Sinaloa Cartel co-founder faces life sentence after guilty plea

Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada – Co -founder of the Sinaloa cartel – pleaded guilty on Monday for managing a criminal business and a racketeering.

The American prosecutor General Pam Bondi announced the plea in Brooklyn, saying that Zambada had confessed a whole crime life with the Sinaloa cartel, labeled a foreign terrorist organization.

“Thanks to the relentless work of our prosecutors and our federal agents, El Mayo will spend the rest of his life behind bars. He will die in an American federal prison where he belongs,” said Bondi. “His guilt of guilt brings us closer to our objective of eliminating drug cartels and transnational criminal organizations through this world which flood our country of drugs and traffickers and homicides.”

Over the past three decades, Zambada and his accomplices have won billions of dollars by important toxic drugs like fentanyl in the United States, has noted. Zambada founded the Sinaloa cartel alongside Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

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The co-founder of the Sinaloa cartel, Ismael “El Mayo”, Zambada pleaded guilty of racketeering and other charges on August 25, 2025. (Reuters / Gustavo Graf)

While the cartel initially built their companies by cocaine, it turned to heroin and fentanyl under the direction of Zambada.

“They bought fentanyl precursor chemicals in China. They did the medication in Mexico and flood it in our communities, killing our children,” Bondi said. “El Mayo also ensured that the Sinaloa cartel exploits and protected its drug trafficking activity based on extreme violence.”

For example, she explained that the cartel had used military quality weapons and ordered gray killers to kill their opponents. The cartel has also committed “horrible” assassinations, abductions and horrible crimes to maintain discipline within the organization, she added.

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US prosecutor General Pam Bondi announced that Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada pleaded guilty to crimes like racketeering on August 25, 2025. (Kayla Bartkowski / Getty Images)

Zambada is also accused of having paid bribes to government representatives to control the corrupt officials and officers, who in turn protected his workers and his drug shipments when they went from Mexico to the United States

“El Mayo’s crimes have been so prolific that over the past two decades, no less than 16 federal courts across our country, 16 of the Western District of Texas in Chicago, in the eastern district of New York. “But under the direction of President Trump, he was finally translated into justice.”

The Ministry of Justice (DOJ) said that Zambada had already been charged by indictments filed in the Oriental District of New York, the western District of Texas, the Columbia district, the North Illinois District, the South California District and the California Central District.

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Mexican drug thorn Ismael Zambada Garcia, also known as “El Mayo”, who co -founded the notorious of the Sinaloa drug cartel is in police custody. (Left image: Gracieuse of the General Procuraduria of the Republica / Handout via Reuters / Photo / Right Photo: US Department of State via AP)

Under the advocacy agreement, Zambada accepted the transfer of the indictment of the West District of Texas to the Oriental District of New York for a plea and a conviction. With this agreement, he is also held responsible in the Oriental District of New York for crimes in the two accusation acts. All other indictments are rejected when Zambada is sentenced on January 13, 2026.

It risks a compulsory minimum life in life prison for managing a continuous criminal business and a maximum sentence of life for racketeering.

He also agreed with a confiscation of $ 15 billion during the conviction.

Research by American police for more than two decades, Zambada has been in police custody since July 25, when he landed in a private plane at an airport outside El Paso with another fugitive cartel, Joaquín Guzmán López, according to the federal authorities.

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Zambada later declared in a letter that he had been with force in Mexico and brought to the United States by Guzmán López, one of the sons of El Chapo.