Sinaloa Cartel Arrests Terrorists and Corruption | Judicial Watch

I’m Chris Farrell, and this is OnWatch. Welcome to OnWatch, everybody. It’s your Just Watch podcast, where we go behind the headlines to report on news and information the mainstream media really doesn’t want you to know about, where we try to recover some lost history and we try to explain the inexplicable. In the realm of inexplicable, today we’re going to look at the arrest of two of Sinaloa Cartel’s kingpins, as you may recall 10 days ago. News reports detailed the arrest of two of Mexico’s most powerful drug traffickers. El Mayo Zambada and Joaquin Guzman Lopez were apprehended at the Santa Teresa International Jetport, a small private facility in New Mexico, about 20 miles west of El Paso.

These are arrests that are likely to upend the world of international drug trafficking. All kinds of turf battles and extreme violence in Mexico are bound to play out in the weeks ahead. This sort of reporting, especially about Mexican cartels and nefarious corrupt practices around El Paso, is nothing new for Judicial Watch. We’ve been reporting on corruption, terrorism, crime, and our poorest southern border in that region since 2014. That’s 10 years covering the rat’s nest of criminality known as El Paso. Judicial Watch supporters who have viewed our documentary on the narco terror plot based from El Paso.

The documentary is called The Sun City Cell. You’ll be familiar with another small private airfield called Cielo Dorado. It’s only about eight miles from the private airfield where the arrests were made of the Cielo Kingpins just a few days ago. You can learn more about our investigation that uncovered the terror bomb plot originating in El Paso but targeting Chicago by watching The Sun City Cell. Sun City is, of course, El Paso’s nickname, so that’s why it’s featured in the title of the documentary. So, while any disruption to the activities of the Cielo cartel must be seen as beneficial to the United States, last week’s arrests give us pause to wonder about timing and targeting by federal law enforcement.

What is new about the Cielo cartel leadership? Nothing. What’s new about the organization itself? Nothing. What’s new about the activities of the Cielo cartel? Again, nothing. So, why now? What is different? What persons or factors drove the sudden and really amazing development? In our 50-year history, it’s actually more than 50 years, but the 50-year history of our war on drugs, what is it? Did we suddenly crack the code on arresting cartel leadership just now? Will there be any real prosecutions or will there be some weird sweetheart deal? You just saw the Biden-Harris administration do a quick double reverse because they were willing to give the architects of 9-11 a plea deal and then they quickly rescinded it because they saw public outrage in an election year and you can’t be seen to be giving terrorists a break or a plea deal.

So, when it comes to the Cielo cartel, are we going to see a real prosecution or a sweetheart deal? That’s the question. Here’s the bigger question. Where are the corresponding indictments of U.S. officials? What corrupt law enforcement officers or other public officials will be rolled up as part of the Zumbada arrest? Surely, these drug kingpins do not operate in a vacuum. Ask yourself, when was the last major U.S. public official arrested who was connected to the Mexican drug cartels? Who? Think about it. Any senators, mayors, chiefs of police? What corresponding U.S.

arrests have there been? I’ll give you time to think about that. But in the meanwhile, let me continue and point out that Zumbada was reportedly the most cautious of the key Sinaloa leaders and that’s why he’s really an old man who stayed atop of a very dangerous pack of cartel animals. Zumbada and the Sinaloa cartel are the number one source of fentanyl and that’s the number one killer of Americans aged 18 to 45. They are killing Americans at a rate that is faster and larger than the Nazis and Japanese combined in all of World War II.

Other than a few sad news reports and some compelling human interest stories, Americans apparently don’t give a damn. If they did, they would be marching on Washington, D.C. and demanding that the government and law enforcement act immediately. The lack of outrage and action on this is probably the real story. Since 2014, Judicial Watch has reported on law enforcement corruption at the federal, state, and municipal level in the El Paso region. There’s the bizarre story of a guy named Jesus. Eddie is his nickname, Eddie Campa, the former chief deputy of the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office.

