For decades, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada cultivated one of the most low-profile images in the Mexican drug trade: a kingpin who shunned the spotlight, spoke little, and preferred ranches and cattle to ostentatious parties.
Yet, behind that country-man facade, Sergio Villarreal Barragán—alias “El Grande”—describes a leader capable of manipulating alliances, pitting his own partners against one another, and ordering murders while keeping his hands seemingly removed from the conflict.
In *Narcocracia: El Grande revela cómo los cárteles conquistaron México* (Narcocracy: El Grande Reveals How Cartels Conquered Mexico) by journalist Anabel Hernández, the former Sinaloa Cartel member and close associate of Arturo Beltrán Leyva recalls his meetings with Zambada. He offers a portrait vastly different from that of the reserved, calculating kingpin: a man he describes as “boring,” a cocaine user obsessed with *corridos* and his cattle, but also an operator who—in his words—would “throw the stone and hide his hand.”
According to Sergio Villarreal Barragán, the Sinaloa Cartel co-founder was never a man for raucous parties, live bands, or flaunted luxury. His style—in contrast to that of Amado Carrillo Fuentes or Arturo Beltrán Leyva—was quieter, monotonous, and calculated.
El Grande met Zambada during the 1990s, a time when he was working for “El Señor de los Cielos” (The Lord of the Skies). From that point on, he says, he was able to observe the differences between the two kingpins.
While Carrillo Fuentes organized gatherings featuring famous musicians, alcohol, cocaine, models, and police commanders, “El Mayo” preferred meetings that were more sober—and, to Villarreal Barragán, tedious. “El Mayo didn’t have live music like Amado did, nor did he bring women along,” recounts El Grande. “He had this shitty little tape player and would play his *corridos*—playing them, rewinding them, playing them, rewinding them. Then he’d show videos of his ranch; a cow would walk by, and he’d say, ‘That one’s the daughter of so-and-so, that other one’s the daughter of so-and-so.’ It was a boring, boring, boring way to get drunk,” he notes.
According to the testimony, Zambada tended to drink beer in small quantities—specifically, small, cold bottles that were constantly replaced. He also used cocaine during some gatherings, although, according to El Grande, he went through periods where he gave up drugs and turned to supposed homeopathic remedies to manage his anxiety.
The former trafficker maintains that he never saw El Mayo accompanied by women in Mexicali, though he claims that at Amado Carrillo Fuentes’s parties, El Mayo would occasionally slip away briefly with one of the female guests.
The contrast with Arturo Beltrán Leyva was stark. According to El Grande, Beltrán was flamboyant, with a taste for tailored suits, jewelry, parties, horses, live music, and relationships with actresses and models. El Mayo, by contrast, preferred to cultivate the image of a country man—reserved and seemingly removed from the limelight.
Yet, behind that low-profile persona, Villarreal Barragán describes an operator who understood the importance of maintaining control without directly exposing himself.
“El Mayo didn’t have friends; he looked out for his own self-interest,” Villarreal Barragán states in the book. “And if he screwed someone over, he’d look for a pretext to justify why he did it.”
