434. The Co-Founders

Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada García has been sentenced to life in prison in the United States.

Zambada co-founded the Sinaloa Cartel with Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán. The Sinaloa Cartel became the largest drug trafficking organization in Mexico and one of the most significant in the world. El Chapo was captured, extradited to the United States in 2017, tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison in 2019. Zambada watched this happen and continued operating.

In July 2024, Zambada boarded a small plane in Mexico. He has said he did not know the plane was going to the United States. He says he was brought to the aircraft under false pretenses by Joaquín Guzmán López — who is El Chapo's son. El Chapo's son arranged for his father's former business partner to be transported to US soil. Zambada landed in Santa Teresa, New Mexico. He was arrested. He did not re-board.

(I want to note that these are the two methods by which the co-founders of the Sinaloa Cartel arrived in US federal custody: extradition and aircraft-boarded-under-false-pretenses-arranged-by-the-other-founder's-son. Both men are now in federal prison for life. I am not editorializing. I am describing the sequence.)

Zambada pleaded guilty in August 2025 to drug trafficking charges. He received a life sentence last week. He is 76 years old.

El Chapo is serving life at ADX Florence, the federal supermax facility in Colorado. Zambada will be designated to a federal facility. The two men co-founded the organization together. They built it over decades. They are now both in US federal custody, having arrived by different means, in the same decade, to the same outcome.

The Sinaloa Cartel continues to operate. This detail is available in the same news cycle as the sentencing and has not prompted any revision to the general assessment of how the decade went.