The United States kidnapped a Sinaloa cartel boss in Mexico and lied to its president.
A woman brought a truck in last week for brakes. She runs a cleaning service over in Dalton, employs six women, sends money home to her mother in Monterrey every month. Her cousin was shot in a Saltillo convenience store parking lot last year during the cartel war that produced “El Mayo” Zambada’s capture. She’d read about Mexico’s accusation against former Ambassador Ken Salazar and asked me what I thought.
Here’s what I think.
The receipts for the lie aren’t buried in classified files. They are parked inside a museum in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, with a placard on them. Mexico’s Attorney General, Ernestina Godoy, filed a formal accusation this week against Salazar, charging he misled the Mexican government about the July 2024 capture of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, the alleged co-founder of the Sinaloa cartel. Salazar told President Claudia Sheinbaum in August 2024 that the operation was a cartel-on-cartel affair — no U.S. plane, no U.S. pilot, no U.S. agents. He repeated the line on social media this week: “It was not our plane, not our pilot and not our operation.”
Then somebody went and looked. Mexican outlets Milenio and Azteca Noticias surfaced the aircraft first. Sheinbaum says her consulate in New Mexico verified directly that the plane is on display at the War Eagles Air Museum in Santa Teresa, advertised as an FBI success. The pilot the FBI used — Mexican media identifies him as Mauro Núñez, “El Jando,” described as a trusted pilot for Los Chapitos — is now facing federal charges in Washington. Mexico’s Attorney General has connected the timing: judicial benefits granted in U.S. courts to Ovidio Guzmán López, one of El Chapo’s sons, landed just before Zambada was taken off Mexican soil. The filing names that pattern as “a coordinated strategy and an unlawful agreement between Los Chapitos and U.S. agencies, primarily the FBI.”
The accountable U.S. officials this week aren’t abstractions. They are:
Former Ambassador Ken Salazar, who made the false statement and is now protected by diplomatic immunity from any criminal consequence in Mexico, and who is out promoting his memoir, The Borders, while the Mexican president has to file formal accusations against him.
Christopher Wray, the FBI Director in July 2024. The plane is in the Bureau’s museum. The pilot is in federal court. The success was claimed in the Bureau’s name.
Former Attorney General Merrick Garland, who Salazar says communicated the same false line to Mexico at the time.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington handling the federal case against El Jando. Whoever that prosecutor is, they’re prosecuting the pilot of an operation the ambassador told Mexico the U.S. didn’t run.
The current FBI Director, who has the plane in a museum with a placard calling it a Bureau success and has not, as of this writing, issued any public acknowledgment that the operation took place on Mexican soil without Mexico’s consent.
This isn’t a diplomatic disagreement. This is what it looks like when one government treats another like a toolbox and the receipts come out.
But the people paying for it aren’t abstractions either. The woman in my shop whose cousin was killed in Saltillo. The Mexican families whose country was treated like a toolbox — the families of the people disappeared in Mexico since the war on drugs escalated, the journalists, the migrants pulled into the cartel pipeline the U.S. helped create. The working families on this side of the border who hire the cleaning crews and the construction crews and the night-shift chicken-plant workers, and who get criminalized by a “war on drugs” architecture that produces exactly the kind of operation Mexico just formally named. The border towns — Eagle Pass, Laredo, Nogales — where the cartel spillover and the fentanyl landing and the federal agents operating without the sheriff’s permission all show up at the same time. The working people in those towns who never get a museum exhibit or a federal supermax for their trouble.
The United States got its cartel boss in a federal supermax. The FBI got a museum exhibit. The Mexican president got the documentary proof that her government was lied to by the ambassador sitting in her capital. The working people on both sides of the border — the ones who never get a museum exhibit or a federal supermax — get the bill and the silence.
Mexico is right about what happened. The question Mexico has now formally put on the record is whether the United States is going to admit it.