Mexicos

Monterrey, Mexico – Portraits of the missing cover Guadalajara’s “Roundabout of the Disappeared”, a landmark renamed by families to highlight the state’s disappearance crisis.

On February 22, the streets surrounding the memorial and throughout the city stood empty after the Mexican army killed Ruben Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, the longtime leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG).

In retaliation, cartel members set fire to buses and taxis, erecting a series of blockades that spread across 20 states.

The widespread unrest demonstrated the CJNG’s capacity for rapid coordination, fuelled by a ‘franchise’ model that allows smaller cells to operate under the cartel’s brand and vast financial network.

While the group’s economic reach extends into Europe and Asia, its power remains rooted in its paramilitary force. This structure relies on extortion, brutal violence and forced disappearances as its main tools to seize territory and control markets.

Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho”, consolidated one of Mexico’s most powerful criminal organisations in part due to a unique franchise-based structure.

According to the United States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), the CJNG maintains a presence in every state of Mexico, with varying levels of influence, and operates in more than 40 countries across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa, and throughout the US. Its primary activity is the trafficking of cocaine, fentanyl and methamphetamine.

Raul Zepeda Gil, a teaching fellow in War Studies at King’s College London, notes that rather than following a “classic organisational pyramid”, the CJNG avoids a centralised financial network.

“Instead, profits can be distributed across many locations and groups simultaneously,” Zepeda told Al Jazeera.

Besides controlling key areas in western Mexico, the CJNG controls the Pacific Coast region, including the strategic ports of Manzanillo and Lazaro Cardenas, crucial for the import of synthetic precursor chemicals.

“Their most important activity is drug trafficking,” Zepeda said. “Chemical precursors that arrive from China reach Mexican ports and are then sent to the United States already in fentanyl form.”

The organisation also generates revenues through fuel theft, illegal mining, extortion, migrant smuggling and money laundering.

On February 19, the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned a timeshare fraud network led by the CJNG that targeted elderly Americans.

“Timeshare fraud in Mexico has plagued American victims for decades, costing them hundreds of millions of dollars while enriching criminal organisations such as CJNG,” the Treasury Department stated in a press release.

The CJNG’s extensive reach and rapid growth are made possible by a vast, powerful network that protects drug trafficking operations and ensures impunity, says Carlos Flores, an investigator at the Centre for Research and Higher Education in Social Anthropology (CIESAS). Flores argues that these “hegemonic power networks”, shadow networks of business leaders, politicians, and criminals, have reconfigured state institutions to serve their own interests.

“These same networks, which control and administer state institutions – including security institutions – focus their actions primarily against their competitors, while simultaneously allowing these other networks to consolidate their power,” he added.

The rise of a deadly paramilitary force

Forced disappearances and extortion are crucial for the CJNG’s control of the market, seeding fear that silences communities and facilitates forced recruitment. This ensures a steady supply of disposable labour while following the ‘no body, no crime’ logic that minimises the political and legal costs of their operations.

Homicides and forced disappearances have surged in Jalisco since the group emerged in 2010. The CJNG rose from the remnants of the Milenio Cartel, a subordinate partner of the Sinaloa Cartel based in Oseguera Cervantes’s home state of Michoacan. While across Mexico more than 130,000 people are missing, Jalisco currently ranks at the top with at least 16,000 reported cases, and collectives of families continue to uncover mass graves and what they describe as “extermination sites”.

Raul Servin, a member of the Guerreros Buscadores, a collective representing more than 400 families of the disappeared, told Al Jazeera that their searches frequently reveal human remains in varying states of decay and torture. They have found victims who were shot, hanged or killed with bladed weapons that were left inside the bodies, he said.

“It’s a sadness and helplessness we feel when we see each body these people leave behind,” said Servin, who has been searching for his son since 2018.

Beyond its financial power, the CJNG is notorious for its extensive arsenal of military-grade weaponry, including armed drones, rocket-propelled grenades, and firearms.

