No stopping drug trade, Mexico mob boss tells journalist

Mexico City: One of Mexico's top drug lords, a fugitive for years, has given a clandestine interview to a Mexican magazine in which he says he would contemplate suicide rather than be taken alive.

Esmail ‘El Mayo' Zambada says he lives "in panic" of being imprisoned but that if he is eliminated, there would be little impact on the flourishing narcotics trade.

The report appeared in Sunday's editions of Proceso, Mexico's leading news weekly, and was excerpted on the magazine's website. The author is Julio Scherer Garcia, the magazine's founder and first editor, who is also known for a series of well-regarded books on drug traffickers.

The interview did not reveal new or surprising information but was remarkable for simply having taken place. What Zambada's motives were is unclear.

Scherer says he was summoned to the interview through an anonymous note that set a time and place where he would be picked up to be taken to the drug boss' hideout. He describes a series of long drives with switching-off chase cars and hours of waiting in a safe house. He finally ends up in a remote, mountainous location where Zambada appears, flanked by well-armed bodyguards. The author and drug baron then sit down to a lunch of orange juice, meat and beans.

Zambada and Joaquin ‘El Chapo' Guzman lead the Sinaloa cartel, the largest and oldest of drug-trafficking rings. Each has a $2-million (Dh7.3-million) bounty on his head, offered by the government of President Felipe Calderon.

Despite suspicions among some Mexicans that the government is not making a serious effort to capture Zambada, the 60-year-old trafficker claims in the interview the army has closed in on him four times. He fled through the mountainous countryside that he knows down to the stones, he says.

"I don't know if I would have the guts to kill myself" if captured, he says. "I want to think that yes, I would kill myself."

Son's arrest

Scherer attempted to draw out Zambada on the arrest of his son Vicente, who was extradited to the US in February. But he declined to discuss the matter, saying it hurts too much. Scherer also didn't have much luck in getting Zambada to talk about the scope of his empire and wealth.

Zambada criticises the government's military-led offensive against his and other cartels, saying it's too little, too late if the goal is really to hurt the drug trade.

"The problem with the narco business is that it involves millions. How do you dominate that?" he asks. "As for the bosses, locked up, dead or extradited, their replacements are already standing by." The government's drug war, he says, is lost. Why lost? asks Scherer. The narcotics trade and everything that goes along with it, Zambada responds, are inside the society "as deeply rooted as the corruption".