The Lies About El Mayo

Journalists and commentators are spinning tales that Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada has been duped by the sons of his compadre El Chapo, that they forcibly put him on a plane, and that the FBI arrested him at a Texas airport. But after the speculation comes the truth: El Mayo’s lawyers, as well as those of the Guzmán family, have debunked these narco-fictions.

Rather than correcting themselves, the disinformation duo supports a pilot whose hobby is coming to Mexico to kill animals. This pair then stirs up a diplomatic crisis, invoking conflict between the president and his security secretary, and constructing a narrative where they predict that AMLO will be incriminated by Zambada. As if that weren't enough, they also forecast that Genaro García Luna will be released from prison.

Don’t be fooled (again). Judge Brian Cogan has just denied García Luna’s request for a new trial, and he will be sentenced in October. Cogan, who will oversee Zambada's trial in New York, also presided over El Chapo's trial, where he barred the defense from mentioning the names of high-ranking officials.

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Even so, some witnesses and Guzmán's lawyer revealed the trafficker's pact with DEA agents and named former presidents, García Luna himself, lawyers like Ignacio Morales Lechuga, the late Jesús Antonio Íñiguez, and other former officials. All denied the accusations.

Unlike his predecessors, AMLO understood that a president doesn’t need to make deals when choosing a path that isn’t war. He said as much in one of his morning press conferences: he decided not to extend the spiral of violence. As I read the theory of Mexican philosopher Sayak Valencia, I conclude that El Mayo was (is) a representative of "Gore Capitalism," understood as the dystopian and bloody version of globalization and neoliberalism.

The absence of a diplomatic crisis is due to the prudence López Obrador has shown this time. For the president, it is the U.S. government that must respond, especially if no Mexican authority was involved in the supposed negotiated surrender of El Mayo. While some spread the notion that there is total ignorance within AMLO and his cabinet regarding the Zambada case, there are others of us who see a handful of commentators attempting to undermine the next government.

No Return Address: This space, to which I have been granted access by Franco Carreño, the director of El Heraldo de México, is called Logical Irrealism because, as Rodrigo Fresán, the inventor of this wordplay, writes, while magical realism is "the measured and just intrusion of the fantastic into the fabric of reality," logical irrealism is a kind of "minimal shards of logic, like the lights on the charros' suits, embroidered over the everyday fabric of the unreal and impossible."

BY ALEJANDRO ALMAZÁN
COLLABORATOR