Dr. Vanda Felbab-Brown, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, stated that the arrest of two top Sinaloa leaders in the United States could exacerbate inter-organizational violence in Mexico, further threatening the U.S. with organized crime. Dr. Felbab-Brown made this statement in a commentary piece on July 26.
"...It will likely augment the already very intense criminal violence in Mexico and possibly leave behind a criminal market even more threatening to the United States," said Felbab-Brown. "Several factors could offset this result in terms of the threat calculus for the United States, chief among them what information El Mayo provides to U.S. law enforcement on the immense corruption at the top of Mexico's political and government circles and security services."
On July 25, Joaquin Guzman Lopez, son of Sinaloa founder "El Chapo," and Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, associate founder of the cartel, were both taken into custody, according to a Department of Homeland Security press release.
According to Dr. Felbab-Brown, the arrest of El Mayo and Joaquin Guzman Lopez was preceded by several months of investigation by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. The arrests of these "high-value targets" are likely to cause violence within the cartel as members vie for now vacant positions of power. In addition, violence could also escalate due to the conditions under which both men were arrested; Guzman Lopez got El Mayo onto a plane under false pretenses, landing in El Paso with U.S. officials waiting to arrest them both. It is presumed that Guzman Lopez turned them both in to lessen his eventual punishment.
Felbab-Brown said two of the sons of El Chapo still continue to run the operations of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico. The cartel's drug trafficking and human smuggling into the United States across the southwest border could possibly be forcibly overtaken by the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion if infighting continues to weaken the structure of the Sinaloa cartel.
Though Felbab-Brown emphasizes these potential problems following the arrests, she indicates that there are several positive potential outcomes as well. She stated that El Mayo has been the "corrupter-in-chief" in Mexican government and business for years and could provide information that would give the United States evidence to convict other officials. This could be crucial to disrupting the cartel's dominance in Mexico and its encroachment into the United States.
Dr. Vanda Felbab-Brown is a senior fellow at Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings, according to their website. She is also director of the Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors and author of numerous books, papers, and policy reports.