On February 22, more than 25 National Guard members were killed in Jalisco. In the past, the organisation has also carried out high-profile attacks against public officials.

Last year in February, US President Donald Trump designated the Jalisco New Generation Cartel as a foreign terrorist organisation. In July, US prosecutors in Virginia unsealed an indictment against Petar Dimitrov Mirchev, a Bulgarian national accused of conspiring with East African associates to equip the CJNG with military-grade weaponry. The indictment states that Mirchev brokered these deals “despite knowing that the CJNG inflicts catastrophic suffering” to protect its prolific drug trafficking operations.

The indictment also revealed that the CJNG was attempting to buy surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft systems (ZU-23). Overall, Mirchev allegedly created a list of weaponry worth approximately $58m.

The paramilitary profile has allowed the CJNG to expand rapidly into rival territories and monopolise the market. Flores describes this training, deployment, and weaponry as being similar to an army, making them “practically uncontestable”.

“They operate under a different kind of logic,” Flores said. “They provide a kind of licence to [local] groups that associate with them. They fight their enemies and collaborate on trafficking in exchange for using the Jalisco New Generation Cartel as a label.”

The CJNG adopted a level of brutality similar to Los Zetas, whose founders were elite Mexican special forces soldiers trained by the US and Israel. In its early days, the CJNG was known as the “Matazetas”, or Zetas Killers.

Servin and the Guerreros Buscadores have seen the results of this brutality firsthand. Locating the missing becomes more difficult as concealment tactics evolve, Servin said. Disappearances have become a powerful economic tool to control and exploit territory. Collectives often find bodies buried under layers of dirt and animal carcasses to throw off the scent, or even encased in concrete.

“They make us work harder than necessary. If they took his life, why not leave him where we can find him quickly?”

Zepeda says that the CJNG leveraged military-grade tactics to fill the void left by the government’s crackdown on other cartels carried out between 2008 and 2010. In 2009, the Beltran-Leyva Organisation – which had been at war with the Sinaloa Cartel since their 2008 split – was reeling from a series of high-profile arrests and killings.

The death of Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel, a key finance operator for the Sinaloa Cartel, at the hands of the military in 2010 further cleared the way for new criminal players. Oseguera Cervantes was working under Coronel before breaking away to form what would become the CJNG.

“If we could summarise the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, it’s a reinvention of Los Zetas, which took over all the territory that the other cartels defeated by the Mexican government had occupied,” Zepeda added.

This history serves as a warning of what may follow the death of Oseguera Cervantes. Zepeda pointed out that the drug trade is an incredibly dynamic market where “there will always be a group of people willing to take control”.

Flores warns that “decapitating the leadership” is insufficient if power networks, along with the CJNG’s criminal and operational structures, remain intact.

“Without dismantling the power networks, yesterday’s victory will become the cause of new violence tomorrow,” Flores said. “We’ve seen this approach many times before, and we know what it leads to: It solves neither the transnational drug problem nor creates conditions of greater stability for the Mexican population.”

Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum has warned she could take possible legal action following comments from right-wing tech billionaire Elon Musk, accusing her of ties to cartels.

At her morning news conference on Tuesday, the president was asked for her response to Musk’s statements a day prior. Musk had described her as being beholden to the cartels.

“Well, we are considering whether to take any legal action,” she began. “The lawyers are looking into it.”

She then proceeded to describe the allegations that she leads a “narco-government” as “absurd” and demonstrably false.

“It falls apart all on its own,” she said, dismissing the accusation as hackneyed. “They don’t even know what to invent any more, right? Honestly, it’s laughable.”

Sheinbaum has faced criticism for her national security policies following a spate of cross-country violence over the weekend.

Killing of El Mencho

The violence erupted after the death on Sunday of a top cartel leader, Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known by the nickname El Mencho.

