Mexican drug lord ‘El Mayo’ Zambada says he was robbed and kidnapped before being brought to the US | Business

But he was led into a room where he was beaten, a hood was placed over his head, handcuffed and then taken in a pickup truck to an airstrip where he was forced onto a private jet that eventually took him and Guzmán López, one of the sons of captured Sinaloa drug cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, to U.S. soil, the letter said.

Zambada’s comments came a day after the U.S. ambassador to Mexico confirmed that the drug lord was taken to the United States against his will when he arrived in Texas on a plane with Guzmán López in July.

The letter raised questions about ties between drug traffickers and some politicians in Sinaloa, the Pacific coast state that is home to the Sinaloa cartel, but the governor denied ties to the criminals and said he was not in Sinaloa that day. After the arrests, he had said he was in Los Angeles.

“There is no complicity in crime,” Rocha said Saturday at an event in Culiacán alongside Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the country’s newly elected President Claudia Sheinbaum.

“We have complete confidence in the governor,” López Obrador said.

Regarding his rivals, Rocha said: “They want to turn me into a narco by force.”

“If they said I would be there (at the meeting), then they lied, and if he (Zambada) believed them, then he fell into a trap,” the governor said.

Zambada’s letter did not mention that Rocha was present at the meeting place.

It did say that Héctor Melesio Cuén, a former local congressman, former mayor of Culiacan and former president of Sinaloa University, was at the scene. He described him as “an old friend.” Mexican officials have said Cuén was killed the same day, and Zambada’s letter says he was killed at the meeting site.

The trafficker said one of his guards, who is now missing, was a commander of the Sinaloa Judicial Police.

In early August, the 76-year-old Zambada appeared in a federal court in Texas for the second time after being taken into U.S. custody the week before.

Guzmán López had apparently been in negotiations with U.S. authorities for a long time about a possible indictment. Guzmán López, 38, has pleaded not guilty in federal court in Chicago to drug trafficking and other charges.

But U.S. officials said they had little warning when Guzmán López’s plane landed at an airport near El Paso. Both men were arrested and remain in custody, facing multiple drug charges in the U.S.

Ken Salazar, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, said the plane had taken off from Sinaloa and had not filed a flight plan. He stressed that the pilot was not American, and neither was the plane.

It has been suggested that Guzmán López planned to turn himself in and that he took Zambada with him to receive more favorable treatment. However, his motives remain unclear.

Zambada was seen as the Sinaloa cartel’s strategist and was said to be more involved in day-to-day operations than his more famous and flashy boss, “El Chapo,” who was sentenced to life in prison in the US in 2019.

Zambada’s faction within the Sinaloa cartel is engaged in fierce fighting with another faction, led by Guzmán’s sons.

Zambada was seen as a skilled negotiator among his rivals and as the most influential trafficker who “has established extensive corruption networks across many Mexican government agencies,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy and Technology.

Zambada has been charged in a number of U.S. cases, including in New York and California. Prosecutors filed a new indictment against him in New York in February, describing him as the “principal leader of the criminal enterprise responsible for importing massive amounts of narcotics into the United States.”