Keegan Hamilton is the senior editor for legal affairs and criminal justice at the Los Angeles Times. He is a former editor and correspondent at Vice News, where he covered federal law enforcement, drug policy and organized crime. At Vice, he was the host and co-creator of the narrative podcast series “Painkiller: America’s Fentanyl Crisis,” which received an Edward R. Murrow Award for its exploration of the underlying causes of the recent surge in fatal overdoses linked to synthetic opioids. He also created and co-hosted the podcast “Chapo: Kingpin on Trial,” about the U.S. prosecution of infamous Sinaloa Cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán-Loera. His writing has been published by the Marshall Project, the Atlantic, the Village Voice, BuzzFeed News and other publications. A graduate of the University of Washington, Hamilton began his career reporting for alt-weekly newspapers in Seattle and St. Louis, Mo.
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According to federal prosecutors, Genaro García Luna, once his country’s equivalent of J. Edgar Hoover, enabled El Chapo and others to operate with impunity.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has dismissed allegations from his country’s jailed ex-security chief that he has links to drug cartels.
The case of ‘El Menchito’ has highlighted the generational divide between boomer-aged drug cartel bosses and their millennial children.
Mexican officials are demanding answers from investigators in the case of a politician whose killing appears tied to the capture of Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada.
Zambada, a Sinaloa cartel founder, was long believed to have police, soldiers, political leaders in his pocket. In a rare public statement, he acknowledges those ties -- and contradicts Mexican officials’ version of his capture.
Amid eroding trust between the U.S. and Mexico on security issues, Mexican officials were caught off guard by the arrest of Sinaloa cartel leaders Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada García and Joaquín Guzmán López.
There is growing evidence to suggest Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada was hauled against his will from Mexico to El Paso in an effort by El Chapo’s son to curry favor with U.S. authorities.
El abogado de Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada niega que su cliente haya sido simplemente engañado para abordar un avión hacia Estados Unidos, diciendo que el capo de la droga capturado fue ‘secuestrado por la fuerza’.
Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada’s lawyer denies that his client was merely tricked into boarding an aircraft to the U.S., saying the captured drug kingpin was “forcibly kidnapped.”
A pesar de llevar más de cuatro décadas prófugo como uno de los fugitivos más buscados del mundo, el capo de la droga mexicano Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada nunca había pasado una sola noche en la cárcel, hasta ahora.