At a meeting held in the tea room of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion/hotel where it was decided on November 11, 2024, that Pete Hegseth would be the next U.S. secretary of defense, the then president-elect offered two arguments he considered decisive. “Nobody has performed better on camera than that guy” was one. “He’s always treated me very well,” was the other.

Loyalty and telegenic appeal are two virtues the Republican president prizes. And at that meeting — the details of which await the reader of Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, written by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan of The New York Times and revealing the inner workings of the current White House — Trump praised Hegseth’s campaign in defense of three veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan accused of war crimes. For the future president, those efforts proved why his administration needed a candidate at the Pentagon who was “willing to stick up for the tough guys.”

Last Wednesday, that man — a former Fox News morning host and a military veteran — went a step further in his plan to reshape the U.S. military around his vision of masculinity by announcing he will require soldiers over 30 to undergo annual testosterone testing; testing will be optional for those younger than that.

Concern about low levels of the male hormone among military personnel predates Hegseth and has been addressed by Congress from a medical standpoint: low testosterone can be a symptom of stress, and can cause loss of muscle mass and sexual desire, obesity, or erectile dysfunction, or be associated with more serious conditions such as diabetes, osteoporosis, or depression. The difference this time is that the secretary of defense made the announcement with the highest possible profile, in a solemn social media video that seemed scripted by the writers of Saturday Night Live, the comedy show in which his character, played by Colin Jost, is as recurring as it is successful.

With his self-confidence and fraternity-member manner, Hegseth often gives the impression that he does not mind being fodder for parody. He was mocked when, to demonstrate his committed adherence to Christian nationalism — the belief that the United States’ destiny is inexorably linked to the teachings of the Bible — he recited at a Pentagon religious service a passage he believed came from the Old Testament but that was actually a fictional monologue spoken by Samuel L. Jackson’s character in Pulp Fiction. Or when he used press briefings on the progress of the offensive in Iran to speak voluptuously about the “pure destruction” he sought to unleash on the enemy and about the “violence” of war, which he called, in this case, “holy.”

A “feminized” military

His obsession with masculinity goes back further. In his 2024 memoir, The War on Warriors, he warns of the dangers of a “feminized” military; he refers to “Pentagon pussies” as the principal enemy because they prevent soldiers from acting with the full “lethality” at their disposal, and lays out the theory that would underpin his diversity-hostile program at the head of the Department of Defense (which he likes to call the Department of War, though he lacks the necessary congressional approval to do so).

“In their zeal to fight racism, generals provoke racial conflict,” Hegseth writes in the book. “By pushing gender equality, they weaken unit readiness. By trying to eradicate ‘extremism,’ they expel patriotic rank-and-file soldiers (like myself). By sheltering trans soldiers, commanders are forced to walk on eggshells instead of forming warriors. Killers.”

In the 15 months since he took office, he has had ample time to apply those ideas. After surviving a Senate confirmation that nearly collapsed amid accusations of sexual assault that he denies and coworker testimony about his fondness for alcohol, Hegseth has purged a significant number of senior officers and hindered military careers, especially those of women and Black men.

Last week, his week of testosterone, a new episode in that systematic campaign went largely unnoticed amid news that the secretary of defense blocked five officers — all women or people of nonwhite race — from being promoted to admiral. The decision means that, for the first time in over a decade, no woman will be promoted to admiral in the United States.

Although his animus also extends to certain men who do not fit his vision of what a soldier should be. The secretary has outlawed bellies, long hair, and facial hair, and declared war on trans service members. The latter has led many to point out the irony that the optional testosterone-replacement treatments he offers to troops found to have low levels closely resemble gender-affirming treatments used by trans men in the military.

A convert to Christianity, Hegseth is not only the secretary of defense who has done the most to politicize the institution; he has also infused it with an extreme evangelism. He has the Jerusalem cross tattooed on his chest and “Deus Vult,” the crusaders’ battle cry in their holy wars against Muslims, tattooed on his right biceps. He has also instituted the practice of monthly prayer breakfasts at the Pentagon headquarters. And he has brought his pastor, a man named Doug Wilson — who argues that women should not have the right to vote and that suffrage should be decided at the family level (patriarchal, of course) — out of the margins.

With all those outbursts, and given the clearly limited success of the U.S. war in Iran, the question in Washington has often been when Trump would decide to remove him from the Cabinet, since after a year of relative calm in the White House the first purges have already begun (mainly targeting women: from Pam Bondi, attorney general, to Kristi Noem, secretary of homeland security, and national intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard).

But Hegseth appears to still enjoy the boss’s favor, someone for whom what sufficed the day he chose him for the post seems to still be sufficient. For the president of the United States, an irresistible combination of loyalty, telegenic appeal and, now more than ever, testosterone.

