Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada, aged 76, was a kingpin in moving drugs into the US, was guaranteed the sentence following his guilty plea last year to trafficking charges
Mexican drug kingpin Ismael Zambada García, also known as ‘El Mayo,’ has been jailed for life in the US after pleading guilty to trafficking vast quantities of cocaine and other substances as the head of the infamous Sinaloa Cartel.
Zambada, 76, is one of the most high-profile cartel bosses to face justice in the United States, following his guilty plea last year to trafficking charges.
The kingpin helped traffic tonnes of cocaine, fentanyl, methamphetamine and other drugs into the US for years before being arrested in 2024 after being kidnapped in Mexico and flown to Texas.
As co-founder and leader of the Sinaloa cartel, one of the deadliest and most powerful narcotics organisations in the world, Zambada spent decades as one of the US government’s most wanted criminals.
His sentencing in Brooklyn federal court is the culmination of the U.S. government’s yearslong fight to bring the long-elusive Sinaloa cartel co-founder to justice.
Zambada ordered torture and plotted murders as he and co-founder Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán grew the Sinaloa cartel into the world’s largest drug trafficking organization and flooded the US, prosecutors said.
He was seen as the cartel’s strategist and dealmaker and was more involved in its day-to-day operations than the flamboyant Guzmán, who was convicted in 2019 and is serving a life sentence at the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.
Zambada pleaded guilty in August 2025 after prosecutors said they wouldn’t seek the death penalty. Speaking through a Spanish-language interpreter at the time, he apologized “to everyone who has suffered or been affected by my actions.”
He also asked that he serve his sentence at a prison hospital. Zambada “contends with a complex of age-related health issues” and “will need ongoing access to medical care,” defence lawyer Frank Perez said in a sentencing memo.
Federal prosecutors at a previous hearing asked Judge Brian M. Cogan to consider “the serious ongoing security risks” Zambada poses, arguing that some facilities “may not be appropriate for the security concerns posed.”
Judges often make recommendations about where inmates should serve time, but it’s up to the federal Bureau of Prisons to decide.
Zambada “was one of the most—if not the most—prolific and powerful narcotraffickers in the world,” prosecutors said in a sentencing memo. “It would be difficult to overstate the magnitude” of his crimes and the scale of the “corruption, violence, and other harm he spread throughout Mexico, the United States, and the world.”
Along with a life sentence, he is also expected to face $15 billion in financial penalties, which prosecutors said reflected proceeds from the cartel’s crimes under his leadership.
