Two years after the outbreak of the war in the Sinaloa Cartel, the brothers Iván Archivaldo and Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar, sons of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, as well as Ismael Zambada Sicairos, alias “Mayito Flaco” and son of “El Mayo” Zambada, remain at large and at the head of the two factions that have sustained the conflict since September 9, 2024.
While their brothers, parents and other relatives and operators have already been arrested, sentenced or extradited, they remain in the crosshairs of the Mexican and US authorities, and so far no operation to capture them has produced results.
The United States government offers 10 million dollars for each of the Guzmán Salazar brothers, while the official DEA file places Zambada Sicairos as a fugitive since 2020 for conspiracy to distribute a controlled substance.
One of the alleged escape episodes that would have occurred in these two years would have occurred in February 2025. Military commandos broke into a safe house in the Tierra Blanca administration, north of Culiacán, after the arrest of Mauro Alberto Núñez, alias “El Jando”, a trusted pilot of Iván Archivaldo, on February 8 of that year.
According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, signed by journalists Steve Fisher and José de Córdoba, the special forces found in the bathroom of the house a closet that hid the entrance to an illuminated three-block tunnel to an abandoned house. The capo had already fled, leaving behind 15 burner phones, laptops and family photographs.
Journalist José Luis Montenegro offered a more detailed version of the episode: the operation occurred on the night of February 20, 2025, and Iván Archivaldo managed to escape thanks to a warning call from his cousin Jaziel Abdiel Guzmán Araujo, alias “El Gabacho”, son of Aureliano Guzmán Loera, “El Guano”. According to Montenegro, the boss already knew about the arrival of federal forces at least an hour before the operation.
The leader of Los Chapitos would have fled with his escort Eric Bastidas, alias “El 09”, and – always according to the reconstruction of Montenegro – used as a distraction strategy the surrender of his own pilot to the authorities.
The tunnel, passable on foot and prepared several days in advance according to official reports, replicated the mechanism that his father used to escape from the Altiplano prison in 2015: an underground exit connected to the bathroom.
