Former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar defended himself in a statement on Wednesday after President Claudia Sheinbaum and the Federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR) accused him of lying when he said in 2024 that the United States wasn’t involved in the operation to capture Sinaloa Cartel leader Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada.
In July 2024, Zambada was arrested by U.S. authorities after arriving at the Doña Ana County International Jetport in New Mexico in a light plane along with Joaquín Guzmán López, one of the sons of convicted drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and a pilot. Last December, Guzmán López said in a U.S. court that he orchestrated the kidnapping of Zambada before the Sinaloa Cartel kingpin was forced onto a plane and flown to the United States.
Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada and a son of ‘El Chapo’ arrested in Texas
In a statement in August 2024, Salazar, who served as U.S. ambassador to Mexico between September 2021 and January 2025, said that Guzmán López surrendered voluntarily to U.S. authorities, but added that evidence indicated that Zambada was taken to the United States against his will.
In the statement, the-then ambassador said that “no United States resources were used to facilitate Guzmán López’s surrender, asserting that “it was not our plane, not our pilot, not our people.”
Salazar also said that no flight plan was presented to United States authorities before the plane took off in Sinaloa, and asserted that the pilot was not a United States government employee nor was he hired by the U.S. government or “any U.S. citizen.”
In light of a recent report by journalist Luis Chaparro asserting that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had admitted involvement in the capture of Zambada, Sheinbaum on Tuesday asked the question, “Did Ambassador Ken Salazar lie?” when he released his statement in August 2024. She subsequently suggested that he did.
On Wednesday, the FGR — which is investigating the report by Chaparro and his media outlet/YouTube channel Pie de Nota — also called into question the veracity of Salazar’s remarks.
If it is confirmed that the FBI and/or other U.S. agencies were involved in an operation to capture Zambada, the Mexican government would consider that another violation of Mexican sovereignty by the United States.
Sheinbaum has already denounced U.S. interference in Mexico in light of the CIA’s alleged participation in a drug lab raid in Chihuahua in April and U.S. prosecutors’ request for the arrest of Sinaloa Governor Rubén Rocha Moya and various other current and former officials accused of drug trafficking in league with the Sinaloa Cartel. She, like her predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has asserted that the U.S. government was involved in the capture of Zambada, which occurred while former U.S. President Joe Biden was still in office. Sheinbaum has noted that the López Obrador administration asked U.S. authorities to explain how the arrest of Zambada came about, but it never received a clear response.
Stemming from his belief that the U.S. government was involved in an operation to capture Zambada, López Obrador asserted that the United States was partly to blame for the escalation of violence between “Los Chapitos” and “Los Mayos,” whose long-running feud intensified after El Mayo’s kidnapping and arrest, claiming well over 2,000 lives and causing the disappearance of thousands more since September 2024. Sheinbaum has indicated that she shares that view.
The plane used to fly Zambada and Guzmán López to the United States was recently placed on display at the War Eagles Museum, located at the Doña Ana County International Jetport. In his report, Chaparro, who obtained access to the plane, said that the U.S. government “has accepted” that the capture of Zambada was an FBI operation.
He asserted that a “joint work group” made up of personnel from the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations and the Central Intelligence Agency were “behind” the operation to capture Zambada and used Guzmán López as “the main material operator of the kidnapping” of “El Mayo.”
🔴Aquí el documento con el que el FBI se atribuye la operación del secuestro de “El Mayo” Zambada.
Se trata de la Operación Air Kings.
El documento ya lo tiene el gobierno mexicano, quien lo solicitó a raíz del reportaje de Pie de Nota, me dice @LuisKuryaki
📃@Piedenota pic.twitter.com/Gf8kddnOh8
— Azucena Uresti (@azucenau) July 9, 2026
“Today, Pie de Nota obtained an official statement attributed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI, where it explicitly accepts its participation,” Chaparro said in his video report, which was posted to YouTube last week.
Zambada pleaded guilty to drug trafficking charges in U.S. federal court last August, but has not yet been sentenced.
Salazar: ‘The truth is the truth’
In a statement published to his personal website and X account, Salazar acknowledged that Sheinbaum “has asked a question: who told the truth?”
“Let me answer it plainly:” he said.
“Attorney General Merrick Garland and I communicated to the Mexican government in our public statements and to the Mexican government on July 25 and 26, 2024 on the arrests of Ismael Zambada García and Joaquín Guzmán,” Salazar said.
“We communicated to the Mexican government that it was not our plane, not our pilot, and not our operation,” he said, apparently referring to the statement he released on August 9, 2024.
“La verdad es la verdad, the truth is the truth,” Salazar said, expressing his position in both Spanish and English.
