Mexico City.- The capture of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and Joaquín Guzmán López, son of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, will benefit the Democratic Party and whoever is its candidate in the presidential election next November, considered Raúl Benítez Manaut and Pía Taracena.
Foreign policy experts agreed that this blow to two of the main leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel must be analyzed in the context of the political struggle taking place in the neighboring country, in which Donald Trump has used the issue of drug trafficking to attack the administration of President Joe Biden.
“It is a very important capture and this helps President Biden and the Democratic candidate, who is almost certain to be Kamala Harris, to say that the United States government is acting and has functioning intelligence services,” said Benítez Manaut, who is a researcher at the Center for Research on North America at UNAM.
The arrest of the drug lords, said Taracena, an academic from the Department of International Studies at the Universidad Iberoamericana, comes a few days after Donald Trump made statements about Mexico being petrified of drug cartels and that the United States was not doing enough.
“I think the arrests of Mayo Zambada and the son of Joaquín Guzmán Loera are not a coincidence. The message is very clear to the American public because there was a perception that the Democrats had open borders,” he said.
The fact that the arrest took place in Texas, he said, reinforces the message that the Biden administration has the capacity to arrest one of the most difficult drug lords to catch in recent decades, a historic leader who had never set foot in a prison.
“These are temporary issues because what a joke it would have been to catch Mayo at a time when it is not really necessary to change the narrative and I think it is completely within the electoral strategy in the United States,” he said.
Benítez Manaut recalled that throughout his criminal career, El Mayo Zambada was a very careful man who did not make the mistakes of other drug lords like El Chapo Guzmán, who became very ostentatious, which is why it is surprising that he was captured in the United States.
“It is very important that the arrest took place in Texas because it acknowledges the transnational nature of the phenomenon. Many simplistic versions of the DEA and some American analysts said that the problem of drug trafficking was a problem of the Mexican government, of the inability to control drug trafficking, of corruption.
“But the fact that he was captured in Texas means that he knows how to move around in that state and speaks to a perspective that points to the fact that, with the persecution in Mexico, he may have moved around the United States more easily. That is one hypothesis,” he said.
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