That’s a Texas agency responsible for patrolling more than a thousand square miles of the area around El Paso and the population there is about 700,000 people. This senior former law enforcement official, his story is wrapped up in mystery and intrigue. We had claims from federal, state, and municipal law enforcement sources that this top cop, Campa, was criminally indicted for embezzling millions of dollars in Homeland Security funds. We investigated the matter and there appears to be no public record of Campa’s indictment. We then contacted a guy named Darryl Fields, who at the time was the U.S.

Attorney’s Office Public Affairs spokesman. It’s a Western District of Texas, and he told Judicial Watch that, quote, he can neither confirm nor deny that Campa was indicted. Campa ended up contacting Judicial Watch based on our reporting, and he said that none of the allegations were true, and he doesn’t know where they came from. It’s all kind of crazy, he said. Judicial Watch also reported on terror threats in the El Paso region to the border crossing point by a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device and also to Fort Bliss, which is the U.S. Army post in El Paso, both around the time of August 2014.

They were vehemently denied by the Obama administration, and even then FBI Director Jim Comey flew down to El Paso and held a press conference to reject our claims. Interestingly, 48 hours later, our claims were ratified or certified. They adopted them, and that denial and then that reversal were cited and documented contemporaneously by the El Paso Times. Very curious stuff. Around the same time frame, we had Beto O’Rourke, who some of you may remember. He was a Democrat congressman representing that region of El Paso in the Congress. He telephoned area offices of the FBI, Homeland Security, Border Patrol, and was frantic to find out how Judicial Watch had found out this information that we’ve been reporting.

O’Rourke’s calls, he essentially threatened the people in the office and told them to keep their mouths shut and don’t cooperate with media. They then put it in a memo and disseminated it through law enforcement channels, saying that anybody that cooperated with any of our journalistic efforts to report on what was going on down there, that anybody cooperating would be fired and criminally charged. So we continued our efforts in El Paso, and that took us to courtrooms in both Chicago and El Paso, where we reported on the plea deals of a guy named Ahmad Caracra and Hector Pedroza, plotters in the Sun City Cell documentary.

And there are elements of that case that are still not explained to the American public. The Justice Department and FBI is really stonewalled. But rest assured, we don’t forget, we never will. And we’ll continue to report on that because the characters involved, several of them are still on the loose. They’re still out in the public. Back in 2016, that’s eight years ago, Judicial Watch reported that Mexican drug traffickers helped Islamic terrorists stationed in Mexico across into the United States for targeting purposes, to look around at targets or places, facilities, and people to attack.

And that was certified to us by a high-ranking Homeland Security official. Among the jihadists that traveled back and forth across this poor southern border is a Kuwaiti named Sheikh Mohammed Omar Khabir. He’s an ISIS operative, living, or at the time living, in the state Mexican state of Chihuahua, which is immediately adjacent to El Paso. Khabir trained hundreds of Al-Qaeda fighters in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen. And he’s lived in Mexico, according to our informant, our information, a government source. Now Khabir trains thousands of men, mostly Syrians and Yemenis, to fight for ISIS. And he does that out of Mexico, in an area, a region nearby Juarez.

And that information was gathered by an intelligence source of ours in Mexico. Khabir is not quiet about this. He bragged about his operations in an Italian newspaper. The Mexican Foreign Affairs Secretary, who was interviewed in that newspaper report, the Mexican Secretary at the time, Claudia Ruiz, she’s quoted in the administration at the time. And the U.S. media are, quote, culpably neglecting this phenomenon, meaning the terrorist training, adding that this new wave of fundamentalism could have nasty surprises in store for the United States. So I’ve reviewed a number of cases that come to mind because of the arrest of Zambada and Chapo Jr.

And I hope I’ve made my point. But here’s the point that I think is even more disturbing or overriding. We still have open cases and investigative operations that are unresolved or that we really don’t have sufficient information to make the case public. And they are just as bad, and in some cases worse, than what I have reviewed here. It’s bad enough that we have cartels working with the communist Chinese and militant Islamist supremacists that are actively working to destroy our country. But in my mind, what is worse is that we have corrupt law enforcement at the municipal state and federal level that are compromised.

And we have U.S. government officials and politicians that are complicit too. Judicial Watch will continue to investigate and root out corruption wherever we find it. We don’t quit and we never forget. I’m Chris Farrell on Watch. [tr:trw].

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