El Mencho is dead. On February 22, 2026, Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, the founder and leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, known worldwide by his alias El Mencho, was killed during a Mexican Army operation in the mountain town of Tapalpa, Jalisco.
He was 59 years old. He had a $15 million bounty on his head from the United States government. He had evaded capture for over a decade while building what the FBI considers Mexico’s most powerful and dangerous criminal organisation.
Within hours of his death being confirmed, cities burned.
Cartel members set vehicles alight and dragged hijacked trucks onto major highways across more than a dozen Mexican states. Guadalajara, the capital of Jalisco and one of the host cities for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, turned into a ghost town as residents hunkered down at home.
The US Embassy issued shelter-in-place warnings for Americans in five states. Airlines suspended flights in and out of Puerto Vallarta and Guadalajara. More than 250 car fires, the narcobloqueos that have become the CJNG’s signature retaliation tactic, were set across twenty states where the cartel operates. Over seventy people died in the operation and its immediate aftermath, including twenty-five members of the Mexican National Guard.
The government celebrated. The cartel responded. The drugs kept moving.
This is the story that has played out every time a major cartel kingpin has been removed. And understanding why requires going much further back than February 22nd.
The man and the myth
Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes was born on July 17, 1966, in the rural community of Culotitlán in Aguililla, Michoacán. He grew up in poverty, dropped out of primary school, and immigrated illegally to the United States as a young man. He was convicted of conspiracy to distribute heroin in the US District Court for Northern California in 1994 and served nearly three years in an American prison. After his release, he was deported to Mexico.
He returned to a country where the drug trade was already transforming itself and its practitioners into something altogether more violent and more powerful than what had come before.
He worked as a police officer after his deportation, which gave him an early education in both law enforcement tactics and their limitations. He then married into the Valencia clan, a major trafficking family from Michoacán who ran what was known as the Milenio Cartel and disguised drug shipments through their legitimate avocado export business.
The path from there to the leadership of Mexico’s most feared criminal organisation was built on a single principle: overwhelming violence, deployed faster and more publicly than rivals could absorb or respond to.
He trained his cartel almost like Genghis Khan in their approach to conquest, one security analyst said. They would wipe out opposition and use that as a warning: if you oppose us, this is what will happen to you. That approach helped the CJNG expand across multiple states rapidly, but it also meant constant confrontation with rivals, with the military, and with the civilian populations caught between them.
Oseguera was a former police officer and avocado farmer who co-founded the CJNG around 2007 and built it into what the FBI considers Mexico’s most powerful trafficking organisation, responsible for the bulk of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and fentanyl entering the US. He cultivated an air of mystery throughout his years as a fugitive, keeping such a low profile that all publicly known photographs of him were decades old at the time of his death.
The US offered $15 million for information leading to his capture. Mexico offered the equivalent of roughly $15 million more. He remained free anyway.
How they found him
In the days immediately preceding the operation, military intelligence tracked the movements of a trusted associate connected to a romantic partner of Oseguera. On February 20, data from this tracking effort indicated that the companion had transported the romantic partner to a secluded rural property in the mountainous region of Tapalpa, Jalisco, where Oseguera was believed to be staying.
It was not a sophisticated intelligence breakthrough. It was the oldest vulnerability in the history of fugitive hunting: personal relationships. The most wanted man in Mexico was found because someone who loved him visited him.
Special forces, backed by the National Guard, military aircraft and helicopters, sealed off the area before dawn on February 22. Cartel gunmen opened fire as soldiers advanced. Security forces returned fire, killing several suspected CJNG members.
El Mencho and members of his inner circle fled to a nearby wooded cabin complex, where a second firefight erupted. Soldiers eventually found a wounded El Mencho alongside two bodyguards.
A military helicopter providing aerial support was struck by gunfire during the operation and forced to make an emergency landing. El Mencho, wounded during the firefight, was airlifted toward Mexico City. Officials diverted the aircraft to Morelia International Airport rather than Guadalajara, where CJNG retaliation had already begun, and from there to the capital via Air Force aircraft. He died en route from his gunshot wounds.
The Mexican Defence Secretary confirmed the operation. The White House confirmed US intelligence support. President Trump called it justice. President Sheinbaum urged calm.
Neither calm nor justice arrived quickly.
The kingpin strategy and why It never works
The idea behind removing a cartel’s leader is intuitive. Organisations depend on leadership. Remove the head, the body struggles. Apply enough pressure to the top, and the structure below collapses.
It is a logical theory. It is also, after thirty years of evidence, demonstrably wrong.
The kingpin strategy was developed by the US Drug Enforcement Agency to weaken, dismantle and destroy drug trafficking organisations by targeting their management and leadership structures. Behind it was the assumption that figures at the top of the drug trafficking hierarchy cannot be easily replaced.
That assumption has been tested against reality repeatedly since Pablo Escobar was killed on a Medellín rooftop in December 1993.
Escobar’s death shattered the Medellín Cartel. But cocaine trafficking did not disappear. It shifted to the Cali Cartel and later to more decentralised, networked organisations. Violence subsided from its peak but never vanished.
The pattern has repeated without meaningful variation in every subsequent case. El Chapo was captured, escaped twice, and was finally extradited to the United States, where he is serving a life sentence. The capture of El Mayo profoundly destabilised Sinaloa and neighbouring states through a cartel civil war, which has seen a 400 percent spike in homicides, with over 2,400 murders and 2,900 disappearances since September 2024.
Whilst the kingpin strategy can remove key figures from drug trafficking organisations, it does very little to stem drug trafficking itself as there are always others willing to step into highly profitable leadership roles.
