Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada García, the Sinaloa Cartel co-founder who was arrested in 2024 after he was kidnapped in Mexico and flown to the United States, was sentenced to life in prison in the U.S. on Monday, 11 months after he pleaded guilty to drug trafficking charges.
"Socalj" for Borderland Beat
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"Char" for Borderland Beat
This information was posted by LA JORNADA
WRITTEN BY: CESAR ARRELLANO GARCIA
NOVEMBER 26, 2024
"Socalj" for Borderland Beat
"Char" for Borderland Beat
This article was translated and reposted from LOS NOTICIERISTAS
WRITTEN BY: TERY PEREZ
SEPTEMBER 19, 2024
"Socalj" for Borderland Beat
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"Socalj" for Borderland Beat
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García Luna tried to bribe fellow inmates into making false statements to support his bid for a new trial in a U.S. drug case, a judge found Wednesday in rejecting Genaro García Luna ‘s request.
García Luna, who once held a cabinet-level position as Mexico’s top public safety official, was convicted last year of taking payoffs to protect the drug cartels he was supposed to go after. He is awaiting sentencing and denies the charges.
Prosecutors discovered his alleged jailhouse bribery efforts and disclosed them in a court filing earlier this year, citing such evidence as a former cellmate’s handwritten notes and covert recording of a conversation with García Luna. His lawyers said the allegations were bogus and the recording was ambiguous.
But U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan found them believable. Judge Cogan also oversaw the trial of "El Chapo" and likely will as well for the future trial of Isamel "El May" Zambada Garcia.
"Socalj" for Borderland Beat
With Contributions from "Itzli" "Char" & "Enojon"
Recently, the news outlet Zeta Tijuana reported that the former leader of the Gulf Cartel and co-founder of the Los Zetas had already been released from USP Terra Haute Federal Prison in Indiana more than a month earlier than his scheduled release date of August 30, 2024.
However, Zeta Tijuana was accessing a Web 3 variation of the BOP Inmate Locator Registry, likely an outdated database on an internal or test server. That database showed his Release Date [future tense] as 07/01/2024. But his BOP Inmate Number 62604-079, still maintains his August release date on the official BOP website.
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"HEARST" for Borderland Beat
Only fools believe there are cartel groups which don’t harm the innocent but, well, that’s never really stopped those groups from trying to sell you that line.
The Zambada family, from the Sinaloa Cartel, has somehow developed the reputation of being less cruel than many of their peers.
But there is an important long-forgotten and under-reported story of a young man that the Zambadas killed. And the government's official version of what happened quickly became a story that Time magazine noted “few in Mexico are buying.”
Compiled by "Socalj"
From Borderland Beat Contributors
"Sol Prendido" for Borderland Beat
A woman, known as "La China," recounts her experience working for Los Zetas, one of Mexico's most violent cartels.
Male newscaster: In the prisons of San Luis Potosí there is a civil association that helps women behind bars. They managed to document that at least 80% of the women are imprisoned for crimes linked to drug traffickers. Rocío López has the details.
La China: I was imprisoned for the crimes of kidnapping, homicide, auto theft, criminal association, and weapons charges. I worked with a criminal group.
Rocio Lopez: 'I lived though four years of hell'. That’s how this woman nicknamed La China describes the experience of having worked for the Los Zetas, one of the most bloodthirsty cartels of the country. She lived in fear of being executed at any moment if she made a mistake. She also witnessed cold blooded murders. That's why the day she entered prison she was relieved.
La China: I'm going to be honest with you. I felt like my arrest was a salvation for me because I knew that sooner or later they were going to kill me. I have three children and I was in a financially bad situation. I was invited to work there because the pay was said to be very good. And so I started to work with them due to economic reasons and the fact that everything was so easy.
Rocio Lopez: The Nueva Luna civil association that supports incarcerated women in San Luis Potosi has documented that up to 80% of women in prison who are behind bars worked for drug traffickers.
Nueva Luna President Marcela Garcia: It’s normally through romantic affairs, amorous relationships, that these men who are involved in criminal organizations hook up with women.
Rocio Lopez: According to the association these women occupied minor positions in the criminal structure. They rarely achieved a position of being in charge of a place or leading a regional area.
Nueva Luna President Marcela Garcia: They play the role of spies and drug dealers. In the case of kidnappings, they take care of the abducted individuals, they feed them. And in many cases there are often the ones who also collect ransoms generated from these kidnappings.
Rocio Lopez: What worries the civil organizations is that even though there haven’t been any cases found in which women are leading criminal gangs. The judges are sentencing them without giving any consideration to gender.
Nueva Luna President Marcela Garcia: If you’re a woman the penalties are harsher if you commit this type of crime because you as a woman should be taking care of children.
