Six months without El Mencho in Mexico

Mexico is becoming accustomed to life without El Mencho, a towering figure in the continent’s criminal narrative who evaded justice for years while building his formidable criminal empire. Killed in a military operation six months ago in Jalisco, his absence is for now being filled by an insistent state offensive against his group, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), which he founded 15 years ago and led until his death. His downfall, the subsequent arrests of key figures in the criminal network, and the apparent pressure by authorities on others shape the present. Now the question is how the criminal structure will reorganize and what the consequences will be.

It still feels strange to imagine Mexico’s criminal landscape without El Mencho — a sensation similar to the one left by the arrest of the Sinaloa Cartel boss, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, betrayed by his longtime associates two years ago; and similar, too, to Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán’s final transfer to the United States after spectacular escapes and evasions that confounded authorities for a long time. El Mencho’s fall — in an operation that left dozens dead, among them authorities and civilians, and which turned the country’s center upside down that fateful February 22, with narco-blockades his group organized in several states — opened a new era in Mexico, whose broad outlines remain hard to discern.

The absence of the CJNG boss invites a look back at his origins, an exercise that immediately draws parallels with other criminal networks, mainly on the Pacific coast, and sketches a picture of the pioneers of trafficking in Mexico — figures who seem alien from today’s perspective. Rubén Oseguera — who later took the name Nemesio — was born in 1966 in Naranjo de Chila, a hamlet in Aguililla, a cursed town between the Tierra Caliente of Michoacán and the Sierra Costa region. Cursed, because progress — which had begun to take hold in the region with the harnessing of a couple of rivers, the Balsas and the Tepalcapetepc, for agroindustrial use, and the construction of a port on the coast in Lázaro Cárdenas — passed the town by. The logic of subsistence prevailed in the municipality. The hope for a better life seemed out of reach.

What happened, however, is that several families from Aguililla rebelled. They gambled on a singular business: growing marijuana for export. Historian Enrique Guerra Manzo of the National Autonomous University of Mexico explains that “as early as the 1930s and 1940s there were narcotics crops in Aguililla, but they became widespread in the postwar period.” Marijuana gave way to poppy, the raw material for heroin. The hesitations of the early years led to an industry that by the late 1960s looked robust. When El Mencho was born, California hippies were consuming increasing amounts of cannabis from Mexico. San Francisco’s Summer of Love led the farmers of the canyons in southwest Michoacán to prosper.

The main family in marijuana and poppy cultivation in the area were the Valencias. “The Valencias are from Dos Aguas, a hamlet of Aguililla, and the family patriarch is credited with introducing poppy to Michoacán,” Guerra says, referring to Miguel Ángel Félix Cornejo, who was murdered in 1994. “In those times, in the 1970s and 1980s, everyone knew each other around there. Dos Aguas, Naranjo de Chila, El Aguaje, El Limón form a tightly linked triangle. That’s where the Valencias and El Mencho come from,” Guerra explains; he is the author of a monumental study on crime in the area, Territorios violentos en México. El caso de Tierra Caliente, Michoacán (Violent Regions in Mexico: The Case of Tierra Caliente, Michoacán, 2022).

The region the expert describes forms a kind of Michoacán version of Badiraguato, echoing the Sinaloa municipality where Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the Beltrán Leyva brothers and Rafael Caro Quintero were born — also the cradle of marijuana and poppy cultivation in the northern Golden Triangle, a counterpart to Michoacán. That is where El Mencho grew up, in the midst of the “golden twenties,” the two decades — from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s — when Michoacán, and particularly Aguililla, became North America’s cannabis breadbasket. Much has been said about the advantages of the canyons in Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua, but Michoacán’s were no less significant.

In his book, Guerra suggests that such a context offered “three options to young men: pursue a rural life (with land or without), migrate to the United States hoping to earn better wages, or enter the narcoeconomy with the hope of getting rich.” El Mencho tried the latter two. “As a teenager he was already tending the Valencias’ orchards, with whom he became friends,” the author says, referring to their avocado groves in territories a little north of the scorched Tierra Caliente, but also to the narcotics fields. In the late 1980s, Oseguera made the jump across the border. His first arrests occurred there in that period. “He was then imprisoned in Texas roughly from 1991 to 1997 on a drug matter. And later he returned,” Guerra explains.

