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Mexican drug cartel leader Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada said he was ambushed and kidnapped when he thought he was going to meet the governor of the northern state of Sinaloa, then was taken against his will to the United States, according to a letter released Saturday by his lawyer.
In the two-page letter, Zambada said fellow drug lord Joaquín Guzmán López asked him to attend a meeting July 25 with local politicians, including Sinaloa Gov. Rubén Rocha Moya, from the ruling Morena party.
But he was led into a room where he was knocked down, a hood was placed over his head, he was handcuffed, and then taken in a pickup truck to a landing strip where he was forced into a private plane that finally took him and Guzmán López, one of the sons of imprisoned Sinaloa drug cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, to U.S. soil, according to the letter.
Zambada’s comments were released a day after the U.S. ambassador to Mexico confirmed that the drug lord had been taken to the United States against his will, when he arrived in Texas in July on a plane along with Guzmán López.
The letter raised question about links between drug traffickers and some politicians in Sinaloa, the Pacific coast state that is the home base of the Sinaloa cartel, but the governor denied any links to the criminals and said he was not in Sinaloa that day. After the arrests, he had said he was in Los Angeles.
“There is no complicity with crime,” Rocha said Saturday at an event in Culiacán alongside Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the country’s president-elect, Claudia Sheinbaum.
“We have all the confidence in the governor,” López Obrador said.
Referring to his rivals, Rocha said, “They want to make me a narco by force.”
“If they said I was going to be there (at the meeting), they lied, and if he (Zambada) believed them, he fell into the trap,” the governor said.