The Mexican military had tracked El Mencho to the town of Tapalpa in central Mexico. He died while en route to medical care after being shot by authorities.

Members of El Mencho’s criminal organisation, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, responded to the news of his death with road blocks, arson and clashes with security forces. Dozens of people were killed in the violence.

Musk was among the online commentators criticising Sheinbaum’s handling of Mexico’s security in the aftermath of the attacks.

His posts came in response to a video clip circulating on social media, showing Sheinbaum advocating for alternatives to the militaristic “war on drugs” approach.

“She’s just saying what her cartel bosses tell her to say,” Musk wrote in response to the video.

“Let’s just say that their punishment for disobedience is a little worse than a ‘performance improvement plan’.”

A vocal critic of left-wing governments like Sheinbaum’s, Musk is closely aligned with United States President Donald Trump, who has likewise pushed for more military action against cartels.

In September, for instance, Trump’s State Department listed Mexico as an area of concern for drug-trafficking and outlined steps it expected to see to address the issue.

“Much more remains to be done by Mexico’s government to target cartel leadership, along with their clandestine drug labs, precursor chemical supply chains, and illicit finances,” the State Department wrote.

“Over the next year, the United States will expect to see additional, aggressive efforts by Mexico to hold cartel leaders accountable and disrupt the illicit networks engaged in drug production and trafficking.”

Trump himself has accused Sheinbaum of inefficacy in her campaign to crack down on illicit drug trafficking.

“She’s not running Mexico. The cartels are running Mexico,” Trump told Fox News in the hours after launching a January 3 military operation to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

“She’s very frightened of the cartels. They’re running Mexico. I’ve asked her numerous times, ‘Would you like us to take out the cartels?’”

Sheinbaum has repeatedly refused the prospect of unilateral US intervention, arguing it would violate Mexican sovereignty. Still, Trump has repeatedly warned that the US is considering military strikes on Mexican soil.

“Something’s going to have to be done with Mexico,” he told Fox News.

Upping the pressure

Sheinbaum, however, has defended her administration’s track record. Faced with US tariffs in February 2025, she deployed nearly 10,000 members of Mexico’s National Guard to the country’s northern border to crack down on fentanyl trafficking.

She has also taken targeted military actions against cartels, though she has argued that the process should be focused on prosecuting criminals, rather than killing them in law enforcement operations.

Her administration has also overseen the extradition of dozens of Mexican nationals suspected of crimes in the US. In January 2025, for instance, 37 people were sent to the US. In April and August, groups of 13 and 14 suspects were transferred, respectively.

Sunday’s capture and killing of El Mencho was the fulfilment of a decades-long goal for the Mexican government, which has long sought his arrest.

Still, on Monday, Trump briefly posted a message on his Truth Social platform indicating that he expected Sheinbaum to do more.

“Mexico must step up their effort on Cartels and Drugs,” he wrote in a post that was later removed.

Sheinbaum, meanwhile, used Tuesday’s news conference to dismiss the criticism as out of touch with what was happening in Mexico. She added that what matters to her is the opinion of the Mexican people, not Musk.

“The vast majority of people recognise the work of the armed forces and the work we are doing every day, not only in security, but for the good of the country, for the wellbeing of all Mexicans,” she said. “That is what will guide us.”

On Sunday, Mexican security forces killed 59-year-old Nemesio Ruben Oseguera Cervantes, alias “El Mencho”, the leader of the notorious Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), based in western Mexico’s Jalisco state.

The Mexican defence ministry acknowledged that the lethal operation had been conducted with “complementary information” from the United States, whose “peacemaker” president, Donald Trump, has repeatedly threatened to attack Mexico to combat the drug cartels.

Mind you, these are organisations that owe their very existence to US policy and drug consumption in the first place.

US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau greeted the news of El Mencho’s death with glee, taking to X to proclaim: “This is a great development for Mexico, the US, Latin America, and the world.”

And yet things aren’t looking quite so “great” thus far.

