Mexico’s war on the drug trade is futile even if cartel bosses are caught or killed, as millions of people are involved in the illicit business, a senior drug chief said in an interview published on Sunday.
Ismael “el Mayo” Zambada, the right-hand man of Mexico’s most notorious drug lord, Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman, blamed the government for surging drug violence and said Mexican President Felipe Calderon was being duped by his advisors into thinking he was making progress.
“One day I will decide to turn myself in to the government so they can shoot me ... They will shoot me and euphoria will break out, but at the end of days, we’ll all know that nothing changed,” Zambada told the investigative newsmagazine Proceso.
“Millions of people are wrapped up in the narco problem. How can they be overcome? For all the bosses jailed, dead or extradited, their replacements are already there,” he said.
Mounting drug violence in Mexico has killed 19,500 people since Calderon launched an army-led attempt to crush the cartels after taking power in late 2006. Although financial markets take the daily reports of mayhem in stride, foreign companies are starting to think twice about new investments.
Arturo Beltran Leyva, a former ally turned rival of the Sinaloa cartel, died in a hail of gunfire in December as Mexican marines surrounded him in a luxury apartment complex.
Proceso, an influential magazine with a strong history of covering the drug war, said Zambada contacted the magazine directly in February to set up an interview because he was interested in meeting Julio Scherer, the magazine’s founder.
He gave specific directions on when and where the interview would take place, the publication said — though it didn’t reveal where.
The magazine offered no other explanation of why a reputed kingpin would give an interview after a lifetime on the run. It is almost unheard for Mexican drug suspects to speak to the media while still free.
The magazine published a front-cover photograph of a burly man who appeared to be Zambada wearing a mustache and a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes holding his arm around Scherer.
Zambada, 62, one of Mexico’s most wanted drug lords, has never been arrested despite a US$5 million reward offered in the US.
He refused to talk about his past in the drug trade in the interview, saying he was now spending his time as a farmer and rancher, and dismissed claims that Guzman was a billionaire.
However he said he lived in constant fear and that the army had come close to catching him four times.
“I’m panicked that I’ll be locked up ... I don’t know if I would have the courage to kill myself. I like to think that I would,” he said. “I’m terrified of being incarcerated.”
Zambada said he had felt the army closing in on him four times and that soldiers had gotten close to Guzman even more often.
“I fled into the countryside. I know the vegetation, the rivers, the rocks, everything,” Zambada said. “I’ll get caught if I get complacent, careless, just like El Chapo.”
Guzman was arrested in 1993, but escaped prison by hiding in a laundry truck in 2001.
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