to January 1989 through January 2024, so a bit before he was arrested, which is essentially his entire criminal career. And then the Texas count covered another window, but still a long time, which was from 2000 to 2012 and was specifically aimed at money laundering, murder, kidnapping, and other drug conspiracies.

Deborah: [00:02:12] Right. And that wasn’t the only case hanging over him, right? The Justice Department’s release also mentions he was facing, I think, indictments in six other federal jurisdictions or six federal jurisdictions in total.

Victoria: [00:02:26] Yes. Right. So New York and Texas were the two he answered for. But there were open indictments in the District of Columbia, which, for example, dated back to 2003. He also had an indictment in Illinois, Southern California, and Central California. And under the plea deal, the Texas case was folded into the New York case again for sentencing purposes. And in the press release that the Department of Justice put out yesterday, they said that the remaining remaining indictments would be formally dismissed in the coming days. So, yes, yesterday there was the closing of one case, but it was also the closing of every open thread that the United States government had on El Mayo all at once.

SEE ALSO: Criminal Profile of Ismael Zambada Garcia, alias “El Mayo.”

Deborah: [00:03:12] Right. And as you said, the case went back to as early as 1989, which is when the earliest charges against him start. So tell us a little bit about his story and where it begins.

Victoria: [00:03:26] Yes. So formally speaking, or at least when we link him to the Sinaloa Cartel, that starts in the late 1980s. He probably had links to the drug trade, to some extent, even before that. But in the late 1980s is when he co-founded what became to be known as the Sinaloa Cartel, alongside Joaquin El Chapo Guzman and the Sinaloa-based traffickers, out of what had previously been known as “the Federation” in the Mexican underworld, which encompassed all major family-based trafficking organizations that operated essentially in western Mexico and also along the US-Mexico border, which included other organizations, for example, the Juarez cartel and the Tijuana Cartel.

Victoria: [00:04:13] So when they broke apart, the Sinaloa Cartel became its own organization. Even though it was no longer called the Federation, it largely continued to operate as a federation. Right. I think we tend to think of the Sinaloa Cartel as this very vertical organization with clear leaders. But really, we have found over the years that it is more an umbrella term for various factions, often based on family clans, family ties that are involved in the drug trade in the state of Sinaloa. Some of these family ties have accumulated much more resources and more considerable social and political influence, such as El Mayo’s faction, also El Chapo’s faction, and they kind of became the protectors and those who also offered resources to smaller factions.

Victoria: [00:05:07] And these factions, they built networks and contacts all across the continent. Right. First of all, they were major players in Mexico’s marijuana and heroin production, which kind of propelled them into the organizations they are today. And later, of course, they were also involved in methamphetamine and fentanyl production. And since the 80s, they have also been key players in the cocaine trade to the United States. Right. They have consistently sent emissaries to Colombia, more recently to Ecuador and Venezuela, to secure cocaine supplies, and more recently with the synthetic drug trade, they have also made established contacts with suppliers of precursor chemicals in Asia to keep synthetic drug production running, right?

Victoria: [00:05:56] So yes, we tend to think of these organizations as global, but the reality is that these different factions have been able to establish these contacts and create these networks to cover that much ground. So in other words, El Mayo was a very powerful figure within the Sinaloa cartel. He headed one of the most influential factions, which is now known as the Mayiza, which is a reference to El Mayo’s nickname or alias, and was therefore, of course, highly significant.

Deborah: [00:06:31] Right. And as you were saying, you know, they’re active in cocaine trafficking as well as methamphetamine and synthetic drug production, which, as we’ve documented in detail, is a highly layered and disparate trade where you’re sourcing, especially in the case of synthetics precursors from all over the world. So this does really go beyond just a drug business, right? This is a pretty sort of sophisticated infrastructure that we’re talking about.

Victoria: [00:07:04] Yes. Agreed. And I think the best way to understand this is to, again, understand the Sinaloa cartel as a network rather than a top-down monolithic organization. Right? Yes, El Mayo had a very influential role, and he possibly had the final say in a lot of the decision-making around the different criminal businesses in which his faction was involved. But his faction had thousands of contacts across the continent from suppliers, transportation networks in Central America, for example, different brokers that allowed them access to the private sector, both for money laundering but also to acquire precursor chemicals. They established contacts with clients in the United States, which bought their product at a wholesale level. They subcontracted armed wings, of course, had political connections, and a lot of these different contacts operated semi-independently. Some of them were, you know, of course, their own organization. Some of them may have been contacts that were shared with other factions of the Sinaloa cartel, like El Chapo’s network. But others may have been exclusive to El Mayo. Right. So it’s a very complex and layered network, as you mentioned, Deb. 