Statement by Former Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar
President Claudia Sheinbaum has asked a question: who told the truth? Let me answer it plainly:
Attorney General Merrick Garland and I communicated to the Mexican government in our public statements and to the Mexican…
— Ken Salazar (@KenSalazar) July 8, 2026
FGR: Salazar’s assertion that US was not involved in the capture of ‘El Mayo’ is ‘false’
At a press conference on Wednesday, Raúl Armando Jiménez, a high-ranking FGR prosecutor, said that “according to the information being collected” by the FGR as part of its investigations into the capture of Zambada, Salazar’s assertion that “there was no intervention” from a U.S. agency is “completely false.”
He and Attorney General Ernestina Godoy said that the former U.S. ambassador wouldn’t be summoned to Mexico to answer questions or investigated due to the diplomatic immunity he had while representing the U.S. government.
Godoy, attorney general since last December, said that FGR “records” related to the Zambada case “warn” that U.S. authorities “on various occasions have provided false or imprecise information” regarding the “identification” of the plane used to transport Zambada and Guzmán López to the United States.
She also said that if it is confirmed that there was a “successful, planned and organized operation carried out by the FBI to capture and kidnap on Mexican soil a person of Mexican nationality in order to transport him and incarcerate him in another country, everything indicates that we would be facing three serious situations.”
If that were the case, there would be “a series of violations of Mexican and international law,” Godoy said.
There would also be an “agreement outside the law” — i.e., a pact between U.S. authorities and Guzmán López — as well as a “lie from a U.S. diplomat,” she said, referring to Salazar.
Godoy acknowledged the statement the ex-ambassador released and August 2024, and said that if he lied in it, that act would represent “a violation of the fundamental principle of good faith in diplomatic relations, as set forth in various international treaties.”
She said that the FGR has seven different investigations related to the capture of El Mayo. The autonomous agency said in 2024 that it was investigating whether treason had been committed, given that kidnapping a person in Mexico for the purpose of handing him or her over to the authorities of another country constitutes that crime. The FGR has also sought to obtain information from U.S. authorities about any involvement they had in the capture of Zambada and his transfer to the United States.
In a statement based on the information Godoy and Jiménez provided at the press conference on Wednesday, the FGR linked the capture of Zambada to the legal status in the United States of Ovidio Guzmán, another son of “El Chapo” Guzmán and brother of Joaquín Guzmán López.
“On July 23, 2024, it was reported by the media and through reports from Mexican diplomatic missions in the United States that Ovidio ‘N,’ who was extradited by the Mexican government on September 15, 2023, joined that country’s witness protection program,” the FGR said.
“Two days later, on July 25, 2024, the U.S. Embassy announced the change in the precautionary measure [i.e., custodial status of Ovidio Guzmán] without consulting the Mexican government,” it said.
“That same day, July 25, the operation took place that resulted in the illegal extraction or kidnapping of Ismael ‘N,’ through a strategy that is currently under investigation, carried out in Sinaloa and concluded in New Mexico.”
The FGR asserted that “the proximity in time” of the events, as well as the family ties between Ovidio and Joaquín Guzman allowed an inference to be made that the kidnapping of Zambada “was the result of the change of the precautionary measure” applicable to Ovidio Guzmán.
Added to that is “the reception of 17 relatives” of the extended Guzmán family by the U.S. government in 2025, the FGR said.
In effect, the FGR is alleging — or at least suggesting — that Joaquín Guzmán López collaborated with the U.S. government on the capture of Zambada to win concessions for his brother (and presumably himself) and safety for his relatives in the United States. Guzmán López, one of the leaders of the “Chapitos” faction of the Sinaloa Cartel, pleaded guilty to drug trafficking in federal court in Chicago in December, but has not yet been sentenced.
The pilot of the plane was arrested in Mexico last year and handed over to US authorities
At Wednesday’s press conference, another FGR official, David Boone de la Garza, said that the pilot of the plane that flew Zambada and Guzmán López to the United States was arrested in Mexico last August on weapons charges. The pilot has been identified as Mauro Alberto Núñez Ojeda, aka “Jondo.”
Boone said that Núñez was deported to Mexico after flying the plane to the United States, and he subsequently continued committing crimes in Mexico until his arrest. He said that Mexican authorities transferred Núñez to the United States after his arrest.
The Los Angeles Times reported in May that “the pilot was apparently released after landing [in New Mexico] and allowed to return to Mexico.”
“He was later arrested in Sinaloa by Mexican security forces and quietly handed over to the Trump administration last August, along with more than two dozen other suspected cartel figures,” the L.A. Times reported on May 10.
“Court records show he pleaded guilty to federal charges last month in Washington, D.C., admitting that his job in the cartel was to ‘work directly’ for [Iván Archivaldo] Guzmán Salazar” — another son of “El Chapo” Guzmán and “Chapitos” leader — “overseeing his fleet of aircraft, serving as his personal pilot and ferrying shipments of drugs and weapons.”
With reports from El Universal, La Jornada, El Financiero and Reforma
