Mexico, El Mencho and the perilous ‘kingpin strategy’
The policy of taking out top cartel bosses has often resulted in brutal reprisals as new leaders use even fiercer violence to assert control
Ciara Nugent in Mexico City and Max de Haldevang in London
In July 2010, Mexican security officials stormed into a wealthy suburb of Guadalajara and killed Ignacio Coronel, one of the leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel.
In the years of bloody fighting that followed between the country’s splintering crime groups, upstart cartel boss Nemesio Oseguera emerged victorious.
Oseguera’s Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) became one of Mexico’s most powerful and brutal criminal organisations.
Taking advantage of the increasing instability, it forcibly absorbed smaller gangs across many of the country’s 32 states, trafficking huge quantities of cocaine and fentanyl to the US and leaving Mexico strewn with mass graves.
The reign of Oseguera, alias “El Mencho”, ended on Sunday.
Mexican authorities, relying partly on US intelligence, followed one of the 59-year-old’s lovers to a romantic cabin in the hills of Jalisco state.
Troops ambushed him, and Oseguera died from injuries in an aircraft en route to Mexico City, according to the country’s defence minister.
El Mencho’s death is a victory for Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum, who is under immense pressure from US President Donald Trump to fight drug traffickers.
Trump quickly took the credit.
“We have taken down one of the most sinister cartel kingpins,” he said on Tuesday.
Security experts, however, warn the “kingpin strategy” of taking out top cartel bosses, which has underpinned Mexico’s war on drugs for much of the past two decades, has usually resulted in brutal gang restructurings but no lasting reduction in crime.
The new leaders who fill the gap often adopt an even greater level of violence to assert control.
“The likelihood is that CJNG will follow the pattern, namely that things get very bloody,” says Vanda Felbab-Brown, director of Brookings’ initiative on non-state armed actors.
“It’s a big win, but it’s probably going to inflame Mexico, for months or years.”
The initial response to El Mencho’s death was ugly.
CJNG members blocked roads across 20 states and burned cars, grocery stores and banks.
At least 70 people died in clashes between cartels and security forces.
Many in law enforcement say Sheinbaum had little choice.
Mexico has seen a nearly 70 per cent increase in lethal violence over the past decade, according to think-tank México Evalúa.
Experts partly blame the hands-off “hugs not bullets” security policy of her mentor and predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Trump has threatened to send US troops into Mexico and linked a looming review of the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement to security outcomes.
In response, Sheinbaum has dramatically increased arrests and extradited almost 100 cartel members to the US.
“You have to do something,” says a former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent who was based in Mexico.
“By taking him out, you don’t stop the cartel from operating but you weaken it.
So that constant weakening, I believe, is the strategy from the US and Mexico . . . as it was getting way out of hand.”
But to truly tackle organised crime would require resources and political will rarely found in Mexico, says Alejandro Schtulmann, founding partner at risk advisory firm Empra.
“No Mexican government has had a comprehensive strategy to weaken the gangs, nor strong enough rule of law to see it through,” he adds.
“Without strategy, intelligence and enforcement, targeting kingpins never works.
I see little chance of it succeeding now.”
Like many of Mexico’s most notorious narcos, Oseguera had humble origins.
Born to a poor family in rural Michoacán state, by age 20 he had begun trafficking drugs for gangs.
US authorities arrested him several times starting in San Francisco in 1986, and he spent three years in a US prison.
After being deported to Mexico in the 1990s, he briefly worked as a police officer in Jalisco before joining the Milenio Cartel, which eventually split into warring factions.
Oseguera turned one of those into the CJNG.
But he shunned the limelight that many earlier cartel leaders had tolerated or in some cases embraced.
Only a few decades-old mugshots exist.
In recent years rumours swirled that he was seriously ill, or even dead.
Mexican media have called him “a ghost”.
Yet many felt his impact. CJNG is an “innovator in violence”, says Manuel Balcazar, a former Mexican security official, citing its use of explosive drones and landmines as well as its assassinations of senior officials, including a former Jalisco governor.
In 2020, the group tried to kill then Mexico City police chief Omar García Harfuch, who is now Sheinbaum’s security minister.
“They are the only group that has openly challenged the institutions of the Mexican state in a systematic way,” Balcazar says.
Its growth strategy was also violent.
Expanding from Jalisco, CJNG brutally conquered local groups in many other states.
“While traditional structures favoured networks of negotiations and gradual pacts . . . CJNG arrived in a territory and redefined the market: forced integration or elimination,” Carlos Pérez Ricart, a Mexican academic, wrote in the newspaper Reforma on Tuesday.
Last year, Mexican activists uncovered two sites they dubbed “death camps” run by the CJNG in Colima state. In at least one, they said unwilling recruits were tortured, killed and buried in mass graves.
CJNG was an early pioneer of synthetic drugs, whose huge potency increased profit margins and made detection by the authorities harder.