Rocio Lopez: La China was sentenced to 49 years in prison. But she appealed and only served a 3 year sentence for home burglary.
La China: I have a lot of people pointing at me right now because they think I killed, that I participated in kidnappings. But that just wasn’t the type of work that I was doing.
Rocio Lopez: The Nueva Luna association details that women are ensared or abducted by the cartels at an early age. Girls as young as 12 years old who live in marginalized areas who are fleeing violence in their homes are preyed upon. They are easy prey for criminals.
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"Sol Prendido" for Borderland Beat
El Lobo' coordinated the shipment and transportation of tons of cocaine from Central and South America to Mexico.
Nava Valencia began his criminal career in the 1990s.
After negotiating with US authorities and ratting out rivals and former allies - including former Secretary of Public Security Genaro Garcia Luna - Oscar Nava Valencia, the former leader of the Los Valencia or Milenio Cartel, was released from prison in the United States after 12 years of incarceration.
Judicial documents to which MILENIO had access reveal that El Lobo left prison on November 27, after having his sentence reduced twice.
In addition, it is likely that Nava Valencia will remain in the United States as part of the protected witness program, along with his wife and children, who are already in that country; according to the agreement signed with the Department of Justice, El Lobo will remain at the disposal of the authorities to cooperate in future cases, as he did with Genaro García Luna and one of Los Cuinis.
El Lobo's path from prison to freedom was based on his ability to put his enemies and former associates in Washington's crosshairs. It was on June 15, 2012 when he signed one of the best deals of his life: he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute cocaine, and thus avoided another charge of direct cocaine distribution in the United States. He opened the way to judicial cooperation as a snitch.
As a result, on January 7, 2014, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison, but then his cooperation began to pay off: he obtained the benefit of a sentence reduction to 200 months, just over 16 years, and the year he spent in prison in Mexico before being extradited was taken into account.
On November 15, MILENIO reported that a new motion for a sentence reduction had been filed, without knowing if it was on behalf of the defense or the prosecution, but the request has already borne fruit. His release, scheduled for April 2024, was brought forward to November 2023.
As MILENIO has been able to confirm, since he was arrested in Mexico, Nava Valencia knew he would become a whistleblower for the U.S. authorities. However, in order not to arouse suspicion among the Milenio Cartel, he tried to avoid extradition without much effort. Thus, in January 2011, he was in the hands of the United States.
"He made the decision while he was in Mexico that he was going to cooperate with the US government as much as possible," El Lobo's lawyers detailed during his 2014 sentencing hearing.
His defense pushed for his two sentence reductions on the grounds that he had been a high-profile and relevant cooperating witness, but also that he was remorseful for what he had done. He even claimed that in prison he had taken all the Bible courses available to him and went to mass.
"All of that he has done with the goal of becoming a better man and assuming that, when he is released, he will assume the role as head of his family, who will help him in improving his life and also to live a good life," his defense assured when he was first sentenced.
The origins of the capo
Originally from Michoacán, he was the leader of Los Valencia or the Milenio Cartel since 2003, following the arrest of his uncle Armando Valencia Cornelio, who founded the organization in the 1990s. He was a close operator of Ignacio Coronel, and remained on Chapo Guzman's side after the breakup of the Sinaloa Federation.
El Lobo coordinated the shipment and transportation of tons of cocaine arriving from Central and South America to Mexico to the port of Manzanillo, Colima, and then to the United States until October 28, 2009, when he was arrested in a federal operation in Guadalajara, Jalisco.
After his fall in 2009, Erick Valencia Salazar, El 85, was left in charge of the cartel, which fractured into two factions, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and the Resistance. The rest is history. Today, the CJNG disputes control of the trafficking of synthetic drugs such as methamphetamine and fentanyl with the Sinaloa Cartel.
El Lobo was part of high-profile cases as a collaborator. One of them was testifying against former Public Security Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna earlier this year in Brooklyn, New York.
During the trial, in front of the former chief of police of the Calderon era, El Lobo assured that he witnessed at least three meetings between Garcia Luna and criminal leaders. First in 2006 to receive $2.5 million, collected by Arturo Beltran Leyva, El Barbas, during the existence of the Sinaloa Federation, to maintain greater control of the territories.
In 2007, in Cuernavaca, when he was summoned by El Barbas to give explanations for the seizure of a shipment of cocaine belonging to the Beltran Leyvas.
And in 2008, in a car wash in Guadalajara, when El Lobo personally said he paid 3 million pesos to García Luna and his right-hand man, Luis Cárdenas Palomino, head of the Police Intelligence division of the now defunct Federal Police, for protection.
