During last Wednesday’s press conference held by the Attorney General’s Office (FGR)—amidst timelines and announcements regarding counter-investigations—the most damaging detail of the entire “El Mayo” Zambada case was revealed almost in passing: the background of the pilot who flew him to the United States.
According to prosecutors Ernestina Godoy and David Boone, following the flight on July 25, 2024, the pilot requested deportation to Mexico. He returned, continued engaging in criminal activity, was arrested for illegal weapons possession, and was subsequently handed over to the United States under the National Security Law. Godoy added a grievance: at the time, the FBI had refused to provide the pilot’s identification details.
Read this carefully, because it contains the whole story. Mexico had the key witness in its hands—the only person who can say with certainty who organized the flight, who hired him, which airstrip he departed from, and whether U.S. agencies were involved—and handed him over to the United States. The witness who could answer “Who lied?” is now in the custody of the very government being asked the question—handed over by the government that is asking it.
And they handed him over via the National Security Law: the fast-track route, bypassing extradition proceedings. This is the same mechanism that Prosecutor Boone, during that same conference, explicitly ruled out using for Rocha Moya. Mexico uses the fast track to get rid of an inconvenient witness while demanding the full formal procedure to protect the governor.
Yet there is one question no one has asked—and it is the most uncomfortable one of all: what did Mexico extract from the pilot before handing him over?
Between his arrest for weapons possession and his handover, there was a period during which he was physically in Mexican custody. It is virtually inconceivable that a detainee of that profile was not interrogated. Any competent prosecutor—faced with the only direct witness to El Mayo’s transfer (a case involving seven open investigation files and classified by the FGR itself as an alleged kidnapping)—would have interrogated him thoroughly.
There are two possible interpretations, and neither favors the government. First: they interrogated him, and they know the truth. In this case, the “who lied?” charade is doubly theatrical—the government publicly asks what it already knows privately—and the withholding of information takes on a different meaning: it does not protect what is unknown, but rather what is known. The questionnaire the FGR administered to Rocha Moya is classified until 2031; if a statement from the pilot exists, it surely holds the same status, or worse.
A second interpretation: he was not thoroughly interrogated, or he was handed over before his testimony could be fully extracted. That would be even more serious, as it would imply that the decision to dispose of the witness via the fast track was made precisely to avoid having to process what he knew—or to keep that knowledge out of reach of judges, transparency requests, and Mexican litigation.
The detail fueling suspicion is Godoy’s own complaint: that the FBI did not provide the pilot’s identification details. Yet Mexico had him in custody. It did not need Washington to identify him; it had him in a cell, with a name, fingerprints, and a file. Complaining that the other government is withholding information about someone who was in one’s own custody is, to say the least, curious.
The FGR presents the pilot’s identification as an achievement of its investigation. What it actually documents is the opposite: that the Mexican State held the key witness to an alleged kidnapping committed on national soil and decided to send him north instead of detaining him. Everything else—the report, the timeline, the presidential question, the seven case files—amounts to a noisy search for something the government itself had quietly placed beyond its own reach.
Source: reforma
