Sinaloa Cartel leader Ismael 'El Mayo' Zambada may face the death penalty, after the US government reinstated capital punishment in an order to initiate "total elimination of the Mexican cartels".
Attorney General Pam Bondi is set to re-establish the death-penalty for cartel criminals, according to information from journalist Jesús Esquivel , in a publication by Proceso. Ismael 'El Mayo' Zambada, who co-founded the Sinaloa Cartel with notorious drug kingpin Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman is currently incarcerated after being arrested last summer.
Zambada is currently on trial at the Federal Court of the Eastern District of New York, under the supervision of Judge Brian Cogan – the same person who sentenced El Chapo to life imprisonment. It comes after US President Donald Trump directed the federal government to revise existing national security and counter-narcotics strategies to pursue total elimination of Cartels and Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCOs).
A leader for decades in the Sinaloa Cartel alongside El Chapo, Zambada was one of the most powerful drug traffickers in the world and known for running the cartel's smuggling operations while keeping a lower profile.
The State Department's website gives the lowdown on El Mayo, saying: "Ismael Mario Zambada Garcia is the long-time leader of the Zambada Garcia faction of the Sinaloa Cartel. Zambada Garcia is unique in that he has spent his entire adult life as a major international drug trafficker, yet he has never spent a day in jail."
"With the arrest, extradition, conviction, and sentencing of fellow Sinaloa Cartel faction leader Joaquin Guzman-Loera, a/k/a Chapo Guzman, Zambada Garcia is the unquestioned senior leader of the Sinaloa Cartel."
The amassed evidence against El Mayo spans several years, as outlined in the files. Mirror US reports that it all starts with an indictment dating back to late January 2003 in the District of Columbia, followed by a subsequent charge out of the Northern District of Illinois, encompassing Chicago, in late August 2009.
Come mid-April 2012, another charge rose up against El Mayo, this time in the Western District of Texas. In the ensuing four years, two further indictments emerged - one at the tail end of July 2014 from the Southern District of California and yet another from the Eastern District of New York around mid-May 2016.
"All of the indictments involve a major violation of U.S. narcotics laws," proclaims a statement from the US Department. The most daunting charge against El Mayo, however, seems to come out of Chicago, particularly as his own son, Vicente Zambada Niebla, has testified against him.
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