One of the world’s most powerful drug lords has been killed, but the question remains whether his death will destroy the organization he built, which slings cocaine, methamphetamine and other drugs from Mexico to the United States and as far as Australia.
Mexican security forces killed the drug lord, Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as El Mencho, the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, on Sunday. Almost immediately, Guadalajara, Mexico’s third-largest city and the capital of Jalisco State, was plunged into chaos as the cartel retaliated, with violence spreading to cities and beach resorts across Mexico as gunmen torched stores and banks and blockaded highways.
The cartel’s survival now depends on how quickly it can appoint a successor and close ranks, or it could fragment as internal factions fight for power.
Another question is whether the Mexican government can sustain a war on two fronts — it is also waging a bloody battle against the Sinaloa Cartel, the Jalisco group’s archenemy.
The Jalisco New Generation Cartel is a vast criminal enterprise that traffics drugs around the world but also grows avocados, smuggles migrants into the United States from as far away as China and is involved in illegal gold mining across South America.
“This is undoubtedly the most important blow that has been dealt to drug trafficking in Mexico since drug trafficking existed in Mexico,” said Eduardo Guerrero, a former Mexican security official and expert on the country’s drug groups.
“Never in Mexico has there been an organization with the presence, territorial control or political penetration that the Jalisco New Generation Cartel has,” Mr. Guerrero added. “The cartels we had in Mexico were more regional in nature.”
But few analysts think this is the end of the cartel.
Mr. Oseguera’s organization was born from the ruins of another drug group, the Milenio Cartel, which disintegrated into infighting after its leadership was captured and killed. By 2009, Mr. Oseguera had emerged victorious and spun off his forces to form the Jalisco cartel.
Most Mexican cartels are dynastic, said David Saucedo, a security consultant, and the cleanest successions tend to be those that keep power in the family.
But several of Mr. Oseguera’s brothers have been arrested, as well as his son, a top commander of the Jalisco cartel until he was extradited to the United States in 2020. Rosalinda González Valencia, now Mr. Oseguera’s widow, could make a bid — she is the daughter of a drug lord and one of the cartel’s most important financial operators — but her rise is doubtful.
“In an environment full of machismo, it is difficult for a woman to assume the command of a criminal organization in Mexico,” Mr. Saucedo said.
Instead, one of Mr. Oseguera’s four commanders may assume leadership, if they can agree among themselves. “Otherwise, a war of succession would break out,” Mr. Saucedo said.
“This is good for Washington, without a doubt, because what they are looking for is weakened cartels and a reduction of drug shipments,” Mr. Saucedo added. “This is bad news for Mexico because smaller cartels mean more violent cartels, and homicides and other crimes will rise.”
If the Jalisco New Generation Cartel descends into a leadership fight, the violence could ripple across Mexico. The country’s most violent states are those where drug organizations are fighting for dominance. When one group has control, a tense peace tends to emerge.
Mr. Oseguera built the Jalisco cartel into one of Mexico’s most feared criminal organizations, its brutality notable even among the country’s landscape of beheadings, dismemberments and bodies hanging off bridges. The cartel became one of the world’s biggest cocaine dealers and the biggest meth dealer, but it largely stayed out of fentanyl. It formed alliances around the world, working with gangs in places as far away as Africa and Australia to expand its reach.
But American officials say they were starting to gather evidence that the cartel was entering the fentanyl market, according to two U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to share their findings. That trade has historically been cornered by the Sinaloa Cartel, but fentanyl busts in the United States last year revealed chemical traces that linked those seizures to territory controlled by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, those officials said.
The killing of Mr. Oseguera on Sunday shocked security analysts and diplomats who had assumed that the Mexican government was too bogged down in its fight against the Sinaloa Cartel to open a second front. The two cartels are Mexico’s most powerful, with weaponry and manpower that often outmatches the government’s.
President Claudia Sheinbaum could now face one of the most violent and consequential chapters in Mexico’s recent history.
Her predecessor as president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, refused to confront the cartels, instead adopting a policy he called “hugs not bullets.” That meant increasing spending on social programs to woo cartel fighters away from the battlefields. The strategy did not work. Violence skyrocketed during his tenure, and cartels gobbled up more territory.
When Ms. Sheinbaum took over in late 2024, she deployed hundreds of troops to Sinaloa State, which had been racked by infighting after the United States arrested one of the Sinaloa Cartel’s top leaders shortly before her election.
The Mexican government’s focus in Sinaloa benefited the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, which expanded its territory and ranks. The infighting saw the “Chapitos,” a powerful faction of the Sinaloa group, ally with the Jalisco group last year. That union made the Jalisco New Generation Cartel the world’s most powerful drug organization, American officials said.
It appears the Mexican government has divided the operations between its security forces. The security minister, Omar García Harfuch, is leading the fight against the Sinaloa Cartel, while the military led the operation to kill Mr. Oseguera.
Analysts said that division could spell trouble if the security forces were not coordinating, sharing intelligence and implementing a shared vision on how to dismantle the cartels.
Mr. Harfuch is seen as having a holistic strategy to confront the cartels on the ground while supporting investigative work to unravel their complex leadership structures and financial networks. The military tends to deploy brute force, which does little in the long term to dismantle the cartels, analysts say.
Mr. Harfuch’s approach echoes efforts that have worked elsewhere, including in Colombia.
John Creamer, who in a former role as deputy chief at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City was involved with a previous attempt to capture Mr. Oseguera, said, “Getting a figure like Mencho is not easy.”
“Without knowing the details, it speaks to the technical skills of the Mexican security forces and shows the government’s political commitment to confronting these groups,” Mr. Creamer added.
While the fall of cartel bosses grabs attention, taking out the middle ranks is crucial, analysts noted. The middle command provides the link between the leadership and foot soldiers, using local knowledge to recruit and execute strategy.
Diego Molano Aponte, who served as Colombia’s minister of defense from 2021 to 2022, said, “When you want to dismantle these organizations, you have to go for the king, you have to dismantle their illegal asset management activities, you have to hit multiple actors up and down the chain of command.”
Since the United States began its war on drugs nearly six decades ago, multiple drug lords have been arrested or killed and cartels have been dismantled.
Yet more people around the world are using drugs than ever. An estimated 25 million people used cocaine worldwide in 2023 — up from 17 million a decade earlier, according to a United Nations report released last year.
Maria Abi-Habib is an investigative correspondent reporting on Latin America and is based in Mexico City.
The post Mexico Killed ‘El Mencho.’ What’s Next for the Drug Cartel He Led? appeared first on New York Times.
