CIPHER BRIEF REPORTING — Exactly who tracked El Mencho, the world’s most wanted and feared drug lord, to a heavily armed safe house in a remote Sierra Madre town is a secret, for now. The Mexican government has revealed only that its air force and special forces commandos descended on a safe house in the quaint Sierra Madre town of Tapalpa early yesterday, encountered gunfire and returned it, killing four cartel gunmen.
El Mencho, whose real name is Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, is the 59-year-old founder and leader of the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG). Oseguera was wounded in the exchange of gunfire, loaded onto a Mexican military aircraft and flown to Mexico City. According to officials, he didn’t survive the flight.
Officials announced that they seized “various weapons and armored vehicles… including rocket launchers capable of shooting down aircraft and destroying armored vehicles” as a result of the raid. Such heavy military-grade weapons don’t just materialize without somebody knowing about them. A lot of people, in fact. Who sold them to Mencho’s paramilitary organization? Where did they originate? Are there others? Officials won’t have the opportunity to interrogate Oseguera about the influential people who were on his payroll as he grew his ultra-violent cartel into a global powerhouse.
But according to DEA intelligence, his cartel is worth billions and has a presence in all 50 American states and 40 countries. Some American agents believe the Mexican government never wanted to take him alive. In fact, for most of his career, as he was consolidating his power, Mexican leaders have told the U.S. that their forces were unable to find and arrest him. What changed? Experts believe at least two things.
First, Mexican leaders finally got fed up with El Mencho’s blood-soaked reign. “The CJNG was public enemy number one” for President Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration, Michael Chavarria, formerly the Drug Enforcement Administration’s senior leader in Guadalajara, the Mexican cartels’ original base of operations, told The Cipher Brief. “It’s the one cartel out of favor with President Claudia Sheinbaum, especially as it was responsible for the attempt on the life of Security Secretary Omar Garcia Harfuch, just prior to Sheinbaum’s election.”
Garcia Harfuch, an aggressive, outspoken crime-fighter considered to be Mexico’s second most powerful official, survived a cartel assassination attempt in 2020, when he was Mexico City’s police chief. He became the CJNG’s implacable nemesis.
Second, under pressure from President Donald Trump and the U.S. Congress, Sheinbaum and other top officials started collaborating openly with the U.S. military and intelligence community, an unthinkable event just a few years ago. But that changed with the election of Donald Trump.
The U.S. Navy’s Seal Team 2 arrived in Mexico around Feb. 16, ostensibly for a training exercise with Mexican military counterparts aimed at interdicting Chinese shipments of chemical precursors used to make the deadly opioid fentanyl, which has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. The timing is noteworthy. According to U.S. officials, Navy SEALs trained elite Mexican navy special forces units that captured, among others, infamous drug kingpins Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman in 2016 and Rafael Caro Quintero in 2022.
For those operations and many others, DEA agents posted to Mexico and along the border provided intelligence gleaned from scores of paid informants recruited over decades. Many operations failed, apparently because they were compromised, but enough succeeded to convince President Trump, who declared drug trafficking and illegal migration top national security threats, to order the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies to step up their intelligence collections aimed at the Mexican underworld. The CIA reportedly added more drone surveillance flights over the border region as a result.
But sharing intelligence with the Mexican government has always been a fraught enterprise. Some plans were slow walked. For others, operational security was compromised by corruption at every level of the Mexican government. Sheinbaum’s predecessor, leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, openly disdained U.S. anti-drug efforts and famously said he would treat the crime cartels with “hugs, not bullets.”
“The CJNG established a nation-wide network of corrupt alliances among federal, state, and local police and regional military – sufficient to afford them a degree of protection,” Chavarria told us. The DEA had recruited plenty of human sources inside Mexico over the decades, but agents complained. The problem was getting the Mexican government to use that intelligence to take action against key cartel lieutenants.
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In December 2024, as the CJNG’s power inside Mexico and around the world expanded precipitously, the Biden administration raised the reward for El Mencho from $10 million to $15 million.
As soon as he took office for the second time, Trump designated the CJNG and other Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. Trump himself repeatedly pressed Sheinbaum to allow the U.S. military to mount anti-cartel operations deep in Mexican territory. She always refused. Trump and her team were warned that such incursions would inflame Mexican politicians and likely backfire, damaging Sheinbaum’s ability to work with the U.S.
The compromise seems to have been that all boots visible on the ground and all triggers pulled would be strictly Mexican, while, behind the scenes, U.S. law enforcement, military and intelligence community personnel would provide “intelligence support,” as White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt posted yesterday on X.
Even though El Mencho has been declared dead, U.S. security experts say the war on the cartels is not even close to being over.
“He died like a dog,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Tex., a Navy SEAL veteran who has led Congressional anti-cartel initiatives, posted on X yesterday. “Cause for celebration – absolutely - but not a victory lap. Now, more than ever, it is critical to keep the pressure on the Mexican cartels.”
DEA veterans say that El Mencho will be quickly replaced by one of his key lieutenants, probably his stepson, Juan Carlos Valencia Gonzalez, 41, known as El R-3, El JP, Tricky Tres or simply 03. He inherits narco DNA, not just from Mencho, a farm boy-turned-enforcer but, even more importantly from the Valencia clan, who are narco royalty.
“El Mencho married into the Valencia family, taking Rosalinda Gonzalez Valencia as his wife,” says Chavarria, an expert on the Valencias and author of the book Junior, about a DEA penetration of the cartels. “This is a common practice among drug trafficking families – designed to solidify loyalty and to protect against betrayal. Narco intermarriages were and are regularly encountered in Mexico’s underworld.”
“The operation against Mencho is more about cracking the idea that powerful cartel leaders operate with impunity than bringing about the downfall of a cartel,” says Carlos Olivo, formerly DEA’s agent in charge in Guadalajara and assistant agent in charge in the key border city of El Paso. “Mencho had near absolute control in that area of Jalisco and for that to be penetrated and successful shows us that a willing partner can indeed turn the tide in Mexico,” he told The Cipher Brief.
Olivo, an ex-Marine who led a DEA team hunting Mencho until recently and is now writing a book about the CJNG, warns that taking down the kingpin and his successors is “just one pillar. Corrupt politicians and banking and business sectors must be next.”
With the stakes in the billions and powerful, respected families involved in the country’s politics, banking and business sectors, and cleaning up Mexico’s institutions will take more than firepower and good intelligence.
“For us Americans, reality won’t change,” says Chavarria. “Same drugs coming across, because of our demand. Same violence in Mexico. Wash, rinse, repeat. It is a small skirmish victory in a prolonged drug war. There will be more Menchos. On a positive note, however, no kingpin can last forever. They can run but they cannot escape their eventuality. Kingpins fall.”
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