As anyone who has ever paid remote attention to global affairs might have predicted, violence has broken out across several Mexican states in the aftermath of the killing – which is generally what happens when you take out a cartel kingpin.

Gunmen have torched vehicles and blocked highways in various locales while various US media have reported sensationally on the plight of American tourists “stranded” in Mexican resort cities on account of the upheaval.

Shortly after his initial enthusiastic post, Landau returned to X with a “PS, I’m watching the scenes of violence from Mexico with great sadness and concern.” But no matter: “We must never lose our nerve.”

The deputy secretary of state ended his “PS” with some words of encouragement in Spanish for the Mexican nation: “¡Animo Mexico!” (Cheer up, Mexico!)

But again, there is hardly room for cheer given that there is not a single example in pretty much the entire history of the world in which the killing of one cartel boss has resolved the narcotrafficking problem – or anything else, for that matter.

Recall the case of Pablo Escobar of the Medellin Cartel, killed in 1993 by Colombian police with a whole lot of help from the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).

Despite Escobar’s absence, the international drug trade proceeded apace, and ensuing decades played host to spectacular levels of violence in Colombia – much of it coincidentally perpetrated by heavily US-backed state security forces.

In one particularly memorable episode, members of the Colombian army slaughtered an estimated 10,000 civilians and passed the cadavers off as left-wing “terrorists”.

To this day, Colombia remains the world’s top producer of cocaine.

In other words, to hail El Mencho’s demise as a “great development” for Mexico or anyone else is at best preposterously delusional.

On Sunday I phoned a Mexican friend in the southern state of Oaxaca, a supporter of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, for our requisite argument over the day’s events. In his view, Mexico’s government had simply been “doing its job” in the “war on drugs” by eliminating El Mencho, and the US had nothing substantial to do with it.

Indeed, much like her predecessor and mentor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Sheinbaum has perfected the art of doing the gringos’ dirty work while purporting to act in a “sovereign” fashion – and even to defy the imperial overlords to the north.

Granted, she does not have a whole lot of room to manoeuvre given the recent kidnapping by the US of Venezuelan head of state Nicolas Maduro – and the fact that Trump has made it known that he is beholden to no law, whether domestic or international.

But while Sheinbaum may have seen no choice but to temporarily placate the Americans and satisfy Trump’s need for blood, Mexicans will pay a heavy price.

A brief review of contemporary Mexican history confirms as much. No sooner did then-Mexican President Felipe Calderon launch his “drug war” under US guidance in 2006 than homicides and enforced disappearances skyrocketed in the country.

Well over half a million people have since been killed and disappeared, many of them victims of militarised agents of the state who often operate in cahoots with organised crime.

Nary a dent has been put in the northward flow of drugs while the southward flow of US-manufactured weapons continues unabated.

The state of Jalisco itself happens to have the highest number of enforced disappearances in all of Mexico and made headlines last year with the discovery of a clandestine crematorium on a ranch outside Guadalajara, one of the host cities of the upcoming World Cup.

The ranch was reportedly used by the CJNG as a recruitment and training centre as well as an extermination site.

And the removal of El Mencho from the equation will do precisely nothing in terms of pacifying the landscape – just as the respective extraditions to the US of Sinaloa cartel leaders Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada merely set off an ongoing violent battle for power.

Contrary to lofty soundbites from US officials, the empire is not at all interested in getting rid of either drug trafficking or violence south of the border as both phenomena provide a perennial excuse for US interference in Mexico and beyond.

Were the gringos actually serious about ridding “Mexico, the US, Latin America, and the world” of the whole cartel problem, a decriminalisation of drugs would do much to nip the business in the bud by rendering the movement of drugs far less fantastically lucrative.

A moratorium on the US’s obsessive manufacture of weapons would also help.

Obviously, nothing so much as resembling those potential solutions is even on the horizon. If it were, that would be one hell of a “great development” indeed.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.