Andrés Manuel López Obrador, former president of Mexico, accused the United States in his new book People of agreeing with the children of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán to transfer Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada to US territory, an operation that he described as “extrajudicial and interventionist” and that, according to his story, unleashed a wave of violence in Sinaloa.
In the book, presented this October 5, the man from Tabasco describes the operation of July 25, 2024 as the most serious disagreement with Joe Biden’s government during the last months of his mandate.
He maintains that the Department of Justice and US agencies “clandestinely and extraterritorially made an agreement” with the children of “El Chapo” to “kidnap and transport the co-founding leader of the Sinaloa Cartel on a private plane to US territory.”
López Obrador documents that, before the operation, Sinaloa recorded an average of 1.3 homicides per day; After Zambada’s arrest, that figure rose to 4.3 per day. The accumulated number, he maintains, was around 1,100 murders between August 2024 and the same month of 2025.
The former president attributes this outbreak of violence to a “hateful revenge” within organized crime, derived from interpreting Zambada’s surrender as a betrayal.
He assures that if the Mexican forces had carried out the arrest, “there would not have been such a loss of human life.”
