Last weekend, Mexican authorities tracked down and killed the most wanted organized crime leader in North America — Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho” — the founder and leader of the powerful Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel (CJNG). He was wounded in an intense firefight before he was detained, and died while being taken to Mexico City for medical treatment.
The cartel’s forces then launched a wave of attention-grabbing violence across Mexico in retaliation for the raid, with much of the worst attacks concentrated in the coastal cities of Guadalajara and Puerta Vallarta. For about 24 hours, live images of massive plumes of smoke rising above both cities dominated media coverage and frightened thousands of tourists, many of them American with their smartphones trained on the images to post on social media. Video of a general panic breaking out inside the Guadalajara airport terminal went viral, as did stories of tourists ordered to shelter in place inside hotels, restaurants and even at a municipal zoo where hundreds were forced to spend the night.
Both President Claudia Sheinbaum and President Donald Trump took credit for the operation, stressing the binational cooperation with Mexican logistics and U.S. intelligence. The violence quickly subsided and much of life returned to normal, quelling immediate concerns about possible security threats to the upcoming World Cup matches this summer to be held in several Mexican cities including Guadalajara. “Normal” includes the resumption of operations by the Jalisco cartel while a possibly violent succession to El Mencho unfolds within the CJNG.
What is underneath?
Nearly a year ago, at the start of Trump’s second term, Mexico handed 29 drug cartel figures over to U.S. authorities in a surprise mass extradition that included the alleged 1985 killer of a U.S. drug enforcement agent, a high ranking figure in the Sinaloa cartel, along with El Mencho’s brother. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel trumpeted the defendants “being taken into U.S. custody” in a DOJ statement that credited Trump’s designation of Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations. The move came as Trump focused early pressure on Sheinbaum through tariff threats to open a wide ranging negotiation of the bilateral relationship centered on a key U.S. priority: stopping the flow of migrants and fentanyl across the border.
By all accounts from a variety of Washington sources, security cooperation between Mexico and the United States has since become closely aligned at many levels. The presidents “have a good relationship”, Trump has said repeatedly, adding that Sheinbaum is a “wonderful woman”. El Mencho was the top target for both governments, and Sheinbaum was not reacting to pressure from Trump in carrying out last weekend’s operation. Multiple reports indicate the intelligence and logistical opportunity to nab El Mencho came together rapidly, and Mexican authorities moved quickly to take him out.
For the bilateral dynamic, the killing of El Mencho is best understood in the wider context of this cooperation begun a year ago. It is also a stark example of Sheinbaum’s sharp policy turn, veering off of the “hugs not bullets” approach towards the cartels from her political mentor and predecessor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO). Indeed, on the day she took office, the military and the National Guard unleashed the first of a string of bloody clashes with suspected migrant trafficking operations. Within weeks, scores of cartel suspects had been killed without a single casualty among government forces.
El Mencho and his Jalisco cartel rose to dominance in part as a consequence of the joint U.S.-Mexico operation in 2016, code named Operation Black Swan, which captured the Sinaloa kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. He was extradited to the U.S. in 2017, convicted in 2019 and sentenced to life at the ADX Florence supermax prison in Colorado. That led to warfare for territorial control between Jalisco and the remnants of El Chapo’s faction of Sinaloa, known as Los Chapitos, that raged on until a reported alliance was forged last year. As I wrote here last September, the Wall Street Journal published a front page investigative report on how the revival of the long-dormant cocaine market in the United States had brought the warring factions together to cooperate on moving the drug from South American production zones through Jalisco coastal ports and up through Sinaloa’s smuggling tunnels along the U.S. southern border.
By this time, El Mencho’s violent empire had grown wide, diversified and more sophisticated. In Jalisco, it operates much like a parallel government, controlling public contracts and taxing a variety of consumer goods to generate steady revenues. Aside from drug trafficking and amassing an arsenal of military-grade weaponry and equipment, the cartel’s conglomeration of business lines includes defrauding seniors, hijacking and re-selling contraband fuel and charging tolls on migrants passing through the state on their way north.
As Parker Asman wrote this week for InsightCrime, El Mencho consolidated power through a governing model that allowed for growth and political capture:
With El Mencho at the top, the CJNG was more vertically integrated than other Mexican criminal networks. High-ranking CJNG members who reported directly to him were, for example, allegedly involved in brokering an alliance with the Chapitos faction of the Sinaloa Cartel last year to battle a rival faction known as the Mayiza in the state of Sinaloa.
That said, the group maintains a franchise-style structure with different semi-autonomous regional factions that maintain alliances with local criminal actors to manage control of drug production and trafficking, extortion rackets, and fuel theft, among other criminal economies.
This strategy has allowed the CJNG to expand into nearly every corner of Mexico, and it also helped them establish their own local systems of criminal governance. The territorial and social control this system creates has fostered the CJNG’s infiltration of local politics and judicial systems as well as the security forces and major legal economic sectors.
A reviled piece of AMLO’s legacy to Sheinbaum may have given the CJNG and its allies and rivals even greater strategic advantage over the Mexican state. As I wrote about in June of last year, a constitutional reform adopted in AMLO’s final act as president converted the entire judicial branch into an elected body. Last year, about 2,600 of the more than 7,000 judges in the country - from the Supreme Court down to local jurisdictions - were chosen in this first staggered round of voting that will implement the reform.
For a long period of time, organized crime factions have manipulated the local elections process in regions where they operate in order to ensure their impunity. The first round of judicial elections drew such a low voter turnout — about 13% — the ability of gangs to mobilize voters for their own candidates was likely much easier than usual. This ran in parallel to a broad capture of the judicial seats by the ruling party MORENA, as part of a larger political takeover of the judiciary through the reform. This has been widely seen as a severe weakening of the rule of law in Mexico precisely at a moment when state institutions are mobilizing to fight the threats coming from the cartels.
Our take:
With all of the background leading up to El Mencho’s demise, we must first wait and see whether the Jalisco cartel starts to fracture like Sinaloa did after El Chapo’s capture. In the meantime, this week was full of questions that are not yet answered.
A key question is about what Sheinbaum’s security forces had up their sleeves as part of the eventuality of taking the kingpin down. What strategy was on the shelf for disrupting the cohesion of the CJNG, and how did they plan to weaken it after a decapitation move like this? This is where taking out leaders has failed for previous Mexican presidents when it was more of a tactic than part of a longer and wider strategy.
Meanwhile, what is Sheinbaum’s plan for dealing with the violence that could easily break out all over Mexico if factions of the CJNG turn on each other in order to gain power? Will the local, state and federal authorities cooperate fully and hold the line or will the rot of corruption within MORENA’s virtual one-party state make that inviable too soon? If civil government becomes too co-opted in too many places, might the role of Sheinbaum’s military and National Guard expand even more?
The images of cities on fire last weekend were more shock and awe than trying to use terror as a weapon. The Mexican cartels are not built on myth, loyalty or ideology, nor do they want to truly run Mexico. They are about profit and territory, and will use the most brutal, inhuman violence in order to secure both. Sheinbaum has made a political decision to take them on and defend civilian rule even if her civil institutions are increasingly squishy. It has been accomplished to some degree by other countries in other eras against similar organized crime syndicates, but rarely without the core of a society backing the fight and the civilian government leading it. Sheinbaum is very popular, and her party won a staggering majority in last year’s free and fair election. But much of that could be paper thin in the face of the kind of war that will have to be waged in order to break the power that the heirs of El Mencho and El Chapo will fight to keep.