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Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, 76, will spend the remainder of his life behind bars. A federal court in Brooklyn announced this on Monday, July 20. Judge Brian Cogan confirmed a life sentence for one of the most bloodthirsty drug traffickers in history, the former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, who last year pleaded guilty to trafficking hundreds of tons of cocaine over a period of decades. The sentence also requires Zambada to pay $15 billion in restitution for the damage he caused.

With this sentence, Zambada is in the same position as his former partner in crime, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who is also imprisoned in the United States and was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2019. They are two of the most prominent Mexican drug traffickers of recent decades who led the Sinaloa Cartel in the country’s northwest.

El Mayo appeared before the court on Monday to hear a sentence he already knew would be imposed under the guilty plea deal he reached last year. He admitted to conspiracy to commit crimes and to running a criminal enterprise, charges that carry a mandatory life sentence. In return, he received a guarantee from the U.S. Department of Justice that it would not seek the death penalty.

Zambada was arrested in July 2024 along with Joaquín Guzmán López, one of El Chapo’s sons, after their plane landed on a small airstrip in the state of New Mexico. Subsequently, Guzmán López pleaded guilty to drug trafficking charges.

Frank Pérez, Zambada’s lawyer, said in a court filing submitted on July 6 that his client was fully aware he would receive a life sentence when he decided to accept responsibility for his crimes. Pérez asked Judge Cogan to recommend that the Federal Bureau of Prisons place El Mayo in a facility where he could receive appropriate medical care.

Prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn said the prisons suggested by Pérez might not have the infrastructure to manage the security risks Zambada poses, including the possibility that he could continue running cartel activities from behind bars. “Those security concerns will persist in the foreseeable future, as people loyal to the defendant continue to control the cartel,” the prosecutors wrote in a filing submitted on July 13.

El Mayo’s sentence threatens to strain relations between the governments of the United States and Mexico. President Claudia Sheinbaum has not hidden her displeasure over El Mayo’s arrest, an operation on Mexican soil in which the role played by various U.S. security agencies is not clear. Although U.S. authorities initially denied their involvement, it has gradually become clear that they did take part. A New Mexico museum recently displayed the plane the FBI brought across the border as part of the operation, which has opened another dispute between the two neighbors.

“The organization I headed encouraged corruption in my country by paying police officers, military commanders, and politicians who allowed us to operate freely,” Zambada said during last year’s hearing in which he admitted his guilt.

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Mexico only knows what 76-year-old Ismael Zambada García, known as “El Mayo,” looks like today from illustrations made by a U.S. court artist when he appeared there a year ago. The portrait shows a wrinkled man with a white mustache and beard, wearing a blue prison jumpsuit and a solemn expression. In fact, only a few photographs of him have been published: a couple taken when he was arrested two years ago, thin and with black hair; a blurry, old U.S. wanted-card photo; and another of him wearing a cap and mustache. He is the man the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York calls “one of the largest and most powerful drug traffickers in the world, if not the most” — but unlike the flamboyant style of his former partner Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, also imprisoned in the United States, El Mayo always chose to hide, to be an enigma.

For decades he led the powerful Sinaloa Cartel in the country’s northwest and organized the logistics to send thousands of tons of cocaine, heroin and, in recent years, fentanyl to the United States. To do that, he drenched Sinaloa in blood with hitmen who killed anyone who stood in the way, and he bribed officials — from police and military officers to politicians. That is the description the U.S. prosecutors give of Mayo’s criminal activity in their sentencing submission, contained in an eight-page letter to Judge Brian M. Cogan, who is scheduled to announce his sentence this Monday, July 20. Zambada has pleaded guilty to all charges. Prosecutors are seeking life imprisonment and a $15 billion fine.

The United States had had him on the radar since the early 1990s, although El Mayo entered the drug trade much earlier, at 16, according to the late Mexican journalist Julio Scherer in the first interview the trafficker ever gave — one of only a handful in his life — to the magazine Proceso in 2010. Asked how he began in the drug business, he said it simply happened: he “just came in.” Fifteen years later, last August before the New York judge, he said he started at 19 by planting marijuana.

Among the flashes of himself shown in the conversation with Scherer, he attempts to portray himself as austere, a country man with social support, always ready to flee, always aware he was being pursued. “I have my wife, five women, fifteen grandchildren and one great-grandchild. They, the six of them, are here on the ranches, daughters of the land, like me. The land is my home, my family, my protection, my earth, the water I drink,” he said.

The prosecutors’ account runs in parallel with the history of the Sinaloa Cartel, now designated a terrorist organization by the United States. It was “a pioneer in the use of new distribution techniques [for drugs], including trains and tunnels across the Mexico–U.S. border,” allied with Colombian cartels to distribute its cocaine at an “astonishing speed,” and at one point reportedly received nightly “15 or 20 flights each carrying between 1,000 and 1,500 kilos of cocaine.”

