U.S. Agents and the Rendition of El Mayo

What role did Americans play in the kidnapping of the kingpin?

“If it is impossible to bring the suspect to stand trial by the normal extradition procedure, rendition to justice is an alternative. Rendition to justice is a technique by which a suspected person is forcibly abducted in another state,” from Rendition, Extraterritorial Abduction, and Extraordinary Rendition.

Frank Perez cut his teeth as a narcotics detective in the Dallas police force but then switched from busting drug traffickers to becoming an attorney defending them. Late last month, he finally landed the client of a lifetime, Mexican kingpin Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, one of the biggest drug lords in history.

On Saturday, Perez released a letter to the media on behalf of his client with a story of how Mayo came to fly over the border into an airport near El Paso on July 25 and be arrested. It set off explosions south of the Rio Grande.

The letter strategically uses legal terms so Perez almost certainly helped compose it but it’s in the voice of the 76-year-old Mayo, who has been in the drug game more than half a century. It reaffirms much of what we reported in CrashOut in an exclusive here. Mayo was lured to a meeting with one of El Chapo’s sons, Joaquín Guzmán López, in the Huertos de Pedregal residential community in the Sinaloa state capital Culiacán on July 25, he says. At about 11 am, gunmen overpowered Mayo’s bodyguards and kidnapped him.

“As soon as I set foot inside that room, I was ambushed,” Mayo says. “A group of men assaulted me, knocked me to the ground, and placed a dark-colored hood over my head. They tied me up and handcuffed me, then forced me into the bed of a pickup truck. During this entire ordeal, I was subjected to physical abuse…I was forced onto a private plane.”

The account thus reinforces the version that Mayo was betrayed by Guzmán López and his brothers of the “Chapitos” (the little Chapos) who handed him to U.S. agents. “The notion that I surrendered or cooperated voluntarily is completely and unequivocally false,” Mayo says. “I was brought to this country forcibly and under duress, without my consent and against my will.”

The letter also reaffirms that Mexican politician Héctor Melesio Cuén, who was subsequently murdered, was at the meeting. But it throws out a new bomb by alleging the Sinaloa governor, Rubén Rocha, was also scheduled to be there. Rocha is in the Morena party of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the claim forced the government go on the defensive over narco corruption.

Of course, a drug lord’s words should be taken with caution and there has been a tangle of evidence springing out on the case from videos to flight trackers. A lawyer purported to represent the Guzmán family (Chapo and his sons) wrote a letter claiming the opposite: that there was no treachery and Mayo did indeed hand himself in. We need to keep an open mind on what the truth is. But the idea of betrayal and kidnapping has become the established version and currently has most evidence to support it.

Yet another factor that is even more murky is what role U.S. agents could have played in the capture of Mayo. Did Guzmán López tell his U.S. handlers of his plan and did they give him the okay to do it? If this is the case, are there questions about U.S. agents outsourcing a kidnapping to cartel killers? Or were there, as some sources have alleged, even U.S. agents on the ground in Mexico? Or did Guzmán López just call up U.S. agents that day and tell them he was flying over the Mexican border with a present?

Mayo’s letter says little about the role of the United States besides stating that after the flight landed, “It was there on the tarmac that U.S. federal agents took custody of me.” Yet by publicizing the account of the kidnapping, Perez could be building up to a legal challenge over the nature of the arrest - or using it for leverage to make a deal.

FBI vs DEA

The DEA leads the global fight against drugs and can be viewed in Mexico as a rather omnipotent force. But there is actually a splattering of U.S. agencies who have pushed into the cartel war including the FBI, ATF, ICE, HSI (Homeland Security Investigations), and pertinently, the CIA. It appears the FBI was the lead agency in negotiating with Guzmán López and securing the capture of Mayo.