With control of clandestine laboratories and transnational trafficking routes, it is one of the biggest suppliers of fentanyl to the US. Trump last year designated CJNG and other cartels as foreign terrorist organisations.
The group has a formidable money-laundering operation and has diversified into many other illicit businesses, from extortion to fuel theft to defrauding American tourists through fake timeshare schemes in picturesque beach resorts.
Experts believe El Mencho had pulled back from running day-to-day operations in recent years.
Former and current security officials mention a handful of powerful lieutenants who could be vying to take over the cartel.
Many see the heir apparent as El Mencho’s stepson, Juan Carlos Valencia González, known as “El 03”, who controls large swaths of territory in Jalisco and western Mexico.
Born into a strand of cartel royalty that prized discretion and anonymity, he grew up in great wealth, was sent to expensive private schools and is seen as a cool, level-headed figure.
Audías “El Jardinero” Flores-Silva, described as an old-school cowboy hat-wearing narco, controls methamphetamine laboratories and clandestine airstrips, as well as trucking routes used to move drugs north, according to US authorities.
He was the architect of a crucial alliance between the CJNG and a faction of the Sinaloa cartel.
Finally, Gonzalo Mendoza Gaytán, known as “El Sapo” or the Frog, leads violent recruitment drives and attacks on law enforcement.
He is widely believed to harbour a grudge against “El 03”, who was rumoured to have ordered a hit on him a few years ago.
El Sapo is “a psychopath”, says Abel Flores, a security consultant and expert on the CJNG.
“He’s one of those guys with no issues in killing even kids.”
But El Mencho remained the “head of state”, holding together his lieutenants and disparate franchisee gangs across Mexico, says Carlos Olivo, a former DEA agent in charge of Guadalajara.
“Everybody saw El Mencho as the boss.”
It seems unlikely, Olivo adds, that any of his potential successors could be such a “unifying figure”, though he thinks all-out war will be avoided, at least in the short term.
The unrest that broke out on Sunday immediately drew comparisons to the situation in the northern state of Sinaloa, where a kingpin removal has had devastating consequences.
The 2024 capture and extradition to the US of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, a Sinaloa Cartel boss, has sparked an all-out war between factions who accuse each other of betrayal.
Thousands have died or gone missing, including many civilians.
It is hard to say whether the Jalisco Cartel will follow that path.
Experts disagree over how El Mencho’s potential successors would respond to the power vacuum.
Some argue El 03 or El Jardinero could retain a fragile hold as leader for now and that both the cartel and the government may avoid further conflict ahead of Guadalajara’s stint as a World Cup host city this summer.
But other experts warn personal rivalries would quickly split the group, causing wars for turf and businesses.
Still others say the cartel could split but that its vast territory could allow the new groups to coexist in relative peace.
But most say it is very likely that further-flung CJNG franchises would either break free or face attacks from other cartels looking to capitalise on the group’s weakness.
The government’s actions may determine if the violence spirals and whether the cartels are truly weakened.
“Now is the time to go after these people, because they’re not a united front,” says Arturo Fontes, a former FBI agent who did two stints in Guadalajara.
“It’ll take about 10 days to two weeks for them to reorganise, and once they do, you’re going to see the battle between them start.”
There is also a risk of retaliatory assassinations against officials, he adds.
One security official in western Mexico predicts a “big” internal conflict between the gangs but argued that taking out kingpins would ultimately reduce violence for civilians.
“It creates chaos with them killing each other — they’ll be doing the government’s job for them,” he says.
“If the government kills a couple, then the others will see they’re exposed and will want to reduce their aggression by as much as 50 per cent and make a deal” with the authorities and each other.
But most experts agree it would take more than killing bosses to have a lasting impact.
Felbab-Brown of Brookings recommends rapidly targeting potential successors, mid-level operators, money launderers and logistical teams.
“But it’s hard to do.
It takes a lot of intelligence resources just to go after one person,” she says.
Harfuch, the security minister, announced a plan last year to expand the government’s lacklustre intelligence and investigation capabilities.
Analysts say the El Mencho operation demonstrated capacities that some doubted Mexico had, though others suggest the CIA and other US agencies were the ones who located him.
“The promise on intelligence has been heartening, but we will only see now how successful it has been,” says María Teresa Martínez Trujillo, a co-founder of security research centre Noria MXCA.
The bigger problem will be tackling widespread corruption among politicians and poorly paid local police forces.
Progress had been made in prosecuting some low-level politicians who shielded or participated in organised crime.
But many doubt that Sheinbaum would move against senior figures in her Morena party who have been accused of links to organised crime.
“If you don’t hit the structures that support the gangs . . . ultimately a new leader will pop up and take over their businesses,” says Lila Abed, Mexico programme director at think-tank The Dialogue.
“That person once again joins the FBI’s top 10 most-wanted list, and the US and Mexico authorities once again work together to go after that person,” she adds.
“But the cartels remain.”
Additional reporting by Christine Murray in Mexico City
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