El Mencho is Dead. The CJNG Isn’t.

In the early hours of February 22nd, Mexican security forces carried out one of the most consequential operations in the country’s recent history. After years of failed attempts, authorities captured and killed the founder and leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG)—Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho”, and Mexico’s most wanted man for years. At least 62 people died in the operation and its immediate aftermath, including 25 members of the National Guard and 34 suspected gang members. Mexican authorities deployed an additional 2,000 military troops to Jalisco as the cartel unleashed a wave of retaliatory violence in response. The images were dramatic, the headlines enormous.

But behind the spectacle of what the government is calling a historic victory, a harder question lingers: what does the elimination of a cartel leader actually accomplish?

The “kingpin strategy” is built on a deceptively simple premise: criminal organizations depend on their leaders, so removing those leaders should collapse the organization. It has been the backbone of U.S. and Latin American drug policy for decades. It brought down Pablo Escobar in 1993. It eventually put Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán behind bars. And now, its proponents argue, it has claimed El Mencho.

The problem is that the evidence doesn’t support the theory. After Escobar’s death, the Medellín Cartel did not disappear—it fragmented, and power shifted to the Cali Cartel and then to a succession of smaller, more horizontal groups. Today, Colombia remains the world’s largest cocaine producer, with the most recent figures pointing to the country producing 3,001 tons of cocaine in 2024 alone. The kingpin strategy didn’t end the trade; it reorganized it. Criminal networks don’t collapse when their leaders fall. They adapt, reroute, rebrand, and new ones emerge to fill the vacuum.

The CJNG is living proof of this cycle. The cartel was born directly out of the consequences of earlier kingpin operations: it formed following the death of Sinaloa Cartel leader Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel and the arrest of other Milenio Cartel figures, a power vacuum that a new generation of operators moved quickly to fill. It is called “New Generation” for a reason. And it did not simply inherit the structures it replaced; it built something more dangerous. The CJNG militarized at a scale that previous cartels had not, using modified commercial drones as explosive devices. In 2015, when Mexican authorities launched “Operación Jalisco” targeting El Mencho, CJNG fighters shot down a military helicopter using a Russian-made RPG-7 rocket launcher, the kind of weapon designed to destroy tanks. The cartel’s reach today extends across money laundering, human trafficking, extortion, migrant smuggling, oil and mineral theft, and an illicit arms trade. These are not activities that shut down because one man is gone. The cartels are complex industries that tend to outlive their founders.

Analysts are now watching for two possible scenarios in the wake of El Mencho’s death. The first is a relatively organized succession, in which remaining CJNG leaders divide the cartel’s vast geographic territory and continue operating with some independence, a messy but contained outcome. The second, more dangerous scenario is an internal split within the state of Jalisco itself. When the CJNG previously fought a rival faction called Nueva Plaza in the Guadalajara metro area, homicides and disappearances surged for years. A repeat of that dynamic is one of the key indicators to watch in the coming months. 

Whatever happens, it is rarely the politicians or military strategists who absorb the consequences. Mexico already has 128,000 officially registered cases of forced disappearances, with many more unreported, one of the highest rates in the world. Each cartel transition adds to that number. The ripple effects also extend beyond Mexico’s borders. Due to the interconnectivity of these operations and the international networks they rely on, disruptions to trafficking routes are likely. Ecuador and Costa Rica have been flagged as particularly vulnerable, as rival criminal groups may seize the moment to challenge CJNG subsidiaries operating there.

It would also be naïve to read this operation outside of its geopolitical context. Multiple analysts have pointed to the raid as, at least in part, a response to intense pressure from the Trump administration, which has threatened unilateral military strikes on Mexican territory if the Sheinbaum government fails to deliver results against fentanyl trafficking. The operation shows that Mexican forces are capable of taking down high-value targets, but various analysts agree that claiming a criminal scalp will not spare the government from a messy aftermath. El Mencho left no clear heir, and the remaining leadership could dispute control for years.

This framing matters because Washington’s role in Mexico’s security crisis does not begin and end with diplomatic pressure. The United States is also, consistently, one of the main suppliers of the weapons that make cartel violence possible. Mexico’s Defense Secretary recently confirmed that since October 2024, nearly 80 percent of the 18,000 firearms seized in Mexico came from the United States: among them Barrett .50-caliber rifles, grenade launchers, rocket launchers, and machine guns. About half of the high-powered .50-caliber cartridges seized since 2012 were traced to a U.S. government-owned ammunition plant in Missouri. The country is also the largest consumer of illegal drugs in the Western Hemisphere, a fact that receives considerably less attention than its role as enforcer.
En la guerra contra las drogas, ganaron las drogas—in the war on drugs, the drugs won. That phrase has been circulating in Latin American political commentary for years, and El Mencho’s death only emphasizes it. What these operations tend to produce is a cycle: a dramatic moment of state action, a terrible burst of retaliatory violence, and then a gradual return to the same structural conditions that allowed the organization to flourish in the first place. That is not an argument against enforcement. It is an argument for honesty about what enforcement alone can accomplish. The capture of El Mencho is a genuine operational achievement, and it will test the structural capacity of Mexico’s institutions in the months ahead. But if it is treated as a conclusion rather than a beginning, the CJNG’s own origin story already tells us how this ends.