The following years were Oseguera’s definitive preparation before rising to the big criminal leagues. At the turn of the century he became a police officer in Tierra Caliente, emulating other bosses — for example Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, the trafficker who led the Guadalajara Cartel in the 1980s. Afterwards, with the knowledge he had gained, his trail disappeared into Michoacán’s canyons. Those were tumultuous years in the area, a time of great change. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) lost its hegemony in Mexico and its regional power collapsed. The cartel agreements within federal security forces dissolved like wet paper. Everything was up in the air. From Tamaulipas, a new way of understanding criminal economies spread across the country. Los Zetas — a violent army of enforcers serving the Gulf Cartel — tried to co-opt traffickers and criminals, by fair means or foul.

The wars in Michoacán have been bloody ever since. Los Zetas versus the Milenio Cartel, the name the Valencias adopted, allied with Sinaloan traffickers before their fall between 2010 and 2011; Los Zetas versus La Familia Michoacana, a league of local criminals sheltered by the regional agroindustry and a narrative of local roots and respect; the fall of the latter and the rise of the Knights Templar, a pseudo-religious evolution of the former and heirs to Los Zetas’ predatory logic; the emergence of self-defense groups, a rebirth of the rural guards of the early century, and their wars against the Templarios…

El Mencho lurked in those turbulent waters. At first he supported the Valencias, but the fall of their leaders in the early 2000s pushed him into a solo venture. “In 2011 Nacho Coronel dies,” Guerra says, referring to the Sinaloan leader in Michoacán, “and El Mencho becomes independent. That’s when the CJNG’s meteoric and expansionist rise begins. One innovation this cartel inaugurated is a franchise model of criminality — absorbing structures and making them work for them, something Los Zetas did but that the CJNG perfected. In this landscape of relentless wars, there are lessons and adaptations. And the CJNG has shown great capacity for evolution and adaptation,” he concludes.

The previous paragraphs summarize the past 15 years. With El Mencho looming, new leaderships emerged: his brothers Antonio and Abraham and other relatives, like his son Rubén and his stepson Juan Carlos; Los Cuinis, remnants of the Valencia family; Audias Flores, “El Jardinero,” from southeastern Michoacán; Gonzalo Mendoza, “El Sapo,” who dominates the neighboring state of Jalisco along with others such as Ricardo Ruiz; the Álvarez Ayala and Guerrero families in Michoacán… No one touched them for years, while the CJNG, in the logic Guerra outlines, expanded from Tamaulipas to Chiapas, from Nayarit to Tabasco, always innovating — from crop-based drugs to synthetics, from drug trafficking to fuel theft.

That was the cartel’s dazzling panorama until last February. What seemed impossible — even for the federal government, aware of the powerful security rings that protected the boss — took place: El Mencho was taken down. Army elite forces, backed by solid intelligence, found him in a town in Jalisco. In the clash between his group and the military, the CJNG leader died from gunfire. In subsequent months authorities have arrested important leaders such as El Jardinero and Ramón Álvarez Ayala, and have come close to capturing others, like Heraclio Guerrero, alias “Tío Lako.”

Speaking now of a reorganization is somewhat premature. The CJNG remains crouched, watchful, awaiting the first signs of weakness in the state offensive. In Mexico and the U.S., it is assumed that El Mencho’s stepson, Juan Carlos Valencia González, alias “El Pelón,” has taken leadership. But with so many changes and arrests, such an assertion remains more in the realm of speculation. El Mencho is gone, as are some contenders for succession. Mexico is in a strange limbo: the old has not quite died, nor has the new fully been born — a statement that also applies to Sinaloa and the fratricidal war within the cartel. Rarely in recent years has the criminal world in Mexico seemed so volatile.

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