Victoria: [00:08:18] And I think, of course, the interesting part here is that that infrastructure is specifically built to outlast any one person’s arrest. Right? And we saw that when El Chapo went down in 2016, when he was finally arrested after many attempts, and he was eventually extradited to the United States. That virtually did not affect El Mayo’s business, right? It presumably stayed unaffected. Even after El Mayo was captured, his faction is now run by his son and by other relatives as well. Right. So that networked, layered infrastructure makes these organizations to be much more resilient to these arrests.

Deborah: [00:09:04] Right. And I dare say the capture, or the third arrest of El Chapo was very storied, right? And by the time that he was eventually arrested and extradited, there probably few people in the world who hadn’t heard of him. And I don’t think that could be said about El Mayo. I don’t think he was sort of a household name in the way that El Chapo was, which kind of relates to how he ran the cartel. And that’s where his style sort of diverged pretty sharply from El Chapo’s.

SEE ALSO: Joaquín Guzmán Loera, alias ‘El Chapo’

Victoria: [00:09:34] Yes. I mean, I think El Chapo and El Mayo are similar to some extent. And, and to another extent, they’re completely different. Right. So on one hand, they come from similar backgrounds. They come from this generation of drug traffickers that are campesinos or farmers, where a lot of their criminal careers was based in the rural areas in this case, of what is known as the Golden Triangle, which are municipalities that connect Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua, epicenters for the poppy trade and for the marijuana trade. And since a lot of the business, at least at the beginning, was based on these plant-based drugs, they needed the support from local communities to work the fields, to offer them protection, to tip them off when there was an army operation. And in turn, they were also seen as kind of like providers of economic bonanza, right, in certain areas. So they cultivated this Robin Hood meets the Godfather image. for instance, in one of our recent field trips to Sinaloa, it’s been a couple of years of years now because it was right after El Mayo was arrested, we were interviewing a synthetic drug trafficker and producer who lived in a rural area still in close to Culiacán, so to the capital of Sinaloa, but he pretty much operated in a rural area. And the image he had of El Mayo was very positive because at some point he had helped pay for his father’s hospital bills. And he referred to him consistently as El Senor El Senor, like “the man.” And when we think of El Chapo, he had a similar role in that regard. And he had a similar admiration or acceptance from local communities. We even saw that after one of his arrests, there was a march in one of the cities in Sinaloa to demand his release. So in that sense, I think they’re very similar.

Victoria: [00:11:36] But on the other, as you say, El Chapo became maybe unintentionally a very visible figure at a global level. And I think that had to do with the different things that happened in his life that made it very Hollywood-style. Right. The prison escapes, the tunnels he built. He was interviewed by Sean Penn and by Kate del Castillo. He was featured in Forbes. So the narco culture that grew around him was huge, and as you mentioned, I think many people around the world knew who he was. And they came to see him as the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, even though in reality, these power dynamics are much more distributed.

Victoria: [00:12:19] El Mayo never cultivated that. He always kept a lower profile. He was never arrested before. And I think, yeah, part of that had to do with that protection he enjoyed or this connection he had to local communities, and kind of this approach of keeping a lower profile as opposed to becoming this very famous figure.

Deborah: [00:12:44] As something that, you know, the last time I was in Sinaloa too, which was also a couple of years ago, people differentiated between El Mayo and El Chapo’s generation of drug traffickers who were respected in the community, as, you know, respected as well as feared. Whereas the Chapitos and the younger generation of traffickers are simply feared rather than respected, which I think is a pretty key difference. And I also think that one of the reasons Mayo did enjoy that sort of low profile was because he did lean heavily into corrupting the Mexican state. Right?

Victoria: [00:13:27] Yes, completely. I think that’s also, I mean, paired with the social legitimacy and connection to communities. I think that couldn’t have happened without those connections. And we see that laid out across the different court filings against him and against his allies, where we get this idea that he did, or his faction, spent millions of dollars every year on corruption payments, on buying protection at every level. More recently we had the case of now the former governor of Sinaloa, Rocha Moya. He was linked to the, Chapitos but I think his case is probably still illustrative of how this protection of organized crime works in Sinaloa, which is maybe similar to what El Mayo enjoyed, which goes from police escorting drug shipments to officials tipping them off when a military operation is about to happen. We also had a lot of that information during El Chapo’s trial, and even in the case in the United States against Genaro Garcia Luna, which was Mexico’s former top security official during the Calderon government.

