InSight Crime Investigator Victoria Dittmar and Co-Director Steven Dudley discuss how the killing of CJNG leader Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, alias “El Mencho,” is going to impact the organization he led, as well as Mexico’s criminal future, drawing on lessons from the past.
Transcript
Victoria Dittmar: [00:00:00] Hello everyone. My name is Victoria Dittmar and I’m a researcher with Insight Crime covering Mexico. I am here today with Steven Dudley, our co-director, to analyze the aftermath of one of the possibly biggest security operations in Mexico in years, and the wave of violence that followed almost immediately yesterday, the 22nd of February, 2026.
Victoria Dittmar: [00:00:24] Nemesio Oseguera, who’s also known as “El Mencho” and the leader of the Jalisco Cartel New Generation, was captured in an operation led by the Mexican army in the state of Jalisco, which is the epicenter of the group’s operations, and he later died from his injuries while he was being flown to Mexico City. And just within a few hours of this happening, the CJNG, the Jalisco Cartel New Generation, took to the streets, setting up major blockades on very important highways, shutting down entire parts of cities and several states, but especially in and around the city of Guadalajara, which is the capital of the state of Jalisco, again, where this group has its epicenter of operations, and also engaging in shootouts with security forces that lasted well into the night.
Victoria Dittmar: [00:01:14] So we know that El Mencho was on the run for decades. He was wanted in both Mexico and the United States for many years. The US had even said a $15 million reward on his head. And this is really the first moment since the beginnings of the CJNG, which started around 2010 after it broke off from the Sinaloa Cartel, where the group is now operating without its historic leader. And, Steve, I wanted to ask you, because this is not something necessarily new in Mexico. We’ve seen this before — since the beginning of the Mexican drug war, major criminal organizations have lost their top figures either in security operations or because they were killed in confrontations with other criminal organizations. And what we have seen is that these groups don’t necessarily disappear. They adapt. So if we look at the at the capture and the killing of El Mencho, what are your thoughts on this? What do you think is different this time, if anything?
Steven Dudley: [00:02:15] Hi, Vic. Thanks for for having me here. The history, as you’re pointing out, is littered with different groups that have faced the same challenge: a major leader that has been eliminated for some reason, captured, hands himself in, is killed, disappears. We’ve had that, too, you know, so a bit of everything. And the results are mostly that these groups atomize, and I would say, mostly dissipate in their power, you know, because once you atomize, then obviously you don’t have the same geographic reach, you’re not involved in as many criminal economies. It doesn’t mean you completely disappear.
Steven Dudley: [00:03:19] But if you take the the Zetas, for example, which was a group that, at a time, I think a lot of us looked at and said, this group is invincible. Look at the way that they operate and how quickly they’ve expanded. They expanded in a way that is very similar to the way that the Jalisco Cartel expanded. They would land in a place and give people a choice: You work with us or you die or leave. And, most people ended up working with them. They also had a similar background in that, they were a lot of security personnel, in particular, special forces personnel, were at the core of the group. And it’s similar with the Jalisco Cartel. There are a lot of former security personnel, including Mencho himself, who was a former policeman, that were at the center of this group. And so they had a similar approach, which was to arrive and cover geographic space. And they had a similar, expansion history, in the sense that it was very rapid, it covered a lot of ground, a lot of geographic ground.
Steven Dudley: [00:04:35] And the result of this, of going after the Zetas was multiple decapitations. So they lost one leader after another, really within like a three-year period. They lost everyone from Z-3 to Z-42. And that was the kind of beginning of the end of it, really. They splintered. They increasingly splintered. They haven’t disappeared, but they are just fragments of what they were. Their strongest faction is in their epicenter, which is what we would expect, in Nuevo Laredo. But they definitely had, like, a similar reach and a similar type of presence and approach. But yet they were essentially dismantled, at least, nothing compared to what it used to be before. So that’s kind of our closest facsimile to this. And we would expect a similar thing.