The critical word is profitable. The drug trade is not sustained by the personality or charisma of any individual leader. It is sustained by demand. As long as there are people in the United States and elsewhere willing to pay for cocaine, fentanyl and methamphetamine, there will be people in Mexico and Colombia and Ecuador willing to produce and transport it.
The margin is enormous. The recruitment pool, in communities shaped by poverty, institutional failure and limited alternatives, is effectively unlimited.
Mexico’s drug trade and organised crime in general is the product of systemic failure across the region: poverty, a lack of good education, a lack of job opportunities, an absence of the state in many parts of the country, as well as corruption endemic to local politics and all state institutions. It is not a case of good guys against bad, but really a product of a system that is letting people down.
Removing one man from the top of that system changes the name of the person at the top. It does not change the system.
What happens to the CJNG now
The immediate question after any kingpin killing is succession. In the case of El Mencho, the answer is complicated by the deliberate secrecy with which he ran the organisation and by the specific circumstances of his family.
El Mencho’s son being jailed in the United States broke the line of succession, with his stepson Juan Carlos Valencia remaining the most likely candidate to assume control. His stepson, known as El Pelón, was considered El Mencho’s de facto second in command by the US Director of National Intelligence’s National CounterTerrorism Centre at the time of the killing.
Mexican security analyst David Saucedo told CNN that a succession war among commanders is expected to determine who will take control of the organisation, though he did not rule out the possibility of an agreement among top leaders. Such an agreement would not necessarily ensure peace. The cartel could adopt a posture of total war against the Mexican state if it interprets the operation as extermination rather than capture.
There is also a wider regional dimension. The death of El Mencho could trigger a domino effect in Latin American countries that are part of the CJNG’s cocaine production, transit, and export network, particularly Ecuador and Colombia. Regional competition over routes and territorial control could spark tensions and renegotiations that directly affect the cartel’s operations.
Experts suggest that removing a figurehead does not dismantle the business. El Mencho’s removal is like saying that a company is going to fail because you take out the CEO. Not at all. The flow of drugs is going to continue, and there are going to be plenty of pretenders to the throne. Mexico is going to have to figure that out.
The psychology of the kingpin obsession
There is a question worth asking that rarely gets asked in the immediate aftermath of these operations: why does the kingpin strategy persist, given the weight of evidence against it?
Part of the answer is political. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has been under tremendous pressure to show results against drug trafficking since US President Donald Trump took office. The killing of El Mencho was the biggest prize yet to show the Trump administration for its efforts.
A named, photographed, wanted fugitive being killed is visible. It produces press conferences and headlines and political validation. The structural reforms required to actually reduce drug trafficking, economic development, institutional anti-corruption work, demand reduction, are invisible, slow, and generate no equivalent news cycle.
Part of the answer is psychological. Human beings understand hierarchies. We understand that organisations have leaders. We understand, intuitively, that removing a leader weakens an organisation. The kingpin strategy maps onto a cognitive model of how power works that feels correct even when the evidence says otherwise. It satisfies the narrative requirement for a story: a villain, a confrontation, a resolution.
The cartel is not a story. It is a system. Systems do not have clean endings.
There is also the deeper psychological mechanism explored in the Schadenfreude article in this series. The fall of a powerful, feared, and hated figure produces a genuine emotional response in the people who have suffered under that figure’s shadow.
For Mexican families who have lost members to cartel violence, for communities that have lived under the CJNG’s territorial control, the news of El Mencho’s death carried real emotional weight. That response is legitimate. It is human. It is not the same as the problem being solved.
The World Cup Problem Nobody Is Talking About
There is an immediate and specific consequence of El Mencho’s death that has received less attention than it deserves.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup playoffs are scheduled to begin in Guadalajara in the coming weeks. The inaugural match of the tournament is scheduled for Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, between hosts Mexico and South Africa. FIFA has not publicly commented on the unrest or its potential impact on World Cup preparations.
Guadalajara, the capital of Jalisco and the CJNG’s home base, turned into a ghost town on the night of February 22nd. The airport was shut. Domestic and international flights were cancelled. US tourists were carjacked and their vehicles set alight to build roadblocks. The city that is due to host World Cup matches in a matter of weeks was, for a period of hours, effectively under cartel control.
The violence has since subsided. The roads have been cleared. Official statements describe normalcy returning. But the security apparatus required to protect a global sporting event in a city where the most powerful cartel in Mexico has just lost its founder, and where a succession war is now beginning, is a problem of a different order from the standard World Cup security challenges.
FIFA’s silence on the matter is its own kind of statement.
The only honest conclusion
El Mencho is dead. That fact is real, and for the soldiers and law enforcement officers who spent years tracking him, and for the communities that endured the CJNG’s reign of violence, it carries genuine meaning.
But the honest accounting of what his death changes is brief.
Where Mexico was dominated by a few major organisations over the last few decades, there are now hundreds of small criminal splinter groups, regional factions, and gangs spread across the country, in large part as fallout from the kingpin strategy. El Mencho’s CJNG was itself born from the wreckage of previous cartel structures dismantled by previous kingpin operations. The organisation that replaces it, whatever form it takes, will be born from the wreckage of this one.
Just taking down one more kingpin is not going to fix drug use in the United States, nor the rule of law in Mexico. These are difficult, complex problems that require a comprehensive solution. Wherever you take out a leader, there is someone waiting to step up and take his place, and that is what a lot of the violence will be connected to.
The drugs will keep moving. The money will keep flowing. The poverty and institutional failure that make the cartel’s recruitment pool effectively inexhaustible will persist unless addressed directly, which is slow and expensive and produces no press conferences.
El Mencho is dead. The system that created him is not.
And somewhere in Jalisco tonight, the people who will determine what comes next are already making their calculations.
This article is part of the Current News cluster. Read the pillar: The Psychology of the News Cycle: Why Certain Stories Hit Different