Victoria: [00:14:37] So all of that gives us an image of corruption is part of the infrastructure. It’s not just bribing. It’s not just an occasional expense. It’s part of how they operate, and it’s, you know, we’re talking about corrupt officials, but also sometimes compromised officials, right? Especially those at the lower levels, as you mentioned, they’re respected and feared as well. So violence also plays an important part in how they they guarantee that protection from both the communities and from political or official figures.

SEE ALSO: Special Series: The Sinaloa Cartel’s Internal War

Deborah: [00:15:12] Right. I mean, talk to us a bit about the violence because even though there was this corruption and that helped protect him and enabled him a certain level of control, the violence has been very real during his reign. ATalk to us about that and a little bit about the in inner conflict we’ve seen erupt in Sinaloa since he was arrested in in July 2024.

Victoria: [00:15:40] Yeah, I think violence has always been very real despite this image that people have about figures like Mayo. Right. Obviously violence is part of organized crime. It’s part of how the drug trade works. In the case of El Mayo, he had relied heavily on armed wings. The most famous ones are the Rusos and the Anthrax, which are also, especially the Anthrax are also based on family ties to El Mayo. And they operated in Sinaloa and Sonora, Baja California to secure all that corridor to the US-Mexico border.

Victoria: [00:16:20] So kidnappings, murders, more recently forced disappearances as well have become part of the modus operandi, right. Or have always been. More recently, forced disappearances have become more common than murders, but in general, violence is part of how they eliminate threats, of how they deal with rivals or even how they discipline internally their own members. So since he was arrested, we have of course seen that violence reach historic levels, right, but even before that, we had already seen how different armed wings, even working for different factions of the Sinaloa Cartel, were continuously fighting each other. So it’s very interesting because we see the war now between the Chaptios and the Mayiza, but if we go back to 2019, 2020, armed wings linked to the Chapitos were already heavily fighting armed wings linked to the Mayiza, especially around the US-Mexico border, because they had different interests. So that also speaks to you about that fragmentation, I guess, of how we don’t understand these organizations as monolithic, but they have different interests. They may work together at some point, but they may be very violent with each other in other points.

Deborah: [00:17:38] Right. And we have, like I said, seen more violence since his arrest, and there doesn’t really seem to be an end right now to the conflict in Sinaloa. What do you think his sentencing means for organized crime in Mexico moving forward?

Victoria: [00:17:58] I mean, the sentencing symbolically is, I think, the end of an era, as you were mentioning at the beginning. El Mayo represented this generation of traffickers who came from rural backgrounds, who had all this mystique around them. That seems to be over, right, that in symbolic terms. Then in more practical terms, the arrest, of course, as we’ve said, has led Sinaloa to arguably one of its most violent wars that is still going on today. That has had tremendous consequences for the local population, but the war is not necessarily the result of the arrest itself or the sentence or in this case, the sentencing. Right. It is the result of all the consequences and circumstances that surrounded that. If we go back to July 2024, when Mayo was arrested, of course, he was, or at least from what we’ve heard in the different cases that are going on right now, with the Chapitos and the Mayiza in the US, Joaquin Guzman, which is one of El Chapo’s sons, he admitted tricking El Mayo, kidnaping him, putting him on a plane and handing him over to US authorities, right, so that was seen as a major betrayal, and it was a culmination of all the different tensions between both factions that had been brewing for many years. As I mentioned at the beginning, there had been fighting already in other parts of the country.

Victoria: [00:19:26] And also some of El Mayo’s sons had testified against El Chapo in previous years, so tension was already brewing and growing. So that war again, it’s not the first war we see in Sinaloa. It’s not the first war we see within the Sinaloa cartel. But it is possibly one of the most significant because it has been going on for so long, and it doesn’t seem to be an end in sight. I don’t think the sentencing itself would change those dynamics. And I also don’t think it’s going to disrupt other criminal activities or supply chains. Right. But again, symbolically in everything that has happened around the, around the capture, has arguably changed the Sinaloa cartel forever, at least as we knew it.

Deborah: [00:20:12] Say more about that. Can you expand a little?