Steven Dudley: [00:05:44] Now, I think with the Zetas, we have to bear in mind that they also faced not just the government going after them, but also other groups. They were definitely — I mean, even the Jalisco Cartel was really after them. I think one of the first major events that the Jalisco Cartel had was when they piled up 37 bodies of members of the alleged members of the Zetas, and that was their sort of announcement to the start of the group. So, you know, this that was a group that had a lot of enemies, and it had maybe overreached. The Jalisco Cartel definitely has a lot of enemies, and it definitely reaches into a lot of spaces, but it also has a very diversified criminal economy. They they had a little bit more, I would say, stability under Mencho as opposed to the Zetas that had a lot of dynamism at the top. You know, Mencho has been around for a long time. He’s been rumored to be ill for a long time, so maybe they’ve set up some kind of succession. So we’ll have to see. But there are some differences here that I think we should note, as it relates to thinking that past is is prologue.
Victoria Dittmar: [00:07:12] Yeah. And I think that’s very interesting, because if we look at how the CJNG expanded across the country — which, as you say, was very similar to kind of the strategy that the Zetas had — but if we look at the structure of the CJNG, on one hand, we have this kind of, you would think it’s a very vertical structure because you have the head, right? You have El Mencho. And we learned, for example, throughout our field trips that the figure of El Mencho — even if he actually was operating or not — but the figure itself was very important to maintain loyalty. And there were still some hierarchies, you know, some commanders that were, you know, on top of others, etc. but at the same time, we don’t think it operated as a monolith because we saw the CJNG expanding in different areas of the country through cells, sometimes local cells that operated differently across different areas of the country. So for example, we saw that in Guanajuato, they would ally with local criminal groups to fight the Cartel Santa Rosa de Lima, whereas in Michoacán they were not just not allied with these groups, but actually dominated them and subjugated them into their their structures. And then, for example, in Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez, at some point, there were also reports of the CJNG forming even new groups, kind of like a mixture between remnants of of older criminal groups to operate. So it’s a very fluid structure to some extent, although it still maintains some sort of centrality. So do you think this kind of structure makes these groups more resilient? Are we still facing, you know, are they still as vulnerable maybe to to fragmentation as others? Or how do you see it?
Steven Dudley: [00:08:45] It’s a really crucial question. I would say that it has this varied structure and ways in which it deals with different geographic spaces, the challenges it faces in each geographic space, and perhaps their own abilities and reach and infrastructure lead them to make certain decisions vis-a-vis other criminal groups. You get rid of them; you suppress them; you integrate them; you make an alliance with them. Let’s say those are three options that you just laid out. However, what we did see, I think one thing that the death of El Mencho showed us, was how quickly they could also coordinate amongst themselves. So even if they are disparate and different in nature, there still is some kind of coordination, and we saw how quickly they were able to coordinate. Now, I think we need to put in perspective a little bit what they did: mostly blockades on main thoroughfares, and and that is important, of course. You stop cars, you eject the people in the cars, you burn them, you stop public buses, you do the same. You block main arteries of cities, you begin to slow down everything that’s happening in the city. And that’s a distraction that helps leaders get away if they’re trying to escape. There’s a whole series of things that it does for you. It sends a message about who’s in control. Certainly with social media these days, it leads to widespread panic and the belief that they are in far more places than maybe they actually are. So it is it’s just one of these things that has a lot of impact. But the point is that they were able to coordinate those. They didn’t, I should note, attack many hard targets, so, like military installations, they didn’t attack those, or police stations.
Victoria Dittmar: [00:11:00] There were a few. There were a few with Guardia Nacional in Jalisco.
Steven Dudley: [00:11:02] There were some interactions with the Guardia Nacional, but did they coordinate an attack on a police station? No. Which is something we’ve seen other guerrilla groups would do, or other criminal groups might do on a specific occasion. But this was unprecedented and on another level the quickness, the coordination, and the reach. And that is definitely startling. Now does this mean this group is more resilient? I’m not sure. I think in some ways it reminds me less of — it reminds me of the Zetas, of course, but it also reminds me of the Urabeños, or the Clan del Golfo, as it’s called — there are so many names for this group — but it is the main group in Colombia that has created a federation of sorts, and it’s not operated by a single player, but rather a kind of board of directors. They have a really varied criminal economy below them, a very federalist type system where you have different cells that are part of the group or that are semi-independent or even independent in their allies. So in that way, it is a model that you described that the CJNG was implementing in Mexico. So in that way, maybe they resemble more the Clan del Golfo, which is an organization that has shown to be shown itself to be very resilient over the last, almost going on two decades. It’s an amazingly resilient group.