In another case, in Washington, he testified against Gerardo González Valencia, one of the leaders of Los Cuinis. He told how, together with his brothers José and Abigael, they operated the trafficking of tons of cocaine provided by Colombian sources. In addition, as MILENIO has been able to find out, he was part of the construction of a criminal case in Chicago, Illinois, although it is not known precisely which one.
Nava Valencia is free, waiting to collaborate against the many targets he has snitched on since arriving in the United States, where the Justice Department is actively working to build new drug trafficking cases, with the help of El Lobo's howl.
"Char" for Borderland Beat
This article was translated and reposted from RIODOCE
The interviews caused outrage among journalists and security analysts who criticized the U.S. government, which always sold the idea that these drug traffickers had done a lot of damage and that they would be judged with the full weight of the law when they were in its power, to finally shelter them for collaborating with them, with the understanding that they would collaborate to sink drug traffickers of their own group that the government considered more emblematic.
"It is a transaction that the United States carries out with drug traffickers, and it does so because these are its rules of the game. And they are rules that the Colombians understood. Now that possibility is open to the Mexicans. Afterwards, they will see if those narcos write books, corridos and live off their royalties," said the researcher, author of El siglo de las drogas (The Century of Drugs).
Zambada García was arrested on October 19, 2008 in Mexico City, along with 15 other people. He was first prosecuted for organized crime, aggravated homicide and possession of weapons for the exclusive use of the Armed Forces. Two years later, the Fifth Court for Federal Criminal Proceedings, based in the State of Mexico, sentenced him to formal imprisonment for another trial, criminal case 180/2009 for crimes against health, stockpiling weapons and cartridges for exclusive use of the Armed Forces.
He was then incarcerated in the high security federal prison of Matamoros, Tamaulipas.
However, both processes were pending resolution, since in April 2012 he was handed over to the United States. According to the bilateral extradition treaty, Zambada García must be returned to Mexico after paying his debts with the U.S. justice system.
Even though such proceedings are pending, unofficial sources from the Attorney General's Office (FGR) stated that King Zambada does not have any arrest warrants in Mexico.
The website Búho Legal, for its part, also has no data showing charges pending against Ismael Zambada's younger brother, El Mayo Zambada, although the legal consultation site clarifies the possibility that his defense requested the judge to keep his name private.
"There are occasions when it happens, but in this case we can't know if this person's case was kept confidential, or if there was never really an accusation against him by federal authorities in the country," said a spokesperson for Búho Legal.
The Minilic case is different, because the drug trafficker is accused of being the intellectual murderer of journalist Javier Valdez Cardenas, and there is an extradition request against him that the U.S. government refuses to grant, due to the fact that Lopez Serrano continues to collaborate as an informant with the U.S. government.
They wanted to kill me
During the interview with Pepe Garza, Zambada García acknowledged having been one of the leaders of the faction commanded by his brother Ismael, but that after 12 years in prison, good behavior, and having collaborated with the U.S. government, he is now on parole "working honestly", but without specifying what he does.
"I don't want to go back to Mexico, because if I do, I would go back to the same thing. And the reality is that prison life is very hard. If someone has never lived it, they don't know what it's like. But I have, because I spent 12 years there, and I don't want to go back even one day," said Zambada García, during an interview that lasted for an hour and 20 minutes, and where he spoke about his intention to become a singer-songwriter.
THE KINGPIN ARRESTED IN MEXICO CITY. End of the race.
Dressed in a gray Porkpie hat, a royal blue shirt and a necklace with a Santa Muerte figure hanging from it, Zambada García admitted that the night of his arrest in Mexico City, they were actually going to kill him, because after the first shots were fired by a convoy of Siedo agents trying to enter his home, he recognized Sergio Villarreal Barragán, El Grande, among the soldiers, so he quickly tried to get to safety.
"My arrest was more like an attempted homicide. They were going to kill me. They never came to identify themselves as the government, nor did they show an arrest warrant, but they came firing bullets, left and right, because what they wanted was to kill me," recalls the former drug trafficker.
He adds: "And I realized and the truth is that I acted coldly, and when I saw that Arturo (Beltrán Leyva)'s people were with them, and how could I not recognize the Grande, I quickly asked for help from the local municipal police, and that's why they didn't kill me.
Zambada Garcia's account coincides with the testimony Villarreal Barragan gave during the trial against Genaro Garcia Luna, when he details how he participated in the operation to arrest King Zambada in October 2008.
"On orders from Arturo Beltrán Leyva, I infiltrated with other hitmen, with agents of the then Deputy Attorney General's Office Specializing in Organized Crime Investigations (Siedo), to capture the brother of Ismael Zambada.
to capture Ismael Zambada's brother," said El Grande.
During that operation, in addition to King Zambada, 15 other people were also arrested, among them his son Jesús Zambada Reyes, 21, and his nephew Juan José Parra Zambada, known as Juanjo.
