Who Are the Alleged Top Cartel Leaders Who Were Just Arrested? Meet El Chapo's Son and Ismael Zambada Garcia

Two top capos – Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada Garcia, who for years allegedly ran the Sinaloa Cartel with El Chapo, and one of the infamous kingpin’s sons, Joaquín Guzmán López – were arrested Thursday, July 25 in El Paso, Texas, as part of a federal crackdown on cross-border fentanyl trafficking in the midst of rampant U.S. opioid addiction.

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who announced their arrests in a statement Thursday, said the
“top cartel leaders” had allegedly helped lead “one of the most violent and powerful drug trafficking organizations in the world.”

They are each facing multiple federal charges alleging that they ran the Sinaloa Cartel’s “criminal operations, including its deadly fentanyl manufacturing and trafficking networks,” according to Garland, who did not further specify the charges against them.

Ducking international enforcement for decades, El Mayo has never before been arrested, with the DEA previously offering up to $15 million for his capture.

An online federal records search on Friday yielded a handful of federal cases against El Mayo, open in Texas, Illinois, D.C. and New York, the latter in the same Brooklyn courthouse where El Chapo was previously convicted of similar charges in 2019.

The arrests come on the heels of a slew of prior take-downs targeted at the cartel, which gained international notoriety when its former leader, Joaquín Archivaldo “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera tunneled his way out of a Mexican prison in 2015.

El Chapo was later re-captured and extradited to New York, where in 2019 he was sentenced to life plus 30 years for 10 federal drug charges connected to cartel operations.

Among the 14 cooperating witnesses who testified against their former leader, was El Mayo’s son, Jesús Vicente Zambada Niebla, who began cooperating with federal authorities sometime after his extradition to the U.S. in 2010.

During El Chapo’s trial, Brooklyn prosecutors alleged that along with El Mayo, four of El Chapo’s sons, known as “Los Chapitos” or “the little Chapos” – who they said, along with El Chapo’s wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, who briefly served a federal sentence on related charges – had helped their father escape and were running the cartel in his place. 

The day after the kingpin’s conviction, a federal indictment – also naming El Mayo – was unsealed against the younger Joaquín, charging him and another brother, Ovidio Guzmán López, with one count of conspiracy to “knowingly, intentionally, and willfully” distribute cocaine, methamphetamine and marijuana for cross-border importation.

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Nine months later, Ovidio was briefly arrested in Mexico, then handed back to the cartel in a bloody battle between the cartel and Mexican authorities that claimed at least 29 lives that October, according to an early body count by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Ovidio was recaptured in January 2023 and arraigned in federal court in Illinois that September, where he pleaded not guilty to five counts in a superseding indictment pertaining to his alleged involvement in his father’s cartel.

In May, Néstor Isidro “El Nini” Pérez Salas – the cartel’s alleged “lead sicario,” per federal prosecutors – was extradited to the U.S. on allegations that in addition to serving as a cartel hitman, he also “was a part of the Sinaloa Cartel’s production and sale of fentanyl.”

“Fentanyl is the deadliest drug threat our country has ever faced,” Garland said in Thursday’s statement. “And the Justice Department will not rest until every single cartel leader, member, and associate responsible for poisoning our communities is held accountable.”

With Thursday’s arrest, two Chapitos – Iván Guzmán Salazar and Alfredo Guzmán Salazar– remain on the run.