Is drug lord El Mencho’s death a new start for Mexico?

The killing of Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, aka El Mencho – Mexico's most wanted man – in a joint operation by Mexican security forces and US intelligence, was a sensational sting. “The 59-year-old former policeman and cartel godfather was tracked down to a modest holiday cabin in a pine forest in his home state of Jalisco” and fatally wounded after a gun battle, says The Times, .

El Mencho was head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) – “The Company” – one of the most powerful criminal organisations in the world. It is a drug-trafficking and extortion empire, with an estimated $50 billion in assets and a private army at its disposal. Now, says The Times, it has “no clear leader”.

El Mencho's demise, while heralded as an important victory in the battle against organised crime, raises the substantial risk of more carnage if it sparks a war for control of the CJNG and its “barbaric riches”. Confrontations inside Mexican cartels, following the removal of kingpins, have “caused the most extreme spikes in violence over the past 20 years”. The violence that followed El Mencho's death was almost immediate, says The Economist. Attacks were carried out in at least 15 states, with buses and banks set alight and roads blocked. Some 60 people were killed.

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Unlike his erstwhile rival El Chapo – the imprisoned head of the Sinaloa cartel – El Mencho has never courted publicity, says The Guardian. Few photographs of him exist. Born poor, one of six sons, to an avocado farmer from Aguililla in the western state of Michoacán, Oseguera was involved in drug-trafficking from an early age. After dropping out of primary school to work in the fields, he started guarding marijuana plantations, noted a 2017 Rolling Stone profile, before migrating illegally to the US at some point in the 1980s. There, he assumed aliases and ran multiple rackets until his luck ran out when he was convicted of heroin distribution in the US in 1994 and jailed for nearly three years.

Oseguera made the most of his deportation back to Mexico, says France 24. He married the formidable Rosalinda Gonzalez Valencia (aka “The Boss”) – the daughter of a drug lord, who later became CJNG's chief financial operator – and joined the Milenio criminal cartel, as well as the local police force. When infighting forced him out of Michoacán, he took refuge in neighbouring Jalisco, teaming up with the Sinaloa cartel to form the “Matazetas”, or “Zeta Killers”. Their mission was to take revenge on the Zeta cartel who had stolen his territory and seize its lucrative business. The brutality was remarkable even by Mexican gang standards. One of Oseguera's tactics, says The Times, was “to strap and detonate sticks of dynamite” on live victims.

El Mencho’s far-reaching grip

Of late, CJNG's business success has been unmatched – as a global drugs trafficker (of cocaine and meth and more recently fentanyl), with lucrative sidelines in “avocado production, fuel and gold smuggling”, and “timeshare property scams” fleecing Americans. El Mencho “formed alliances with like-minded drug gangs from Africa to Australia”, maintaining an active social-media presence that portrayed CJNG as “both charitable and menacing” – there are plenty of shots showing off formidable weaponry.

Drug cartels gained a big foothold in Mexico in the 1960s and 1970s, but El Mencho and his peers came to exert a substantial and far-reaching grip on the national economy. On one estimate, criminal activity in the country cost 18% of GDP in 2024. The very fact that his succession is now a national talking point shows how deeply the cartel is embedded in Mexican life. With his son “El Menchito” now imprisoned for life in the US, speculation has swirled that maybe his divorced wife will win the power struggle.

With Donald Trump breathing down her neck, Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum had little option but to take down El Mencho, says Al Jazeera – even though she must fear the consequences of killing the kingpin. A long history of removing gang chieftains in Mexico and Colombia has done little to stem the production and flow of drugs towards the US. Maybe so, says The Economist. But it's unlikely many Mexicans will mourn his demise.

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