On the morning of February 22, Mexican Army special forces converged on an upscale gated development in the mountain town of Tapalpa, Jalisco, acting on intelligence that led them to the most wanted man in North America. What followed was a firefight that left four cartel operatives dead at the scene and three others, including Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes—“El Mencho”—mortally wounded and airlifted toward Mexico City, where he died before the helicopter landed.
By killing El Mencho, the Mexican Army decapitated what had become Mexico’s most powerful drug cartel—and thrust swaths of the nation into chaos.
Within hours, 252 cartel blockades were reported across the country. Twenty-five National Guard officers, a state police officer, a security guard, and a civilian woman were killed in retaliatory attacks in Jalisco alone. Guadalajara—a host city for the 2026 FIFA World Cup—became a ghost town as civilians sheltered in place.
The scale of the retaliation answered, with brutal clarity, the question that has defined Mexican security politics for two decades: just how deeply do the cartels run?
The Rise of El Mencho and the CJNG
Oseguera Cervantes was born into poverty in Aguililla, Michoacán, dropped out of primary school, and immigrated illegally to California in the 1980s before being deported to Mexico in the early 1990s.
He returned to work as a police officer in Jalisco—a trajectory that gave him an intimate understanding of law enforcement operations—before rejoining the criminal world and rising through the ranks of the Milenio Cartel.
Following a violent internal war for territorial control after the death of Sinaloa Cartel lieutenant Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel Villarreal in a 2010 military raid, the faction commanded by Oseguera and Erick “El 85” Valencia Salazar defeated their rivals and rebranded as the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
What followed was one of the most rapid criminal expansions in Mexico’s modern history.
By 2018, the CJNG was believed to have over 100 methamphetamine laboratories throughout Mexico. Based on average street value, its trade netted upwards of $8 billion annually for cocaine and $4.6 billion for crystal methamphetamine.
The DEA describes the gang as structured like a franchise business, composed of approximately 90 organizations across Mexico, with contacts in more than 40 countries, including throughout the Americas, Australia, China, and Southeast Asia.
The cartel captured key ports of entry along both the Gulf and Pacific coasts, controlling the physical infrastructure of the illegal drug supply chain from chemical precursor imports to finished product export.
The cartel also pushed heavily into South America to directly control illicit cocaine supply chains and illegal mining operations across multiple countries, contributing to a large increase in violence in Ecuador in particular. Intelligence reports had indicated that prior to his death, El Mencho was actively working to consolidate CJNG’s hold over Pacific coastal trafficking corridors—the mountain and coastal regions of Jalisco, Nayarit, Colima, and Michoacán that form the spine of the cartel’s original territorial base and its most critical export routes to North America.
“Hugs, Not Bullets”—And the Cost of Inaction
The debate over how to confront Mexico’s cartels is not new. It predates Sheinbaum, predates Trump, and predates El Mencho himself.
Since President Felipe Calderón launched a full-scale military campaign against organized crime in 2006, successive administrations have cycled between confrontation and accommodation—and the cartels have grown through both.
Calderón’s successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, allowed the strategy to drift. His successor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, reversed course entirely with his “hugs, not bullets” policy—an attempt to undermine gang recruitment through social programs and youth employment. The result was a dramatic rise in homicides and other forms of violence, and organized crime groups deepened and diversified their networks with effective impunity.
Under López Obrador, Mexico did not face the threat of unilateral U.S. military action, and the cooperative intelligence infrastructure needed to target cartel leadership simply did not exist in Washington-Mexico City relations. That began to change when Sheinbaum took office in October 2024.
Sheinbaum’s Shift—and the Political Risk
Sheinbaum’s approach drew directly from her experience as mayor of Mexico City, where she built her security record on sophisticated criminal investigations rather than social programs. Her security chief in the capital, Omar García Harfuch—who survived a spectacular CJNG assassination attempt using grenades and high-powered rifles in Mexico City in 2020—now holds the national security portfolio.
The Sheinbaum administration’s anti-corruption operations have reached deep into her own party. Some 60 individuals across six states have been arrested, including sitting and former mayors and municipal security directors, many of them from Sheinbaum’s own Morena party—a willingness to clean her own house that her predecessors were conspicuously unwilling to demonstrate.
Before the El Mencho operation, Sheinbaum had already extradited over 100 high-ranking cartel operatives to the United States, and homicides appeared to be falling—her first State of the Union cited a 25% reduction between September 2024 and June 2025. The February 22 operation represented the most visible expression yet of how far she had moved from López Obrador's approach.
But the political cost was immediate. The retaliation following El Mencho’s killing demonstrated both the scale of the threat and the depth of cartel reach across the country—and rather than being credited for executing the operation, Sheinbaum faced criticism from both directions: opposition figures in Mexico accusing her of running a “narcogovernment,” and U.S. officials, including Florida Rep. Carlos Giménez, implying that direct American military intervention remained on the table regardless.
The Question of Political Will
Sheinbaum is taking significant political and personal risks by targeting cartel leadership, increasing extraditions, and deepening cooperation with U.S. authorities. However, it is undeniable that much of the anti-trafficking efforts on the part of the Mexican authorities is a byproduct of the immense amount of political and economic pressure that the administration in Washington is willing to exert.
The February 22 operation was carried out without U.S. troops on Mexican soil—Sheinbaum’s absolute red line—and in direct defiance of the cartel’s demonstrated capacity for violent retaliation. But the United States did assist its Mexican partners with intelligence that led to the capture of El Mencho, a partnership that the White House has been urging its Mexican counterpart to accept.
Officials in government in Mexico City and analysts of organized crime in the region have long argued that what Mexico lacks is not political will. It is institutional capacity. Trust in Mexico’s justice system, ranked 135th out of 143 countries assessed by the World Justice Project, is so low that crimes frequently go unreported—and even when they are, low prosecution rates reinforce a culture of impunity.
Mexico’s so-called judicial reforms opened the door for cartels to influence the court system through lowered eligibility standards and popular elections for judges at every level.
At the municipal level, the problem is not merely one of corruption but of intimidation. Criminal groups routinely threaten to inflict torture and death not just on local officials but on their families. Google News Initiative Candidates running for local office in cartel-controlled regions face a choice between compliance, exile, and assassination — a dynamic that cannot be resolved by any number of federal military operations.
What Comes Next
Unlike the Sinaloa Cartel—a two-family organization that fractured along familial lines—El Mencho led an organization with a far larger number of high-ranking figures who lack blood ties. Powerful commanders such as “El Jardinero” and “El RR” each control highly capable, geographically separated factions that do not rely heavily on one another and oversee different trafficking corridors to the U.S. border.
Mexican security analyst David Saucedo warned that the cartel could adopt a posture of total war against the Mexican state if it interprets the operation as extermination rather than capture—a distinction with significant implications for the coming months. Kidnappings, vehicle thefts, and extortion of businesses are all expected to rise as rival CJNG factions seek to cut off each other’s economic flows and extract income from new sources during what is likely to become a multi-sided internal conflict.
The death of El Mencho could also trigger a domino effect in Latin American countries that are part of CJNG’s cocaine production, transit, and export network—particularly Ecuador and Colombia.
Former Ecuadorian Army intelligence chief Mario Pazmiño told CNN that if organizations in those countries worked for the CJNG and received support from Mexico, the Sinaloa Cartel will automatically try to take over those spaces.
For Sheinbaum, the immediate challenge is managing the transition without allowing the resulting power vacuum to produce violence that overshadows the achievement. For Washington, the challenge is resisting the temptation to declare victory—and recognizing that the El Mencho operation was only the beginning of a very bloody campaign.
