Sunday’s killing of Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes by the Mexican army marks the biggest blow to the country’s drug cartels in years, sparking a wave of violent retaliation.
Oseguera Cervantes, better known as “El Mencho,” led the powerful and deadly Jalisco New Generation Cartel, which has earned a reputation for brazen attacks against Mexican security forces while establishing itself as a top distributor of cocaine, methamphetamine and fentanyl.
“He was brutal,” said Alejandro Garcia Magos, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto who studies Mexican politics, who called Oseguera Cervantes’ death “good news.”
Oseguera Cervantes was facing multiple indictments in the United States, and the U.S. State Department had offered a US$15 million reward for information leading to his arrest. Canada and the U.S. designated his cartel and others foreign terrorist organizations a year ago.
Here’s what to know about “El Mencho” and the cartel he formed and led until his death.
A lengthy criminal history
Born in rural Michoacán in western Mexico in 1966, Oseguera Cervantes grew up in a poor family before he reportedly illegally immigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s.
He settled in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he was arrested multiple times on firearms and drug charges and deported back to Mexico, but managed to re-enter the U.S.
A Univision profile of Oseguera Cervantes claims he smuggled drugs from Mexico into the U.S. multiple times, crossing the border under various aliases.
In 1992, after settling in California once again, Oseguera Cervantes and his brother Abraham were arrested on federal charges in Sacramento, three weeks after a heroin deal with undercover police officers.
According to Rolling Stone, Oseguera Cervantes pleaded guilty in order to avoid a life sentence for Abraham, who had acted as the seller while “El Mencho” served as lookout.
Oseguera Cervantes was sentenced to five years in prison but was released on parole after three years, after which he was deported back to Mexico.
Upon his return, “El Mencho” became a Jalisco state police officer before joining the Milenio Cartel. He soon married Rosalinda González Valencia, whose family led the cartel.
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Oseguera Cervantes first served in an assassin squad that protected Milenio’s leaders and gradually rose through the cartel’s ranks to become a top lieutenant during a time when Milenio effectively merged with the powerful Sinaloa Cartel.
“El Mencho” worked closely with Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel, an ally of Sinaloa Cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, to help enforce Sinaloa’s control of drug trafficking through Jalisco state and its capital city of Guadalajara.
In a span of months between 2009 and 2010, Coronel was killed in a shootout with Mexican soldiers and Milenio’s top leader, Óscar Orlando Nava Valencia (“El Lobo”), was captured.
Out of the leadership vacuum, the Milenio Cartel fractured into two warring groups — one of them led by “El Mencho,” which won the war over control of the Jalisco drug trade and changed its name to Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, or CJNG.
CJNG steadily expanded its control over drug trafficking across Jalisco and into other neighbouring states “with the political protection of governors” who were corrupted, said Edgardo Buscaglia, a senior scholar in law and economics at Columbia University.
“That’s huge, when you have the political protection of nine governors — that allows you to engage in local monopolies to make a lot of money through not just drugs, not just human trafficking, not just migrant trafficking, but you start making money through the state, through public procurement,” he said.
“So the Jalisco cartel was very much merged with the Jalisco state.”
Days before Oseguera Cervantes was killed, the U.S. government accused him and CJNG of a timeshare fraud scheme in Puerto Vallarta as an additional illicit revenue stream for the cartel.
CJNG’s assets have been estimated to be around US$20 billion by state terrorism researchers at the University of Maryland.
González Valencia, “El Mencho’s” wife, who was known as “La Jefa,” has led the cartel’s financial and money laundering operations, which included real estate and luxury resort properties.
“There isn’t a single state in Mexico that doesn’t have the presence of either the Jalisco cartel or the Sinaloa Cartel in some shape or form, be that in terms of boots on the ground or the financial structures of these organizations,” said Deborah Bonello, the managing editor of InSight Crime, an organized crime think tank that has published several profiles and analyses of “El Mencho” and CJNG.
“El Mencho” effectively solidified his position as Mexico’s new top drug lord in 2016, after the final capture of “El Chapo” Guzman, when CKPG kidnapped two of Guzman’s sons while they were vacationing in Puerto Vallarta. The two men were eventually freed after a negotiation with Guzman that involved payment to CKPG in cash and drugs.
Oseguera Cervantes evaded capture by Mexican forces multiple times before his death on Sunday and maintained an extremely low profile.
His cartel, meanwhile, developed a reputation for brazen violence against Mexican authorities and politicians, including the 2013 murder of Jalisco tourism secretary Jesús Gallegos Álvarez, which was believed to have been ordered by “El Mencho.”
In 2015, CJNG forces ambushed a police convoy travelling from Puerto Vallarta to Guadalajara, killing 15 officers. A few weeks later, during a retaliatory operation by Mexico’s military on “El Mencho’s” suspected compound, cartel soldiers shot down a military helicopter, killing nine Mexican army and police officials.
The cartel followed that up by unleashing a wave of violence across Jalisco state similar to the current unrest.
CJNG was also blamed for the attempted assassination in 2020 of Mexico City Police Chief Omar García Harfuch, who is now Mexico’s federal security secretary.
The Canadian government says CJNG “is known for their innovative use of rigging drones to drop explosives, a violent tactic adopted from insurgent groups.”
The cartel has also used public executions and kidnappings in territories it controls to instill terror in communities, the Canadian terrorism listing for CJNG says.
Toronto police seized 835 kilograms of cocaine linked to CJNG in January 2025, marking the largest drug seizure in the city’s history.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration announced in September last year it had seized 77,000 kilograms of drugs and over a million counterfeit pills during five days of operations in the U.S. and Mexico.
With Oseguera Cervantes now dead, it remains to be seen whether CJNG can be fully taken down.
“Unless the political protection of the Jalisco cartel ends, the death of ‘El Mencho’ will mean nothing,” Buscaglia said.
—With files from Global’s Touria Izri, Uday Rana and Jackson Proskow
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