Even in the operatic annals of Mexican organized crime, it was a shock last year when one of the country’s biggest drug lords was abducted by a son of his former business partner and flown across the border into the hands of American federal agents.
The story sounded so improbable that many in Mexico, including some government officials, were skeptical that it was true. Had the once-untouchable kingpin, Ismael Zambada García, really been kidnapped by a younger man he had known for years, Joaquín Guzmán López, who was also a son of the infamous drug lord known as El Chapo?
But on Monday, Mr. Guzmán López pleaded guilty to a sweeping set of charges that included the abduction of Mr. Zambada García, who helped his father establish the Sinaloa drug cartel, one of the world’s most profitable trafficking organizations. At a hearing in Federal District Court in Chicago, he acknowledged luring Mr. Zambada García out of hiding in Mexico and having his associates place a bag over his head and zip ties on his hands as he was flown into American custody at an airport outside El Paso.
The guilty plea by Mr. Guzmán López was the most recent blow suffered by the Sinaloa cartel, which has been under such pressure from the Mexican government and its adversaries in the underworld that it formed a strategic alliance last summer with one of its most reviled competitors.
The plea also came at a confusingly contradictory moment in the Trump administration’s handling of the international war against drugs. While the White House has ramped up pressure on Venezuela in a purported effort to stem the flow of narcotics to the United States, President Trump on Friday announced that he would pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras. Mr. Hernández was convicted last year by an American jury of taking bribes from El Chapo as part of a yearslong conspiracy to smuggle cocaine across the U.S. border.
Most of the charges to which Mr. Guzmán López pleaded guilty were in an indictment unsealed in Chicago in April 2023, accusing him of joining his brothers in taking control of their father’s faction of the Sinaloa cartel after a federal judge in Brooklyn sent El Chapo — whose real name is Joaquín Guzmán Loera — to prison for life in 2019.
Prosecutors say Mr. Guzmán López coordinated logistics for the organization run by the brothers, who are known collectively as Los Chapitos. The brothers stand accused in several overlapping indictments of using graft and violence in a multicountry smuggling operation that brought billions of dollars of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, fentanyl and marijuana into the United States reaching back to 2008, when El Chapo was still in power.
In July, Mr. Guzmán López’s brother Ovidio Guzmán López entered his own guilty plea to similar charges in Chicago, acknowledging his role in overseeing the distribution of fentanyl in particular. As part of his plea deal with the government, he agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors, though it remains unclear what information he has provided.
At the hearing on Monday, prosecutors revealed that Joaquín Guzmán López has also been cooperating with them. They recommended to the judge overseeing the case, Sharon Johnson Coleman, that he serve at least 10 years in prison.
After the hearing, Jeffrey Lichtman, Mr. Guzmán López’s lawyer, said a 10-year deal was not set in stone.
“I don’t know where it’s going to end up,” Mr. Lichtman said. “This is very early, so it’s hard for me to really have an idea of how this ends.”
The other two sons of El Chapo, Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar and Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar, remain at large in Mexico, where they have been relentlessly pursued both by the legitimate authorities and by Mr. Zambada García’s offspring and allies. Over the summer, the brothers reached an extraordinary deal with their longtime rivals in the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, essentially trading criminal turf for protection from their enemies.
More top cartel operatives are also facing charges in the United States. Among them are José Ángel Canobbio Inzunza and Néstor Isidro Pérez Salas, both of whom were senior members in charge of overseeing security for Los Chapitos.
While the drug charges in Mr. Guzmán López’s guilty plea were significant, they paled in cinematic drama to the accusations surrounding the abduction of Mr. Zambada García, his father’s former partner in crime. Known as El Mayo, Mr. Zambada García had long been one of Mexico’s most wanted men and had escaped capture countless times in recent years, evading both American and Mexican authorities.
By using his familial connections, Mr. Guzmán López persuaded Mr. Zambada García to come down from one of his hide-outs in the mountains of Sinaloa in July 2024 for what he thought would be a meeting to resolve a dispute among local politicians. Mr. Guzmán López then ambushed the older man, drugging him with sedatives and flying him in a turboprop plane across the border, where he was apprehended by waiting U.S. agents.
Mr. Guzmán López’s plea agreement said the U.S. government did not “request, induce, sanction, approve or condone” the abduction plot. But it took place after Mr. Guzmán López had been in touch in with the F.B.I. through a secretive back channel, according to a person directly familiar with the matter who discussed it on the condition of anonymity.
Andrew Erskine, an assistant U.S. attorney working on the case, said Mr. Guzmán López had hoped the kidnapping would earn him and his brother, Ovidio, credit with the government that could result in favorable sentences. But Mr. Erskine told Judge Coleman that neither man would earn any credit for kidnapping Mr. Zambada García.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
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