Nemesio "El Mencho" Oseguera, the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, is dead. Mexican federal forces killed him in a military operation Sunday in the mountains of Jalisco, and his cartel responded exactly the way you'd expect a terrorist organization to respond.
Over 50 people were killed in the aftermath. Cartel loyalists blockaded 252 roads with burning cars and trucks. Flights out of Puerto Vallarta and Guadalajara were cancelled. More than 25 of the dead were Mexican National Guard troops.
The man who had run one of the most violent drug operations on the planet for decades, who once commanded a $15 million U.S. bounty, died in a secluded resort town called Tapalpa, nestled in the pine forests of Jalisco's southwest. Mexican authorities said during President Claudia Sheinbaum's daily press conference Monday that security forces tracked one of his girlfriends to the location.
Mexico's Ministry of Defense confirmed the United States provided intelligence and other unspecified support in the operation. Sheinbaum made clear Monday there was no American involvement on the ground, but that security and intelligence sharing between the two countries has increased.
All operations, from their planning onwards, are the responsibility of the Mexican federal forces.
That was Sheinbaum's line, and it's a carefully drawn one. Mexico wants credit for the kill. Fine. What matters is the result, and the result is that the leader of a designated terrorist organization is no longer breathing.
Robert Almonte, a Texas-based security consultant and former deputy chief of the El Paso Police Department who specialized in narcotics, framed the operation in blunter terms:
This is an attack against the Mexican government, who signaled a new war against the narcos and worked with the US to bring them down. This is an indication that the US stepped up our game against the cartels.
That's the signal that matters. After President Trump designated cartels as terrorist organizations last year, the posture change, the New York Post reported. This wasn't a negotiation. It was an operation.
Sunday's mission was directed by Omar Garcia Harfuch, Mexico's Secretary of Security and Civilian Protection. He's 44 years old. He received training from the DEA and the FBI. And six years ago, CJNG tried to kill him in an ambush in Lomas de Chapultepec, Mexico City, that left him with three bullet wounds and two police officers dead.
He survived. He got the cabinet appointment from Sheinbaum in 2024. And then he went to work.
After Trump's terrorist designation, Garcia Harfuch sent 29 suspected cartel leaders to face justice in the United States. He was instrumental in capturing Ryan Wedding, the Canadian former Olympic snowboarder who was allegedly working for the Sinaloa cartel and sitting on the FBI's 10 most wanted list.
Now he's directed the operation that killed El Mencho. The man has receipts.
The Jalisco New Generation Cartel was formed sometime between 2007 and 2009 by Oseguera, his brother, and others. What followed was a campaign of violence that defies civilized description.
A 2023 study in Science magazine estimated between 160,000 and 185,000 people were involved in these secretive gangs across Mexico. This is not a law enforcement problem with a law enforcement solution. It is a war, and Sunday's operation treated it like one.
The significance of this moment sharpens when you consider what came before. Sheinbaum's predecessor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, adopted an "abrazos, no balazos" approach to cartel violence. Hugs, not bullets. He once blamed American families for the fentanyl crisis, claiming they didn't hug their children enough.
According to a Drug Enforcement Administration report, Obrador received millions of dollars from Sinaloa leader Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman for his unsuccessful 2006 campaign for president. Almonte was direct about it:
[Obrador] was protecting the Sinaloa cartel because he was in on it.
The contrast between that era and what happened Sunday could not be starker. One president looked the other way. The current one, whatever her other faults, let her security chief pull the trigger.
It's worth noting the irony: Obrador's own predecessor, Enrique Pena Neto, had asked for U.S. help to capture and extradite El Chapo. That cooperation produced El Chapo's conviction in a Brooklyn federal court in 2019. He's currently serving life in a maximum security prison in Colorado. Then Obrador took office, and the cooperation dried up. Years of progress, squandered by a man allegedly on the cartel payroll.
The retaliation that swept Mexico on Sunday is not a sign of cartel strength. It's a spasm. Almonte described the loyalty inside CJNG as absolute: they would die for their leader. But dying for a dead man is not a strategy.
The question now is succession. Almonte identified possible future leaders, including El Mencho's son-in-law, Juan Carlos "Numero 3" Valencia Gonzalez. The cartel's bench, though, is thinner than it looks:
The family tree is in prison, in custody, or dead. That is not an accident. That is a strategy working.
Almonte laid out the path forward plainly:
Regardless of who takes over the leadership, it's important that we continue to keep pressure on the cartel to not let the new leader take over and move it forward.
We need to continue hitting them with everything we've got.
He's right. The worst thing the U.S. and Mexico could do now is celebrate and relax. Killing the head of a cartel is not a victory lap. It's an opening. The Sinaloa cartel fractured after one of El Chapo's sons was captured in Culiacan in 2023. CJNG will fracture too, and fractured cartels fight each other, which means more violence in the short term but less consolidated power in the long term.
Flights were restored on Monday. The burning roadblocks will be cleared. The news cycle will move on. None of that changes the underlying reality: the terrorist designation gave this operation its teeth, the intelligence-sharing pipeline made it possible, and the willingness to act made it real.
Sunday proved that when the United States and Mexico stop pretending cartels are a social problem and start treating them as the enemy, the enemy can be found in a mountain town and put in the ground. The 25 National Guard troops who died in the retaliation deserve to be remembered for what they were: soldiers in a war their government finally decided to fight.
Now keep fighting it.
