OPINION: Ex-DEA agent now puts jailed cartel leader in a class of his own

The recent arrest of Sinaloa Cartel leader Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada Garcia briefly made headlines in the United States and on news outlets around the world, but the story faded so quickly that I decided to call legendary retired Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Mike Vigil and ask him to put the moment into perspective.

“Mayo Zambada makes a great Mafia figure like Carlo Gambino, as great as he was, look like a neophyte,” Vigil says. “They called Gambino ‘the boss of all bosses,’ and rightfully so. I would call Zambada the boss of all bosses.”

A bold statement? Sure, but Vigil knows what he’s talking about. He rose to prominence as an undercover agent for the then-new Drug Enforcement Administration. He worked undercover in the U.S., Mexico, Colombia and Bolivia, eventually rising to become the agency’s head of international operations. Today, the retired Vigil is an author and consultant who provides a powerful and authentic American voice across Latin America on a range of issues, including transnational organized crime, drug trafficking and political corruption.

It wasn’t just the size that set Zambada apart, but his management style and diversity of products. Turn on the TV and “you always hear about Pablo Escobar as the greatest drug trafficker of all time — not a big deal,” Vigil says. “Pablo Escobar was really just a cocaine dealer, and most of his market was in the United States. Look at the organization that Mayo Zambada built. It now spans six continents, and he wasn’t just dealing in cocaine, he was dealing in marijuana, heroin, methamphetamine, fentanyl. He invested billions in legitimate businesses (in Mexico and the U.S.) and made billions of dollars in human trafficking.”

He started far from the top of the treacherous mountain. Around the time Vigil was working undercover in Sonora, Mexico, and the country’s “Golden Triangle” states of Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua, Zambada had traded in his life as a farm boy and teenage marijuana dealer in Sinaloa for an integral role in what would become known as the Juarez Cartel. Working with Amado Carrillo Fuentes, Zambada established a network of reliable smuggling routes by air, land and sea from Medellin to El Paso, emphasizing business over bloodshed. But if trouble arose, he could fix it with dozens of sicarios under his command.

After Carrillo Fuentes’ death in 1997, Zambada partnered with Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán. Zambada largely stayed free by keeping his trusted inner circle small and not drawing attention to himself. He moved frequently, spent millions a year on police and political corruption, and lived, compared to most, a humble lifestyle. For decades, he was a ghost, a plume of smoke, and a rumor in the mountains of Sinaloa and the coast near Nayarit. He allowed others, including his partner Guzmán, to assume higher profiles and more dangerous reputations.

Zambada, Vigil says, recognized early on that a simpler life was also safer. Despite millions in rewards offered for his capture — Vigil recalls billboards demanding information from Arizona to Texas — he stayed out of prison until he was captured along with Chapo’s son, Joaquín Guzmán López, on July 25 at a private airport in El Paso.

At the time of his arrest, Zambada was a major player in the Mexican drug gang and had served six presidential terms.

The horizontal corporate structure and distribution allows the cartel to operate regardless of who is at the top. As long as there are willing buyers, particularly in the US, ways will be found to move and sell the product.

Given that reality, Vigil winced in May when the DEA released a threat assessment stating the obvious: that the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels were active in all 50 states. According to the report, “They control secret drug production sites and transportation routes in Mexico and smuggling routes into the United States, and maintain major network ‘hubs’ in U.S. cities along the southwest border and other key locations in the United States.”

The drug crisis is very real, Vigil says, but the politicization of it by those who want to build walls and target the most immigrants is the worst kind of bravado. The vast majority of drugs entering the U.S. come through legal ports of entry, he says.

Zambada should know. He helped pioneer and plan many of the routes—roads that led to misery for many and billions for a few.

That, according to Vigil, is why Zambada’s arrest marks the end of an era, and he knows it.

“We’re definitely from the same era, but we’re on opposite sides of the spectrum,” he says. “This guy had a tremendous amount of street smarts. And the fact is, like Chapo Guzmán, he had very little education and came from poverty. Through sheer tenacity and intelligence, he was able to build an empire that most people in business couldn’t build. If you look at most CEOs of global conglomerates, they don’t build anything. These guys built a criminal enterprise from nothing that spans six out of seven continents.”

And now El Mayo has disappeared from the radar and is behind bars?

“The fact is that it won’t make a dent in the Sinaloa cartel,” he says. “As long as the infrastructure remains intact, the capture of a leader — even Mayo Zambada — won’t have a noticeable impact.”

John L. Smith is a longtime author and columnist. Born in Henderson, his family’s Nevada roots date back to 1881. His stories have appeared in New Lines, Time, Readers Digest, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, Reuters, and Desert Companion, among others.