The leader of one of the world’s biggest drug cartels has been arrested — what happens next?

Key PointsIsmael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada was arrested when a plane he was on landed just beyond the Mexican border, on US soil.Also arrested with Zambada was the son of the cartel’s infamous former leader, known as ‘El Chapo’.The US says the cartel has smuggled hundreds of tonnes of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, crystal meth and fentanyl.

The head of one of the biggest criminal drug traffickers in the world has been arrested.

The leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada, was arrested when a plane he was travelling in landed across the United States border in El Paso, Texas.

Police detained him on Thursday along with Joaquin Guzman Lopez, the son of the cartel’s former leader Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman Loera — with whom Zambada co-founded the cartel.

So what impact will Zambada’s arrest have on the outlaw drug organisation’s future?

Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada Garcia (left) and Joaquin Guzman Lopez (right), the son of former Sinaloa Cartel leader Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman Loera, face multiple charges for funnelling drugs to the US. Source: AAP / Drug Enforcement Agency / US State Department / EPA

Power, violence, drugs

The Sinaloa Cartel has been involved in smuggling hundreds of tonnes of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and crystal meth across Mexico’s border with the US.

Philip Johnson, a lecturer at Flinders University’s College of Business, Government and Law said that Mexico’s state of Sinaloa had for decades been a centre for the cultivation and distribution of illicit drugs.

“It’s where opium has been grown for a long time, so it’s been the basis of the heroin trade, but probably in the 1980s we started to see something a bit more like the kind of organisations we know today coming together.”

Joaquin Guzman Loera, also known as ‘El Chapo’ was arrested by Mexican authorities in 2016. Source: Getty / Anadolu

Over decades, the cartel has set up sophisticated supply chains to move drugs across the globe, as well as sourcing heavily regulated chemicals and bringing them into its home base in Sinaloa.

In recent years, US authorities have accused the crime syndicate of being the biggest supplier of the synthetic opioid fentanyl in the US.

Mexican drug cartels are known for using extreme violence to enforce their control over drug manufacturing and trafficking within the country.

According to Statista, there were more than

in Mexico in 2020 — a steep increase from the roughly 8,000 in 2014.

The travails of El Chapo

The audacious exploits of El Chapo captured the world’s imagination and turned him into a folk hero for some in Mexico, despite the thousands of people killed in the name of his cartel.

He has broken out of Mexican prisons twice.

In 2001, El Chapo bribed prison guards, before going on to dominate drug trafficking along much of the Rio Grande and in 2015 he escaped from prison through a 1.6km-long tunnel.

He was eventually caught by Mexican authorities in Sinaloa in January 2016 and extradited to face charges in the US the following year.

El Chapo is currently serving a life sentence in a maximum security US prison.

However, in a bizarre twist, just weeks before his capture he had sat down with Hollywood actor Sean Penn for an interview to be published in Rolling Stone magazine.

The interview, in which he boasted about his criminal achievements, was published on the same day he was arrested.

“I supply more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world. I have a fleet of submarines, aeroplanes, trucks and boats,” Penn said Guzman told him at his mountain hideout.

The future of the Sinaloa Cartel

Johnson said Zambada and Guzman Lopez would likely have had contingency plans that could be implemented if they were arrested in either Mexico or the US.

“Once they’re on US soil and going to US courts, they’re thinking about what information they can give that will get them a good deal to ensure the sort of the longevity of their family and their wealth,” he said.

Johnson said the loss of a specific leader to the US authorities was unlikely to make much difference to the operation of the cartel itself.

He said the role of the leader was largely symbolic.

“A cartel is often a pretty loose coalition of smaller criminal groups and these link up in the manufacturing and the trafficking of drugs. They are sort of close allies but they’re also not totally dependent on each other,” Johnson said.

“There are plenty of other leaders leading the different parts of this organisation” and the cartel itself would be “immune to the loss of any one seemingly high-profile [leader],” he said.

“It’s probably to some extent business as usual. I think the thing that it’s probably going to have the least impact on is drug trafficking — because these are pretty robust, but also pretty flexible, networks of trafficking.

“And there’s so much money involved that there’ll be a lot of incentive and a lot of effort by traffickers to make sure that the chemicals keep arriving that you can process, that you can ship.”

Johnson said that, while illegal drug manufacturing and trafficking would likely not be impacted, the arrest of a cartel leader could lead to “ripples” within the current arrangements within parts of the operation.

He said that, following similar situations in the past, there had been “increased violence afterwards as rivals, lieutenants and former allies try and take over the boss’s contacts or territory.”

A “wild card” in the arrest

The Wall Street Journal has reported that a senior cartel member had been involved in getting El Mayo onto the plane that led to his arrest.

According to the news outlet, El Mayo believed he would be inspecting clandestine airfields on the Mexican side of the border and had been unaware the aircraft would land on US soil.

While such suggestions have not been verified, Johnson said that, if Guzman Lopez had been the one working with US authorities, this could create further tensions within the cartel.

Financial rewards had been on offer for information about the Sinaloa Cartel and its high-ranking members. Source: AAP / AP

“If that’s the case, that’s a bit of a wild card because it suggests one prominent family within the cartel sort of using the other, or turning on the other side of the cartel to get something out of it,” he said.

Johnson said betrayal of one leader by another was “fairly common” within cartels.

“If it is a high-profile betrayal, I think that probably suggests more violence is coming and maybe a bigger rift between some former allies.”

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