Leader Of Mexico’s Sinaloa Drug Cartel Arrested In Texas (Photos)

unclear, but it appears they flew into the United States.
Citing Mexican and US officials, the Wall Street Journal reports that Zambada was tricked into boarding the plane by a high-ranking Sinaloa member following a months-long operation by Homeland Security Investigations and the FBI.

Zambada believed he was going to inspect clandestine airfields in Mexico, the paper reports.
In a statement, US Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said the Sinaloa cartel “pioneered the manufacture of fentanyl and has for years trafficked it into our country, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans and devastating countless communities”.

FBI director Chris Wray said the arrests are “an example of the FBI’s and our partners’ commitment to dismantling violent transnational criminal organizations like the Sinaloa Cartel,” he said.
As more information emerges, Zambada’s arrest will no doubt be heralded by President Joe Biden’s administration as one of the most significant operations by the DEA in years.
Zambada co-founded the Sinaloa cartel in the wake of the collapse of the Guadalajara cartel at the end of the 1980s.

While Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was the public face of the organisation and the most notorious of the two men, many believed it was in fact El Mayo who was its real leader
Not only ruthless, he was also innovative, creating and maintaining some of the earliest links with Colombian cartels to flood the US with cocaine and heroin.
And more latterly, fentanyl.
His leadership of the criminal empire has endured in the face of changing presidents in Mexico and the US, amid repeated anti-drug offensives from successive governments and constant efforts by his enemies in other drug-trafficking organisations to bring him down.
That is no mean feat in the violent, dangerous and treacherous underworld in which he has operated as an unassailable kingpin for many years.
Yet that extraordinary resilience appears to have run out in El Paso, Texas – a city blighted by the influx of the synthetic opioid, fentanyl, much of which was smuggled in by his organisation.