What is the fallout from the US arrest of the drug lord ‘El Mayo’ Zambada?

Monterrey, Mexico – It was a dramatic fall for two high-ranking members of Mexico’s infamous Sinaloa cartel.

On July 25, the United States announced it had arrested 76-year-old Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and 38-year-old Joaquin Guzman Lopez at a rural airport near El Paso, Texas.

One was the cartel’s co-founder. The other was the son of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, another co-founder in the drug-trafficking syndicate.

But while the US has hailed the arrests as a victory in its efforts to stop cross-border smuggling, experts in Mexico fear what happened may unleash a wave of instability, both in terms of international relations and local security.

Two weeks later, much remains unclear. Even the circumstances surrounding the sudden arrests are shrouded in mystery.

Speaking anonymously, US officials have told journalists that Guzman Lopez lured Zambada onto a small propeller plane under the guise of inspecting clandestine airstrips in northern Mexico.

But, the officials explained, it was a trap: Guzman Lopez planned to surrender to US officials and wanted to bring Zambada down with him.

Zambada’s attorney, Frank Perez, has contested this account, alleging that Guzman Lopez instead kidnapped his client. Perez also rejected speculation that Zambada willingly surrendered.

Both men have since pleaded not guilty to drug-trafficking charges in US court.

While the circumstances that brought Zambada to the US are unlikely to have any bearing on the criminal charges he faces, Falko Ernst, a senior security analyst at the International Crisis Group, said the situation could potentially damage cross-border relations with Mexico.

The Mexican government, after all, voiced frustration at the surprise nature of the arrests.

“That could very well backfire in terms of further curbing trust between both countries, in terms of collaborating on matters of security,” Ernst said. “We’ll see to what degree Mexico will try to leave clear that they are not fans of this sort of thing becoming a normalcy.”

The cross-border relationship, Ernst added, is an important one to both countries. “Security is only one pillar of a very complex bilateral relationship that also includes trade, commerce, manufacturing, the energy sector and migration, among other things.”

Already, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and Rosa Icela Rodriguez, the country’s security secretary, have called for the US to reveal the circumstances surrounding the arrests.

“You ask if it was a delivery, if it was capture,” Icela Rodriguez said in an interaction with reporters during the president’s morning press conference on July 26. “That is part of the investigation and part of the information that we would be expecting from the government of the United States.”

On August 2, Mexico’s Foreign Secretary Alicia Barcena also explained that she had asked her US counterpart, Antony Blinken, for a detailed report about the plane that transported the drug traffickers, including its takeoff location.

The arrests come at a pivotal moment in the bilateral relations between the US and Mexico. The US is in the midst of a heated presidential race, and immigration is a top election issue.

Ernst pointed out that there is a growing discourse in Washington, mainly among Republicans, that aggressive military action is needed to confront the cartels and stop them from trafficking fentanyl and other drugs.

Figures like former President Donald Trump have called on the US to “wage war on the cartels”. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis even threatened to “send in the Coast Guard and the Navy” if Mexican ports were not secured.

“These more hardline voices have been gathering steam,” Ernst said.

All the while, he added, bilateral relations have deteriorated, and there’s a growing sense that patience is dwindling. “We’ve seen a stagnation and inertia in defining security cooperation and security policy in Mexico.”

But the tensions following Zambada and Guzman Lopez’s arrests are not only on the international scale.

Andres Villarreal, a journalist based in Culiacan, Sinaloa, warns the events of July 25 could intensify violence in specific regions of Mexico itself.

The journalist described an uneasy calm in the northwestern state of Sinaloa, as the arrests have put the population on edge. “It’s like that calm that happens after a storm — or before a storm,” he said.

In the months preceding the arrests, Sinaloa had already experienced a series of upheavals in its eponymous cartel, Villarreal explained.

Federal forces had intensified their presence in certain areas, leading to arrests, captures and even deaths among key members of the drug-trafficking organisation.

Those attacks on the cartel’s hierarchy have heightened the uncertainty among residents who fear violent reprisals.

Iliana Padilla Reyes, a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who has studied violence and peace-building in her home state of Sinaloa, explained to Al Jazeera that the cartel operates within a well-established structure, governed by violence.

Key figures in both legal and illegal spheres dictate the rules within this system.

“This policy of going after the heads of organised crime is what has caused these violent breaches of agreements, and that generates a lot of instability,” Padilla Reyes said.

One potential consequence of these arrests, given the removal of a key leader like Zambada, is a succession dispute.

The extent to which this could trigger infighting among Sinaloa cartel factions remains uncertain. Villarreal noted that, while speculation abounds, it is likely the arrests will provoke significant turbulence within the organisation and its broader ecosystem.

The journalist predicts the turmoil could affect the drug “transfer routes, what the business itself represents, who it covers, who is around the business [and] the cells that are scattered throughout the country”.

“Because we are not just talking about the state of Sinaloa,” Villarreal said, pointing to the international network the cartel controls.

Ernst, the security analyst, echoed that observation. He believes the consequences of Zambada’s arrest will stretch across Mexico and beyond.

“The Sinaloa cartel has a presence in almost all of Mexico’s states. So the ripples could be felt really throughout Mexico but also beyond Mexico, seeing how the Sinaloa cartel does have a presence in Central America, South America and other parts of the world as well,” he said.

That instability, he explained, is one consequence of targeting high-level drug lords without confronting the whole cartel structure.

That approach — known as the “kingpin strategy” — has long been a cornerstone of the US’s so-called “war on drugs”. The idea is that, by attacking the leadership, the rest of the cartel is left in disarray.

But critics like Ernst said the “kingpin strategy” has not dismantled major drug-trafficking organisations in Mexico but has rather fragmented them.

“This has really left the country with a very, very high number of highly violent feuds between a greater number of smaller or medium-sized criminal groups that emerged from splintering off from far bigger and more cohesive criminal organisations,” said Ernst.

He added that flashy arrests focused on big-name criminals often engender a simplistic “good versus evil” narrative, obscuring the intricate nature of criminal networks and their connections to the government.

“It is politically convenient to be able to focus and to signal out the stereotypical bad guys and perpetuate that tale of the all-powerful criminal actor and cartel that exists independently from state power, which is not the case,” Ernst explained.

Experts like Ernst and Padilla were adamant that the July arrests will not disrupt the flow of narcotics into the US, no matter how important Zambada and Guzman Lopez were to Mexico’s drug trade.

Padilla explained that earlier arrests of El Chapo and his other son Ovidio Guzman Lopez in 2023 also did not halt the production and trafficking of substances like cocaine and fentanyl.

Villarreal went further, quoting Zambada’s words from a 2010 interview with the late Mexican journalist Julio Scherer: “If they catch me or kill me … nothing changes.”

“He himself establishes that nothing is actually going to happen,” Villarreal explained.

Zambada may have been the Sinaloa cartel’s most recent figurehead, but Villarreal believes his role as leader will easily be filled by another.

“Right now his name is Ismael, and tomorrow he could be called Andres, Juan, Francisco, whatever it may be. It will be someone very similar who will take control of the organisation.”