Victoria Dittmar: [00:12:50] Yeah, for sure. And I think I wanted to jump back a little bit. You just mentioned social media. And I think in this case specifically, this was very striking to see because as all the news were coming out — a lot of it was on social media because official communications were a bit slow in coming out — AI-generated content and misinformation was out there, but to an extent that I perhaps haven’t seen before, especially in these times of crisis. For example, in the case of Guadalajara specifically, there was a story that the airport, the local airport, which is an international airport, had been taken by the CJNG, and there were a bunch of videos. Some of them were true of people running, but then others weren’t true, you know, some of them were showing people with guns entering the airport. There were AI-generated images of planes on fire, which obviously creates a big sense of panic amongst the population and possibly also complicates, how authorities react. And as you said, Steve, you may have an idea that the presence of the group is much wider than it actually is. so I think this is for me, this is kind of an example of how these crises will unfold in the future as well: We have what’s happening on the ground, but then we also have this technological innovation with AI. But also with other technologies that the CJNG has also kind of been a pioneer in implementing, you know, in the various battlegrounds that it has. So how do you see this? Is it now more difficult to deal with these kinds of crises than maybe, you know, five, 10 years ago when we saw what happened with the Zetas or even with the Sinaloa Cartel?
Steven Dudley: [00:14:30] I don’t think there’s any question that it is. I mean, everything from phones to the use of of artificial intelligence to produce fake attacks where you could draw authorities — who knows? You certainly could draw the authorities with these AI-generated videos. You could at the very least terrify civilians because they were being shared widely. So it services your ends in a lot of ways, to how things are, you know, how money is laundered, all of the mechanisms that it’s laundered. So there are a lot of different ways in which the modern world is making it much more difficult to take on groups like the Jalisco Cartel, no question about it. Across the board.
Victoria Dittmar: [00:15:28] For sure. And I think, one of the questions that remains — I mean, it’s important to mention that today, or around this week, it’s exactly one year since the US designations of these groups included as terrorists came in. And it all came in in this conversation and debate about their role in the fentanyl trade. And I think many people are also asking themselves if El Mencho’s capture has any impact at all. We know the CJNG is hyper-diversified. Fentanyl is just one of the many ventures that it’s in. We’ve seen that the group is involved in fuel trafficking, various extortion rackets, extensive money laundering operations, even timeshare frauds. Right. So as we start to think ahead and start to anticipate, how do you see these criminal economies? Do we even expect anything to change with El Mencho gone in any of these different ventures?
Steven Dudley: [00:16:24] The short answer is no because of everything that you’re saying, that they’re already entrenched in these criminal economies. It’s not like El Mencho is the one who is calling the shots on their operations in the fentanyl trade, or contraband, or theft of fuel products and the resale of those products. All of those are independently managed by a lot of operatives across the board. What El Mencho represents is this kind of sense of unity and purpose and loyalty, and all of the things that hold these somewhat disparate pieces together. So he’s gone then, maybe that unity or that cohesion also begins to just erode over time. And then eventually you have a kind of atomization because these independent groups don’t rely on one another for a lot of these for their activities.
Victoria Dittmar: [00:17:38] Yeah, there’s certainly still a lot of unanswered questions as well, because still a lot of official information is pending to come out. We know there were more people who were either captured or killed in these operations, and still a lot of information is missing. But we definitely at InSight Crime will be continuing to follow this and to continue offering analysis on how did we even get here, and what do we think, what we can anticipate in the various areas of Mexico where the CJNG was present and even beyond — the regional implications as well. So just for our audience, we encourage you to stay tuned and to keep following our content. And thank you very much, Steve.
Steven Dudley: [00:18:23] Thanks, Vic. We’ll we’ll definitely stay on this.