Mexico - April 2026

The killing of Mexico’s most powerful drug kingpin, Nemesio ‘El Mencho’ Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, on 22 February served a major blow to the cartel he led, the Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), and a significant boost for President Claudia Sheinbaum. The Mexican president has come under great pressure from US President Donald Trump to combat drug cartels and, with El Mencho’s death, she has arguably taken out the US’ biggest target. However, in the weeks following the operation, it has been clear that it was not the answer to all of Mexico’s problems. US pressure continues while questions remain as to what El Mencho’s removal means for the CJNG and Mexico’s wider criminal landscape. While an immediate surge in retaliatory violence has since died down, authorities remain on high alert as the path forward looks far from certain.

Security forces located El Mencho at a country club on the outskirts of Tapalpa, some 130km from Jalisco state capital Guadalajara, after tracking the movements of his lover. On 22 February members of the Mexican army special forces, the air force, and national guard descended on the area by air and land. In the ensuing gun battle, three members of the military were injured while eight members of El Mencho’s security detail were killed. Additionally, El Mencho and two bodyguards were captured after sustaining injuries and died while being transported to hospital, according to the authorities.

While the operation itself was carried out exclusively by Mexican forces, the federal defence minister, General Ricardo Trevilla Trejo, stated that US intelligence had contributed. President Trump was quick to capitalise on the operation, declaring in his state of the union address on 24 February that “we’ve… taken down one of the most sinister cartel kingpins of all.” Meanwhile, newswire Reuters reported that a new US military-led task force specialising in gathering intelligence on drug cartels played a role in the operation, citing a US defence official.

While the extent of US involvement remains uncertain, it is clear that the operation took place in a context of heavy pressure from the Trump administration for Mexico to demonstrate results in the fight against drug cartels. The elimination of such a high-profile yet hitherto elusive kingpin like El Mencho serves as a tangible and highly symbolic demonstration of this fight. Additionally, Mexican forces also had their own reasons for wanting to take El Mencho down. In July 2021, CJNG gunmen, allegedly on orders from El Mencho, attacked the federal public security minister, Omar García Harfuch, then public security minister of Mexico City (CDMX), severely injuring him and killing two of his bodyguards.

While the operation has been hailed as a major success in both Mexico and the US, it was not without its downsides. The CJNG retaliated with a wave of violence that saw 252 roadblocks set up in 20 of Mexico’s 32 states, and vehicles, banks, and local businesses set alight. Over 70 people were killed, including soldiers and cartel hitmen, in a display of the extent of the CJNG’s reach and the brutality that is characteristic of the cartel that El Mencho founded in 2010.

Origins

El Mencho is thought to have been born in the municipality of Aguililla in Michoacán state, which borders Jalisco to the south and has a long history of drug production. He became involved in drug trafficking at an early age and, after travelling undocumented to the US, was arrested there several times in the 1980s and 1990s before being deported to Mexico in 1997. Back in Mexico, he briefly worked as a police officer in Jalisco before working under Ignacio ‘Nacho’ Coronel, who led the Jalisco branch of what was then known as the Federación de Sinaloa, later to become the Cártel de Sinaloa. When Coronel was killed in 2010, there was a struggle to take over his empire. El Mencho emerged victorious, joining various splintered factions to create the CJNG.

In the years that followed, the CJNG expanded and consolidated its control over drug trafficking and other illegal markets in Jalisco and neighbouring states. With a strategy of violent growth, favouring the forced integration or elimination of rival groups instead of negotiations or pacts, the CJNG has grown into one of Mexico’s two most dominant cartels, along with the Cártel de Sinaloa, and has a presence in nearly every Mexican state. Over the years, it has gained a reputation for violence and has diversified its activities and revenue streams to encompass extortion, illegal mining, fuel theft, and timeshare fraud schemes. It also has a global financial empire run by Los Cuinis, which is led by the González Valencia family to which El Mencho was linked through his wife, Rosalinda González Valencia. Notably, the CJNG is also one of the main players in Mexico’s synthetic drugs trade and a major supplier of fentanyl to the US, making it a key target of the Trump administration.

• Timeshare fraud

One way in which the CJNG has diversified is by scamming owners of timeshare properties along the Pacific coastline of Jalisco and neighbouring Nayarit state. In February Mexico’s finance ministry (SHCP) and the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (Ofac) sanctioned a total of 11 individuals and 19 companies which they said were involved in the CJNG’s timeshare network. The sanctions revolved around Kovay Gardens, a timeshare resort in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, Nayarit, which Ofac said “uses underhanded tactics” to entice buyers who are then scammed multiple times through a “vertically integrated timeshare fraud model allow[ing] CJNG to efficiently and repeatedly victimize Kovay Gardens timeshare owners”, who are often from the US.

What next?

The elimination of such a major figure risks destabilising the criminal landscape, sparking succession feuds within the CJNG and prompting rival groups to capitalise on the disarray to try and wrest territory and business from the cartel. Indeed, precedent in Mexico shows that the strategy of removing leaders of organised crime groups, known as the kingpin strategy, can trigger more violence by leading to the fragmentation of groups, which makes them more difficult to dismantle and leads to clashes between warring factions. These effects were most notable during the war on drugs launched by former president Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), which led to an explosion in violent crime rates.

