Pleaded guilty last year after prosecutors declined death penalty
Zambada’s sentencing in Brooklyn federal court is the culmination of the U.S. government’s yearslong effort to bring the long-elusive Sinaloa cartel co-founder to justice, the Associated Press reported. He was arrested in 2024 after he said he was kidnapped in Mexico and flown to Texas.
Zambada pleaded guilty in August 2025 after prosecutors said they would not seek the death penalty. Speaking through a Spanish-language interpreter, he apologized “to everyone who has suffered or been affected by my actions.”
Prosecutors said Zambada ordered torture and plotted murders as he and Guzmán grew the Sinaloa cartel into the world’s largest drug trafficking organization, flooding the United States with tons of cocaine, fentanyl, methamphetamine and other drugs. Zambada was described by prosecutors as the cartel’s strategist and dealmaker, more involved in its day-to-day operations than Guzmán, who was convicted in 2019 and is serving a life sentence at the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.