Drug lord charged in Mexico with extraditing another to the US

The strange story of how two Mexican drug lords were captured after landing on a plane in the United States in July just got stranger.

Mexican authorities now say they are charging Joaquín Guzmán López, but not because he was the leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel founded by his father, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

Instead, Mexican prosecutors are charging the younger Guzmán with kidnapping Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, an older drug boss from a rival faction of the cartel, forcing him onto a plane and flying him to an airport near El Paso, Texas.

The younger Guzmán apparently wanted to turn himself in to U.S. authorities, but reportedly brought Zambada as a prize to make any possible plea deal more attractive.

Federal prosecutors said in a statement that “an arrest warrant has been prepared” for the young Guzmán on kidnapping charges.

But it also cited another charge under a section of Mexico’s penal code that defines what he did as treason. That section of the law says treason is committed “by those who illegally kidnap a person in Mexico to hand them over to the authorities of another country.”

This clause was apparently prompted by the kidnapping of a Mexican doctor wanted for alleged involvement in the torture and murder of Drug Enforcement Administration agent Kiki Camarena in 1985.

Nowhere in the affidavit is it mentioned that the younger Guzmán was a member of the “little Chapos” faction of the Sinaloa cartel, which was made up of Chapo’s sons and smuggled millions of doses of the deadly opioid fentanyl into the United States. About 70,000 people die from drug overdoses there each year.

The federal prosecutors’ statement also included an unusually stark and revealing description of evidence presented by prosecutors in the northern state of Sinaloa, which has since been shown to be false.

Sinaloa state prosecutors apparently sought to distance the state’s governor, Rubén Rocha, from the killing of a local political rival, Hector Cuén, who was present at a meeting that was used as a pretext to lure Zambada to the kidnapping site. Zambada has said he expected the governor to be at the meeting; Rocha has said he traveled out of state that day.

To downplay reports of the alleged meeting, prosecutors released a video of an apparent shooting during what they called a botched robbery at a local gas station. They said Cuén was killed there, not at the meeting site, where Zambada said Cuén was killed.

While federal prosecutors did not allege that the gas station video was fake, they previously noted that the number of shots heard in the video did not match the number of gunshot wounds on Cuén’s body.

Today, federal prosecutors went a step further, saying the video is “inadmissible and does not have sufficient evidentiary value to be considered.”

Zambada has said that Guzmán, whom he trusted, invited him to the meeting to help smooth over the fierce political rivalry between Cuén and Rocha. Zambada was known for evading capture for decades because of his incredibly tight, loyal and sophisticated personal security apparatus.

The fact that he would consciously leave all that behind to meet with Rocha means that Zambada considered such a meeting credible and feasible. So did the idea that Zambada, as leader of the oldest wing of the Sinaloa cartel, could act as an arbiter in the state’s political disputes.

The governor denies that he knew about or attended the meeting where Zambada was kidnapped.

The whole affair is a source of embarrassment for the Mexican government, which only learned afterwards that the two drug lords had been arrested on American soil.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has long viewed any U.S. intervention as an insult and refused to confront Mexico’s drug cartels. He recently questioned the U.S. policy of detaining drug cartel leaders, asking, “Why don’t they change that policy?”