Victoria: [00:20:15] Yeah. I mean, so one factor is that that model that we’ve talked about that El Chapo built is over. Right. Again, the war that we’re seeing right now is likely only going to come to an end when one faction either eliminates the other or severely weakens it. Previously, the way that the Sinaloa Cartel was able to become so successful from a criminal standpoint was that even though it was involved in violence and in criminal conflicts, at least in its epicenter, it favored reaching non-aggression pacts, having some sort of unity or at least, you know, coexistence between the factions. So if that doesn’t work, that means a severe weakening of the criminal organization and the different factions involved. The other faction is what we’ve talked about: this generation of campesino narcos, which, for better or worse, had the strong link to communities. And you mentioned this just a few minutes ago, Deb, the sons of El Mayo and El Chapo, which are sometimes known as the narco juniors, right? They have a completely different relationship to local communities. They are much more urban. They have much more public lives. They’re of course, much more seen on social media. For example, some describe them as hyper capitalistic and violence is often much more for show rather than serving a specific purpose.

Victoria: [00:21:42] So that Robin Hood narrative that we mentioned before doesn’t really apply to them. And what we have found in our field trips as well, is that they have definitely lost a lot of the legitimacy that their ancestors or the previous generation had. Also, again, because they rely on forced disappearances, that are having severe consequences in the population, of course. And then the third aspect is that we are now seeing a new security strategy that in no small part because of pressure from the United States, favors a much more militarized approach. So that’s the two Sinaloa Cartel factions are not just under pressure because they’re fighting each other, but they also have this increased military pressure around them. And of course, we’re now even seeing pressure on the protection networks, right? The politicians that that provided them with with support, with with information and protection from legal consequences. So I think that will likely lead to even more splintering internally and more fracturing. So that organization we knew, I think is evolving and we’re entering a new generation of the Sinaloa Cartel.

Deborah: [00:22:59] That’s right. And I suppose when we talk literally about generations, right, the ethos and the offspring of El Mayo, these are people who were sort of born into that lifestyle, born with a certain amount of entitlement, rather than having to sort of scramble their way up from rural poverty the way that their fathers did. And I think that does kind of set a different precedent for them moving forward as it as it does their fathers. And so for Mayo, I suppose he’s no longer an example of what comes next, right? He’s just, a sort of legend, but a closed bracket for a chapter that’s that’s ending.

Victoria: [00:23:41] Yeah, for sure. And I think even before his fall, we had already seen that it had become almost impossible for other criminal leaders to replicate that. Mexico’s criminal landscape is much more atomized than when El Mayo grew in power. It’s much more volatile now. We see that leaders survive shorter periods, not longer. So I don’t think we have any other example of someone who has been able to lead an organization for decades. El Mencho was probably just one example, but of course, he was recently killed. So we haven’t seen another case of a leader that survives that. Right. And also because organized crime now works differently as well, it’s much more diversified and again operates more in networks, and it’s much more volatile. Alliances change. And also something we may see, which is something we’re seeing in Colombia, a country that also went through severe changes in its organized crime landscape. What we saw in Colombia is that at some point you didn’t see these Pablo Escobar figures, right? You saw actors that had a more invisible modus operandi. We actually called them an InSight Crime “the Invisibles,” precisely to avoid this increased law enforcement pressure and pressure from rival groups. So we have documented in Colombia how many of the actors that are key to the drug trade today maintain a completely legal facade, are not necessarily linked to an armed organization, but operate more like brokers, more on the business front rather than the territorial, criminal wars, which also gives them a degree of protection. So it could be interesting to see if we see that also evolve in Mexico under these circumstances.

SEE ALSO: ‘The Invisibles’ of the Drug World – Memo Fantasma

Deborah: [00:25:28] Yeah. I mean, there’s no doubt that the sentencing and the $15 billion forfeiture are closing the book on one of the most significant careers in modern trafficking history in Mexico, but the organization and the country will move on. Regardless, what that means for Sinaloa’s internal balance in the months ahead is very much an open question and one that we’re going to keep following. Victoria, thanks very much for joining me.

Victoria: [00:25:56] Thank you. Deb.

Deborah: [00:25:57] You’ve just watched The Insight Take, our weekly video chat analysis on the biggest crime stories in Latin America. You can find it on our website, in the multimedia section or on YouTube and Spotify. And if there’s a story or subject you’d like us to take apart, please reach out to me at at InSight Crime dot org. We’ll be back with another insight take next week. Bye for now.