A more recent example is the state of Sinaloa, which has been engulfed in a bloody conflict between two rival factions of the Cártel de Sinaloa following the arrest of two of its leaders in the US in July 2024. The violence in Sinaloa did not take off in earnest until around two months after the arrests, suggesting that violence could yet explode in Jalisco and surrounding areas despite the initial retaliatory violence from the CJNG having died down. While the government has deployed some 10,000 members of the armed forces across the country to respond to potential CJNG attacks, a strong military presence in Sinaloa has so far been unable to alleviate the violence in that state [SSR-26-03].

The question of succession is key. There is no clear successor given that El Mencho’s son, Rubén Oseguera González, known as ‘El Menchito’, is serving a life sentence in the US on drugs and firearms-related offences, while El Mencho’s brother, Antonio Oseguera Cervantes, alias ‘Tony Montana’, was extradited to the US last year where he faces drug trafficking charges. One potential successor is El Mencho’s stepson, Juan Carlos Valencia González, known as ‘El 03’, who is believed to control large swathes of territory in western Mexico. According to the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), he is responsible for the manufacturing, transportation, and distribution of large quantities of drugs, as well as for organising numerous violent crimes.

However, others are also likely to be vying for the top spot. These include Audías ‘El Jardinero’ Flores Silva, who controls methamphetamine laboratories and clandestine airstrips, as well as routes used to transport drugs north, according to US authorities. Another option is Gonzalo ‘El Sapo’ Mendoza Gaytán, who has a reputation for violence and is believed to hold a grudge against El Mencho’s stepson, although some local media are reporting he may have been killed during the operation to capture El Mencho. Mendoza was reportedly in charge of the CJNG’s violent recruitment activities, including camps such as that discovered in Teuchitlán, Jalisco, last year [SSR-25-04].

Much also rests on the government’s response. One tactic is to continue hitting the cartel while it is weakened, going after potential successors and other high-ranking members. However, such a combative strategy risks a further increase in violence, which the Mexican government will likely want to avoid, particularly ahead of the Fifa World Cup, with some matches due to take place in Guadalajara in June. The blockades following El Mencho’s death could well serve as an intimidation tactic, warning the government of the chaos the CJNG is willing to unleash if it continues to target the group. The CJNG’s demonstrated capacity for violence, as well as the assassination attempt on Harfuch, is also likely to factor into the government’s approach.

• World Cup

Guadalajara’s Akron stadium is due to host four group-stage World Cup games including Mexico’s second group fixture against South Korea on 18 June. In the aftermath of El Mencho’s death and the ensuing retaliatory violence, questions were raised as to whether the conditions would be right for the matches to go ahead as planned. However, Fifa’s president, Gianni Infantino, has said that all scheduled matches would take place, expressing his “confidence” in Mexico as a host country.

A less risky tactic would be to target the networks of collusion between the CJNG and the authorities. Indeed, following his death, journalists from national daily El Universal found documents allegedly belonging to El Mencho that detailed the bribes he paid to municipal police, state security forces, and prosecutors in Tapalpa and nearby municipalities. Harfuch has said that the federal attorney general’s office is analysing the documents. Targeting these networks, as well as the financial networks of cartels, could serve to reduce violence and weaken criminal groups in the long term, although it risks dredging up some difficult questions for the government.

For now, the government is likely to continue monitoring the situation in Jalisco and maintaining a heavy military presence in the state and other CJNG strongholds. Sheinbaum will hope the successful operation will offer her some form of respite from Trump’s demands – although he showed no signs of this in comments made at a regional summit in early March – and contribute towards the long-term weakening of the CJNG. As with the Cártel de Sinaloa, her government will continue to leverage its increased intelligence and investigation capacity to systematically go after mid- and high-level members of the cartel and chip away at its financial networks, while hoping to avoid any further escalation in violence.

Counter cartel coalition

On 7 March US President Donald Trump launched the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition, which he described as a “military coalition” dedicated to eliminating the region’s criminal cartels. Despite the biggest of these cartels operating in Mexico, the country was not among the 17 Latin American and Caribbean nations invited to join the coalition, which was launched at the Shield of the Americas summit in Florida.

The summit was attended by the presidents of Argentina, Bolivia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, and Paraguay, as well as the prime ministers of Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago and the then president-elect of Chile. Representatives of The Bahamas, Belize, Guatemala, Jamaica, and Peru were also present.

Although Mexico was not in attendance, it was the subject of comments made at the summit by Trump, who said that Mexico was “the epicentre of cartel violence”. While Trump said that Sheinbaum was “a very good person”, he complained that she would not let the US into Mexico to eradicate the cartels.

Sheinbaum responded to the snub with the cool-headedness that has come to characterise her relations with Trump, simply saying that Mexico already had a security agreement with the US. However, Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro was not so agreeable about his country’s exclusion. Petro said that Colombia’s experience in working to eradicate cocaine trafficking was “essential” for such a group, stating that the “17 small, weak countries” in the coalition would not be able to tackle cartels effectively.