Joaquín Guzman Lopez admitted to kidnapping drug lord Ismael Zambada García and transporting him to the United States, among other crimes.
Even in the dramatic annals of Mexican organized crime, a shock was caused last year when one of the country’s biggest drug lords was kidnapped by the son of his former partner and flown across the border into the hands of American federal agents.
The story seemed so improbable that many in Mexico, including some government officials, were skeptical of its veracity. Was the drug cartel leader, Ismael Zambada García, who had been an outcast, really been kidnapped by a younger man he had known for years, Joaquín Guzman Lopez, who was also the son of the notorious drug lord known as El Chapo?
But on Monday, Guzman Lopez pleaded guilty to a wide range of charges, including kidnapping Zambada Garcia, whose father helped found the Sinaloa drug cartel, one of the world’s most profitable trafficking organizations. At a hearing in U.S. District Court in Chicago, he admitted to coaxing Zambada-Garcia out of hiding in Mexico and having his associates place a bag over his head and bind his hands with zip ties while he was flown to an airport outside El Paso to be placed in U.S. custody.
Guzman Lopez’s guilty plea was the latest blow to the Sinaloa cartel, which has come under such intense pressure from the Mexican government and its underworld rivals that last summer it formed a strategic alliance with one of its most reviled rivals.
The statement also came at a confusingly contradictory moment in the Trump administration’s handling of the international war on drugs. As the White House increased pressure on Venezuela in an alleged effort to stop the flow of drugs into the United States, Trump announced on Friday that he would pardon Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former president of Honduras. A US jury last year convicted Hernandez of accepting bribes from Chapo as part of a years-long conspiracy to smuggle cocaine across the US border.
Most of the charges to which Guzmán Lopez pleaded guilty were included in an indictment filed in Chicago in April 2023, in which he was accused of joining his brothers to control his father’s faction of the Sinaloa Cartel after a federal judge in Brooklyn sentenced Chapo — whose name is Joaquin Guzmán Loera — to life in prison in 2019.
Prosecutors allege that Guzmán Lopez coordinated logistics for the organization run by the brothers, known as Chapitos. The two brothers are accused in multiple overlapping indictments of using bribery and violence in a multinational smuggling operation that has brought billions of dollars worth of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, fentanyl and marijuana into the United States since 2008, when Chapo was still in power.
In July, Ovidio Guzman Lopez, Guzman Lopez’s brother, pleaded guilty to similar charges in Chicago, acknowledging his role in overseeing the distribution of fentanyl in particular. As part of his deal with the government, he agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors, although it remains unclear what information he provided.
At Monday’s hearing, prosecutors revealed that Joaquin Guzman Lopez also cooperated with them. They recommended that the judge overseeing the case, Sharon Johnson Coleman, serve at least 10 years in prison.
After the hearing, Jeffrey Lichtman, Guzman Lopez’s attorney, said the 10-year agreement was not set in stone.
“I don’t know what it’s going to end up being,” Lichtman said. “It’s very early, so it’s hard for me to get an idea of how this will end.”
Chapo’s two other sons, Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar and Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar, remain at large in Mexico, where they have been searched tirelessly by both legitimate authorities and Zambada García’s sons and their allies. Over the summer, the brothers reached an unusual agreement with their former rivals from the Jalisco New Generation gang, essentially trading criminal territory in exchange for protection from their enemies.
Other top cartel leaders also face charges in the United States. Among them are José Angel Canobio Inzunza and Nestor Isidro Pérez Salas, both experienced members responsible for overseeing the security of the Chapito family.
Although the drug trafficking charges in Guzman Lopez’s guilty plea were significant, they pale in cinematic drama compared to the accusations surrounding Zambada García’s kidnapping. Zambada García, known as El Mayo, has long been one of Mexico’s most wanted men and has evaded capture countless times in recent years, evading U.S. and Mexican authorities.
Using his family connections, Guzmán Lopez Zambada convinced García to come down from one of his hideouts in the Sinaloa Mountains in July 2024 to attend what he assumed was a meeting to resolve a dispute between local politicians. Guzman Lopez then ambushed the older man, drugged him with tranquilizers, and took him on a turboprop plane across the border, where he was arrested by waiting American agents.
The plea agreement with Guzmán-López stated that the U.S. government did not “solicit, induce, sanction, approve, or consent” to the kidnapping plot. However, that happened after Guzmán Lopez contacted the FBI via a secret channel, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter, who commented on the condition of anonymity.
Guzman Lopez hoped the kidnapping would give him and his brother Ovidio credit with the government that could lead to favorable sentences, said Andrew Erskine, the assistant U.S. attorney working on the case. But Erskine told Judge Coleman that neither of them would take any credit for kidnapping Zambada-Garcia.
Alan Foer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on criminal cases related to the January 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald Trump.