Legendary drug lord Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada was expecting it to be a routine, private meeting with state governor Rubén Rocha.
But as he headed to the gaudy conference centre on the dusty outskirts of Culiacán, the capital of Mexico’s ultra-violent Sinaloa state, he was in fact walking into a trap worthy of a Hollywood script.
Zambada, 76, had been asked to arbitrate, he says, in a dispute over a local university, involving Mr Rocha and his political rival Héctor Cuén, a former Culiacán mayor and ex-rector of the university.
For the co-founder of the Sinaloa cartel, Mexico’s most feared organised crime syndicate, such clandest...
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