Finally, the King was arrested in that operation and detained in the Altiplano prison in Almoloya, and a year later he was extradited to the United States where, after agreeing to collaborate with the U.S. government, a sentence of 20 years was reduced to 12 years, thanks to good behavior and negotiations made by his lawyer with prosecutors.
But it wasn't until a couple of years ago that prison agents told him to be careful, because they had intelligence information that the former Public Security Secretary had ordered him to kill him.
"The agents told me to be careful because Genaro had sent to kill me. It is difficult to know if that was true or not, since those who really know is the government. But they told me not to worry, because everything would be fine. Maybe they told me that so I wouldn't get scared," recalled El Rey.
Eventually, Zambada Garcia testified against Garcia Luna, and his testimony would have contributed to putting the former security secretary in prison for life.
According to El Rey, the formula to stay out of the spotlight was to keep a low profile, for which he had to change his name, a name, he explains, that he suddenly came up with.
"Everything I did was under that name, and I ended up being that name. I had a passport with that name, a visa, border crossing, so I could enter the United States whenever I wanted, and I traveled through Europe and South America. That's why, when I was captured, I (as Jesús Reynaldo Zambada García) didn't even have a traffic violation," said the drug trafficker.
Article published on November 12, 2023 in the 1085 edition of the weekly Ríodoce.
Source: RIODOCE
"Sol Prendido" for Borderland Beat
Oscar Nava Valencia, leader of the Milenio Cartel, had pleaded guilty to cocaine trafficking in 2012.
Óscar Nava Valencia, El Lobo, a witness presented by US prosecutors to testify in the trial against Genaro García Luna, a former official of Felipe Calderón's six-year term, could be released from prison before serving his sentence in the United States.
The former leader of the Milenio cartel is looking for his active collaboration with U.S. authorities in cases such as that of former Public Security Secretary and one of the leaders of Los Cuinis, Gerardo González Valencia, to pay off.
Garcia Luna received millions of dollars from the two most powerful Mexican cartels.
According to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons, Nava Valencia would be released from prison in April 2024, that is, in less than 5 months, after having received in 2014 a 25-year prison sentence after reaching a collaboration agreement which was reduced to 200 months, just over 16 years, in 2019. In addition, the year he spent in prison in Mexico was taken into account.
However, this November 15, a motion for a sentence reduction was filed, which although it is not known if it was filed by the prosecution or Nava's defense, would imply reducing his sentence again so that he could be released as soon as possible.
El Lobo Nava had pleaded guilty to cocaine trafficking in 2012. As the leader of the Milenio Cartel, in addition to running a multi-million dollar drug trafficking business, he had contact with the most recognized Mexican drug lords, such as the Beltran Leyva brothers and Joaquin El Chapo Guzman. He was arrested in Mexico at the end of 2009 and shortly after a year, extradited to the United States.
At the beginning of 2023, he reappeared on the national scene when he was part of the group of witnesses that the US prosecution used against Genaro García Luna, for conspiracy to traffic cocaine.
He said he witnessed at least three meetings between García Luna and criminal leaders. First in 2006 to receive 2.5 million dollars, collected by Arturo Beltrán Leyva, El Barbas, while the Sinaloa Federation existed, to maintain greater control of the territories: "the first time was in 2006, we had to collaborate, to make an agreement between all of us".
Then in 2007, in Cuernavaca, when he was summoned by El Barbas to explain why drugs belonging to the Beltrán Leyva family had been seized.
"We met in Cuernavaca with Arturo Beltrán and Genaro García Luna to find out what happened (...) I gave him cash. More than 10 million pesos," said El Lobo, in order to receive the report of the seizure and thus not have problems with his Colombian partners who were claiming for the loss of their cocaine.
And finally in 2008, in a car wash in Guadalajara, when El Lobo personally claims to have paid 3 million pesos to García Luna and his right-hand man, Luis Cárdenas Palomino, head of the Police Intelligence Division of the now defunct Federal Police, for protection.
He also saw how the Gonzalez Valencia brothers, who would later lead Los Cuinis, the financial arm of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), operated the trafficking of tons of cocaine, as he testified in the trial against Gerardo Gonzalez Valencia.
Nava Valencia could be deported after his release, however, having been a cooperating witness for the US government, he could also enjoy protection benefits, his family could also benefit from this, in US territory. In the end, it will be up to a federal judge to determine if El Lobo will be released from his incarceration sooner.
"Char" for Borderland Beat
This article was reposted and translated from DW MINDS
In an exclusive interview, the former member of the Sinaloa Cartel's top leadership assures that García Harfuch received bribes from the criminal organization and stole two million dollars from his father, Dámaso López Núñez.
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