The murder of two important fentanyl traffickers linked to Ismael The May Zambada, this weekend in Sinaloa, has put the region on alert, following the capture at the end of July of Zambada himself, one of the main leaders of the Pacific cartel. The tortured bodies of the brothers Martín and Leobardo García Corrales appeared on Saturday morning on a rural road in the municipality of Elota, near Culiacán. A third body lay next to theirs. The United States justice system was offering up to four million dollars in reward for information leading to the capture of each one.
The García Corrales brothers had long been in the crosshairs of US authorities, accused of conspiring to traffic fentanyl to that country and of possessing automatic weapons. In the indictment from the US Attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York, which the Department of Justice published months ago, the prosecutor reported meetings between the two brothers with partners and employees of their network, in which they discussed the production of the powerful opiate, responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people a year in that country.
The prosecutor details the monitoring of the brothers and two other partners between August 2022 and February 2023. Although he does not explain how they get the information, the official recounts, for example, the negotiation of Leobardo García Corrales with other associates on a ranch in Sinaloa, in August 2022, for the sale of a ton of fentanyl north of the Rio Bravo. García Corrales, who according to the prosecutor boasted of his good relationship with El Mayo Zambada and with the old leader of the cartel, Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán offered to send the drugs to New York at a rate of $15,000 per kilo.
In another meeting in September of that year, García Corrales explained to another colleague, this time in a restaurant in Mexico City, that he intended to move his fentanyl laboratories to Oaxaca, on the South Pacific coast. In October, US authorities intercepted a delivery of 10 kilos of his fentanyl in a parking lot in California. The story is similar with his brother. In August of that year, he held a meeting with another of the accused, Humberto Beltrán Cuen, alias Don Chino, to discuss fentanyl sales in the US. In that meeting, the man said that he and his brother had helped El Chapo hide after his first prison escape, in 2001.
In the case of Martín, the prosecutor details meetings in which he and Beltrán Cuen discuss the purchase of “hundreds” of automatic weapons, 50-caliber rifles and grenades. In a later meeting, the two men agree to the purchase of weapons, which Cuen will handle, in exchange for fentanyl. The account goes on to detail meetings in Austria for the purchase of the weapons, meetings in the United States for the delivery of fentanyl in exchange for the weapons, etc. Beltrán Cuen was arrested in Guatemala in March of last year and later extradited to the United States.
It is not clear what role the García Corrales brothers play in the Sinaloa cartel’s organizational chart, although the amount of the reward offered and their apparent ability to buy weapons and manufacture fentanyl illustrate their power. The US Attorney’s Office and the Department of Justice link them to Zambada and El Chapo, a connection they infer from the brothers’ own statements. In April of last year, however, the same Attorney General’s Office and the DEA included them in the Los Chapitos network, the faction led by El Chapo Guzmán’s sons, of whom only two remain free, Iván Archivaldo and Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar, after the capture of Ovidio Guzmán in January of last year and the apparent surrender of Joaquín Guzmán López in July.
Guzmán López’s surrender this summer is at the centre of a stormy succession of events, still difficult to understand, to which the discovery of the bodies of the García Corrales on Saturday could be linked. On July 25, Guzmán López landed near El Paso, Texas, in the company of Zambada. The US authorities were waiting for them. Apparently, Guzmán had set a trap for his father’s old partner, so that he would attend a meeting in Culiacán, with the governor of Sinaloa, Rubén Rocha, of Morena, and his political enemy, the future federal deputy Héctor Cuen. Zambada’s role would be to mediate.
According to El Mayo, in a letter released from prison in the US, he had gone to the meeting with Rocha and Cuen in confidence, but then Guzmán and his henchmen kidnapped him, put him on a plane and took him to the US, where the authorities have accused Zambada of several crimes for years. Zambada writes that Héctor Cuen was killed right there, at the place where he was kidnapped in Culiacán, not at a gas station in the city, in an isolated event, as the State Attorney General’s Office has claimed. The Cuen branch of the criminal farce ended up blowing up the state Attorney General’s Office, whose head resigned this week, days after the Attorney General’s Office questioned the thesis of his local colleagues on Cuen’s death, and his actions in the case.
The death of the García Corrales brothers now complicates the matter further and puts tension in a delicate region. Since the fall of El Chapo Guzmán in 2016, conflicts between the different factions of the Sinaloa Cartel have intensified. First, his sons confronted their father’s old lieutenant, Dámaso López, alias El Licenciado, who was arrested shortly after. Since then, they have tried to take control of the State, their father’s routes and connections. The trick to hand over Zambada has placed the criminal group in uncharted territory, without veteran figures, to the point that it is pertinent to question whether it makes sense to continue talking about the Sinaloa Cartel as a minimally cohesive and organized entity.
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