May and capital punishment

The possibility that he will be sentenced to death for the crimes he is accused of in the United States is the central argument used by Ismael El Mayo Zambada to request that the Mexican government request his repatriation.

"If the Mexican government does not act, I will be sentenced to death without a doubt," the drug lord warned in the letter delivered last week to the Mexican Consulate in New York.

The issue of capital punishment is a sensitive one in Mexico, a country that has not included it in its legislation since 2005, when it was removed from the Constitution at the initiative of then-President Vicente Fox .

The last time it was applied in the common jurisdiction was on June 17, 1957, when the infanticides José Rosario Don Juan Zamarripa and Francisco Ruiz Corrales were executed in the penitentiary of Hermosillo, Sonora. In the military sphere it has not happened since June 17, 1961, when the soldier Isaías Constante Laureano was shot in Saltillo, Coahuila, for an act of insubordination in San Luis Potosí that caused the death of two of his companions.

A few days before Zambada 's letter became known, the director of the Fondo de Cultura Económica, Paco Ignacio Taibo II , had created a controversy by saying, wrongly, that the death penalty was still in force in the Constitution, and that Mexicans who declared themselves "Trumpists" would have to assume the role of traitors to the country and be shot as such.

“There is still dirt on the Cerro de las Campanas,” Taibo said in an interview on the official television station Canal Once. “Treason against the country, I didn’t just make this up, is punishable by death,” added the writer, who has not been reprimanded for these statements.

Mexicans' rejection of the death penalty has grown stronger since 1993, when the state of Texas administered a lethal injection to Ramón Montoya Facundo , the first compatriot to be sentenced to death in more than half a century, and the first to be so since the reinstatement of that punishment in the United States in 1977. Since then, another 12 Mexicans have been executed in the United States. The most recent case was that of Abel Ochoa Revilla in February 2020.

Now, could El Mayo be sentenced to death? Last October, Judge Brian Cogan – who also handled the cases of Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán and Genaro García Luna – said that the prosecution could ask for that sentence, provided for cases of crimes against humanity, with the legal argument that the consumption of fentanyl, whose trafficking to the United States is attributed to the Sinaloa kingpin, is behind hundreds of deaths in the United States.

However, there is a long way to go from there to Zambada being able to die by lethal injection. In recent years, the average time between sentencing and the execution of the death penalty has been more than 20 years, due to the large number of legal appeals that defendants can file against execution.

There have even been prisoners on so-called death row who have died of natural causes before the final order to execute them was given, such as James Frazier , who died of Covid in 2020, at the age of 79, in an Ohio prison, 15 years after being sentenced for the murder of a neighbor from whom he stole money to buy cocaine.

So El Mayo , who is 77 years old and in fragile health, would hardly live to be taken to the place of execution. His lawyers are most likely aware of the sensitivity of the death penalty in Mexico and, together with the disputes their client seems to have with Mexican politicians, are taking advantage of the situation.

What does the boss want then? Surely to play his last card to return to Mexico because, as the Colombian drug trafficker Pablo Escobar once said, for someone like him, a grave in his own country is better than a prison in the United States.