Zambada Niebla Case Exposes US Drug War Quid Pro Quo

U.S. government officials have long presented the drug war through the media as a type of "Dirty Harry” movie, in which hardscrabble cops are engaged in a pitched battle with hardened street criminals who threaten the very social fabric of life behind America’s gated communities.

Of course it’s a big pretense, with the truth being closer to what really goes on in the marketplace of the US everyday. The drug war is, in reality, a drug business in which backroom deals are cut to advance the profit motives of the business entities involved, whether they be narco-trafficking organizations, or weapons manufacturers or government bureaucracies — and the aspiring, greedy careerists who inhabit their leadership ranks.

But even the US government makes mistakes, and in this case it’s the government’s own agents and prosecutors who have that egg on their face via affidavits filed in early December in a controversial criminal case now pending in the Windy City.

The pleadings supposedly advance the government’s case against a major Mexican narco-trafficker, Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla. In reality, though — for any person of a critical mind reading them — the court documents demonstrate the insidious nature of the cooperation that exists between the US government and Mexico’s Sinaloa mafia organization.

Nowhere has the peel on that sour fruit been stripped back more cleanly with the paring knife of truth, revealing the bloody pulp inside, than in the ongoing narco-trafficking case against the rising Mexican Sinaloa Cartel capo Zambada Niebla — son of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada Garcia, who, together with business associate Joaquin Guzman Loera (El Chapo), serves as a godfather of the Sinaloa organization.

According to Zambada Neibla, he and the rest of the Sinaloa leadership, through an informant [Humberto] Loya Castro, negotiated a quid-pro-quo immunity deal with the US government in which they were guaranteed protection from prosecution in exchange for providing US law enforcers and intelligence agencies with information that could be used to compromise rival Mexican cartels and their operations.

The alleged deal assured protection for the Sinaloa Cartel’s business operations while also undermining its competition — such as the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes organization out of Juarez, Mexico, the murder capital of the world.

At the same time, the information provided by the Sinaloa Cartel to US agencies against its rivals assures a steady flow of drug busts and media victory headlines for US agencies and for the Mexican government. That propaganda is necessary for hoodwinking their citizens into believing that progress is being made in the drug war and thereby assuring the continued funding of bloated drug-war budgets and support for failed policies that have cost the lives of some 50,000 Mexican citizens since late 2006 and ended any hope of a productive life for hundreds of thousands of US citizens — most wasting away in US prisons and not a small number the victims of street homicides linked to drug deals gone bad.

This is the true picture of the drug war in America and across the border in Mexico. It’s a bloody business that throws off a lot of money, power and privilege for those pulling the strings — both the “good” guys and the “bad” guys.

Perhaps any deal that might exist between the Sinaloa leadership is limited to Chapo Guzman and Ismael Zambada, perhaps it was put in place by a US intelligence agency under the guise of law enforcement, or through some secret pact cobbled together by the US State Department that does not have to be honored by the Justice Department because it applies only in Mexico. In this case, the devil is in the details, and in all those scenarios, the cloak of national security could easily be invoked to prevent evidence of the pact surfacing in a court of law.

None of this can be ruled out, but nor can it be verified so long as the US government can play by two sets of rules, one for its citizens and those accused in its courts, and another for government agents acting in an “official” capacity under the protection of national security.

And Zambada Niebla, in such a case, easily becomes a pawn in such a king’s game. It is no stretch to assume that as a rising leader in the Sinaloa Cartel, with a powerful father presently at the helm of the mafia organization, that he had many enemies who saw him as a future threat, possibly even Chapo Guzman himself sees it that way.

In any event, it is clear that the informant Loya Castro moved between both worlds freely, with his identity as a double agent well-known in both worlds, yet he was not skinned alive by the Sinaloa organization nor was he locked up by US law enforcement, nor used by US agencies to set up Chapo Guzman or Ismael Zambada for capture or assassination.

Why is that?

Read the complete article online at Narco News.