By the 1990s, El Mayo had formed an alliance with El Chapo to run the Sinaloa Cartel and clashed in gun battles with rival cartels over control of trafficking routes. When El Chapo was imprisoned for the first time, El Mayo ran the business, and when El Chapo escaped, El Mayo helped him flee. He did so again on his second escape, until El Chapo was captured in 2016 and deported to the United States, where he is serving life and from where he cultivates an epistolary habit of writing to the judge. In those letters he complains about the isolation conditions at the maximum-security prison in Colorado: “I have drunk unclean water, I do not breathe clean air, the air is dry, my throat hurts, my nose hurts, my ears hurt, my head hurts. I have been denied the right to breathe clean air,” he says in one, frequently invoking God.

In a way, El Mayo’s story can be told in opposition to that of his former partner. Against El Chapo’s spectacular prison escapes — his last one involved a tunnel connected to a shower — his desire to be recognized as the world’s top trafficker and his eagerness to speak — he gave an interview to actor Sean Penn and sought a biography — El Mayo remained almost entirely in the shadows. From 2017, when he became the cartel’s sole leader, until 2024, U.S. prosecutors attribute to him “systematic murders of other cartel members” and rivals. He commanded an arsenal of military-style weapons and an army to protect his interests.

When the U.S. judge announces El Mayo’s sentence this Monday, the man who evaded justice for decades will spend the rest of his life in prison. He accepted a life term to try to avoid a supermax prison like the one holding El Chapo, and he has requested placement in a medical facility because of his health problems. There will also be no trial, which leaves some unanswered questions that, two years after his transfer to the United States, still influence politics in Mexico today.

One mystery concerns how he arrived at an airport in New Mexico, on the U.S. side of the border. In a letter distributed by his lawyer, El Mayo claimed he was deceived and kidnapped by one of El Chapo’s sons, who subsequently surrendered to U.S. authorities. He had gone to a meeting where he was told the then-governor of Sinaloa, Rubén Rocha Moya, and the former mayor of Culiacán, Héctor Cuén — who was murdered that same day — would be present.

Rocha Moya, of the ruling party Morena, said he was in Los Angeles on July 25, 2024, and that he knew nothing about the meeting. He is currently suspended from office and accused by the United States of having ties to the Sinaloa Cartel. His case has generated major friction with Washington, which seeks his extradition — something Mexico refuses unless solid evidence is provided. El Mayo ended up on a plane, after being beaten, bound for prison.

The Mexican government says it was not involved in the surreal transfer of the capo to the United States and now wants to know whether any U.S. agency took part in handing over El Mayo — an act that would violate Mexican sovereignty — in a new controversy in the fraught relationship with Washington. In 2024, Ken Salazar, then the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, said his country had nothing to do with it: “It was not our plane, nor our pilot, nor our agents in Mexico.” The controversy has reemerged now that the Mexican government learned the FBI claims credit for capturing El Mayo and that it donated to a museum in New Mexico the plane on which the trafficker crossed the border.

A second unknown emerged in the prosecutors’ filing to the judge, where paragraphs are redacted in the section about El Mayo’s arrest, which mention the cartel’s corruption of Mexican authorities. “[El Mayo] increased bribes to police, military chiefs and politicians,” the text reads, specifying that the cartel paid “millions of dollars a year” in payoffs. What it does not say is who received them.

El Mayo’s arrest unleashed a true war in Sinaloa over control of the cartel between the successors of the former partners, Los Chapitos and Los Mayos, in a wave of violence that left thousands dead and forced the Mexican government to deploy 1,600 soldiers in January to quell the outbreak; roughly 14,000 troops are now stationed there. The sentence to be announced this Monday will leave El Mayo in prison for life. But as Ernesto López Portillo, coordinator of the Public Safety Program at Universidad Iberoamericana, points out, that sentence “does not mean the symbiotic relationship between criminal groups and the state will end, nor that the macro-criminal networks involving the state, companies, and organizations will be dismantled.”

The information that captured kingpins can provide may be valuable for pursuing others, “but the fall of Mayo is not the fall of the narco; leaders have been taken down for decades,” López Portillo says. For now, the prosecutors’ letter to the judge cites testimony obtained in trials against El Chapo and Genaro García Luna to support the thesis that “corruption at all levels was necessary for the cartel to operate so effectively and on such a large scale.”

For López Portillo, the sentence only indicates “levels of total impunity”: “Why are there no trials that dismantle criminal networks in Mexico? The Mexican state has not built a criminal narrative, with judicial documents on criminal structures, that prove what they do, who runs the financing, logistics and technical circuits…” He warns: “In the 1980s there were five or seven cartels. Today people talk about 500 criminal organizations in the country that operate locally, in only some states or with a national presence.”

El Mayo seemed to understand well the reproductive logic of his violent business. In that first interview with Julio Scherer in 2010, when he was still a fugitive, he said something that proved prophetic: “The problem of the narco involves millions. How to control them? As for the bosses, locked up, dead or extradited, their replacements are already out there.” Locked up for life with the secrets he may hold from decades of criminal activity, El Mayo remains shrouded in unanswered questions.

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