GUADALAJARA— The famous drug lord was sick and his kidneys were failing.
To ensure smooth management of his multimillion-dollar cartel while undergoing dialysis, Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho,” delegated day-to-day control to several top lieutenants.
Each ran a separate region, had their own group of hitmen, and developed their own fearsome reputation.
Mexican soldiers killed Oseguera on Sunday in a raid on his remote mountain hideout. Immediately, their designated commanders ordered a nationwide campaign of terror: cartel fighters carried out arson attacks and blocked roads in more than a dozen states and ambushed security officers, killing 25 members of the National Guard.
A bus burned by cartel agents after the murder of the boss known as “El Mencho.”
(Armando Solís / Associated Press)
The fires are now out, but key questions remain.
What will happen to the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel and its fragile coalition of ruthless leaders?
Will they agree to share power? Or elevate a single man to the position of boss?
Many Mexicans fear a third worrying scenario: a bloody power struggle that fragments the cartel, opening new fronts of conflict in an already volatile criminal landscape.
A photograph of Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, center, known as “El Mencho,” provided by federal prosecutors.
(US District Court)
“What comes next will not resemble a clean succession,” Ghaleb Krame Hilal, a former security adviser in the state of Tamaulipas, wrote in the online magazine Small Wars Journal. “It will be a fight over who has the center of gravity within the organization, and that outcome is not predetermined.”
The scenario is complicated because Oseguera's only son, Rubén Oseguera González, known as “El Menchito,” is serving a life sentence on drug charges in the United States.
Juan Carlos Valencia González, seen in a wanted photo published by the United States Department of State in 2021. He is one of the possible successors of “El Mencho” as leader of the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel.
(US Department of State)
That leaves Oseguera's cadre of regional commanders as the most likely heirs to his drug empire.
Perhaps the most powerful among them is Oseguera's stepson, Juan Carlos Valencia González, known as 03. Other nicknames include El Pelón, El JP and Tricky Tres.
Valencia, 41, is the commander of the Elite paramilitary group and belongs to a clan that runs the cartel's money laundering operation.
His mother, Rosalinda González Valencia, was arrested in Guadalajara in November 2021 and accused by Mexican authorities of being a “financial operator” for the Jalisco cartel. His biological father was the co-founder of the now defunct Milenio cartel, where Oseguera got his start.
Valencia was born in the Orange County city of Santa Ana, one of many sons and daughters of high-ranking cartel figures born in the United States in recent decades. After Valencia's father went to prison, Oseguera married his mother.
The United States Department of State is offering a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to Valencia's arrest.
A group of fighters from the Jalisco New Generation cartel.
(Juan José Estrada Serafín / For The Times)
Here are the other contenders:
Ricardo Ruiz, alias RR, is known for producing clever propaganda about the cartels, including a viral video on social media that showed dozens of cartel fighters dressed in fatigues next to a column of armored vehicles and homemade tanks. “We are the men of Mencho!” they shout as they fire automatic weapons into the sky.
Authorities blamed Ruiz for the death of Valeria Márquez, a 23-year-old model and beauty influencer shot to death last year while livestreaming on TikTok.
Audias Flores Silva, a leader widely known as “El Jardinero,” controls methamphetamine factories in the states of Jalisco and Zacatecas, according to the DEA. It has a fleet of planes and tractor-trailers used to smuggle drugs from Central America to the United States, U.S. officials say.
Flores is believed to have engineered the Jalisco cartel's recent alliance with a faction of the warring Sinaloa cartel, led by two sons of imprisoned drug trafficker Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
And then there is Abraham Jesús Ambriz Cano, alias “El Yogurth”, 29 years old. Ambriz has raised a small army of foreign mercenaries, mostly former Colombian soldiers with experience in bomb-making and counterinsurgency tactics. Some of those fighters say they were lured to Mexico under false pretenses and forced to fight.
Together, the men help lead one of the most powerful and feared cartels in history: a criminal enterprise that traffics tons of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and fentanyl into the United States, but also profits from extortion, fuel theft, illegal mining and logging, and timeshare fraud within Mexico.
Avocado fields in the Mexican state of Michoacán, where the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel and other criminal groups tax producers and have their own crops.
(Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times)
Security analysts say the group's horizontal, franchise-like structure allowed it to engineer a rapid response to Oseguera's murder and will allow it to conduct business as usual in the coming months.
Many believe the cartel's remaining leaders will try to work together… for now.
“Right now they perceive a huge common enemy: the government of Mexico,” said David Saucedo, who advises local and state governments on security policy.
But, Saucedo warned, “it is possible that the cartel will fracture at some point as conflicts arise over control of profits, trafficking routes and contact with political officials.” Personal conflicts and invasion by rival cartels could also cause problems, he added.
The inner workings of cartels are intentionally opaque to the outside world.
To understand changes within gangs, analysts and officials track social media communications, changes in drug flows and outbreaks of violence. Many closely follow the narco corridos, or drug ballads, that chronicle the politics of the cartels.
Saucedo noted that recently several songs have described Flores as Oseguera's successor. Another song venerates Valencia (“He was born in Orange County, where the sun burns differently,” it begins).
It is unclear whether any of the current leaders would possess the gravitas of Oseguera, who exercised unquestionable authority even as his health deteriorated and he was forced to live on the run. This is due in part to his unwavering willingness to violently punish anyone who threatened or betrayed him.
He was blamed for the 2020 assassination attempt on Omar García Harfuch, then Mexico City police chief and now top public security official during the presidency of Claudia Sheinbaum. During a previous government effort to capture Oseguera, in 2015, cartel fighters used rocket-propelled grenades to shoot down an army helicopter, killing nine soldiers.
Last year, at a ranch near Guadalajara apparently used to train Jalisco recruits, activists discovered the remains of hundreds of missing people.
Born to farmers in the state of Michoacán, Oseguera immigrated to the United States illegally as a teenager. He was first arrested at age 19 in San Francisco for selling methamphetamine. His stature grew as he went from small-time thug to myth-shrouded kingpin of a seemingly invincible cartel operating in most Mexican states and countries in South America, Asia and Europe.
Mexico's recent history is littered with stories of once-powerful syndicates (gangs in Guadalajara, Tijuana, and Ciudad Juárez, among them) that splintered, were devoured by other mobs, or went extinct when the big guns were captured or killed. Colombia's historic Medellín cartel was another mafia that withered after Pablo Escobar died in 1993.
Linthicum reported in New York, Hamilton in Guadalajara, and McDonnell in Mexico City.
