The Bloody Life and Legacy of El Mencho

Tapalpa, Jalisco, is classified in Mexico as “a magical pueblo,” or special tourist town, with a Spanish church and cobblestoned streets, nestled between hills of bright-green agave, the spiky plant harvested for tequila. Early on February 22nd, residents woke up to the whirl of Army helicopters buzzing low over their houses, while those on the western edge of town heard gunshots and explosions. “We saw from social networks that there was a shoot-out, but we didn’t know if it was an operation or who it was going after,” Pedro Gómez, the owner of a local wine-and-liquor store, told me. By eleven that morning, news broke that the operation was targeting Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, better known as El Mencho, the fifty-nine-year-old head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or C.J.N.G., and the most powerful drug lord in Mexico. Two hours later, the Mexican Army confirmed reports that Mencho had been killed. “We thought there would be revenge on the whole town,” Gómez said. “You get scared, because of the person he is, that they are going to come with everything, and there is going to be a war.”

But the C.J.N.G didn’t just exact its revenge in Tapalpa; it unleashed it across Mexico. The day of Mencho’s death, cartel thugs launched more than two hundred and fifty attacks in twenty of Mexico’s thirty-two states, burning trucks, cars, buses, shops, and banks. They targeted National Guard forces, killing at least twenty-five troops, and left bullet-riddled corpses on roads. Foreign embassies issued shelter-in-place alerts, international airlines cancelled flights into parts of the country, and millions cowered in their homes. In the airport of Guadalajara, the capital of Jalisco state, travellers ran in panic amid a false alarm that gunmen were storming the facility.

Taking out Mencho was a win for the Mexican President, Claudia Sheinbaum, helping to mollify the U.S. President, Donald Trump, who had threatened to launch military strikes against cartel targets south of the Rio Grande. U.S. intelligence sources revealed that they helped in the arrest, including with a surveillance drone, and Trump boasted in his State of the Union that “we’ve also taken down one of the most sinister cartel kingpins of all.” But the victory was dampened by the ensuing violence, which was quickly broadcast around the world and suggested that the Mexican government was unable to prevent cartels from behaving like insurgents—an unfortunate development just months before Mexico is due to co-host the FIFA World Cup, with four games scheduled to be played in Jalisco’s Akron Stadium.

The blood and fury following Mencho’s death encapsulate the life and legacy of the crime king. Even by drug-cartel standards, Mencho was especially brutal, revelling in his bloodthirsty reputation. In 2017, a Mexican singer wrote a popular ballad titled “Soy Mencho,” which opens with the line, in Spanish, “They say I am very violent / Well, it’s true, why should I lie about it?” The C.J.N.G.’s first high-profile mass attack was in 2011, when the group left thirty-five corpses under a bridge, claiming that the victims worked for the Zetas, a rival gang. During a previous attempt to arrest Mencho, in 2015, gang members blockaded thirty-nine roads in Jalisco with burning vehicles and shot down an Army helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. And, in the time that Mencho was the boss in Jalisco—fifteen years—government forensics teams dug up clandestine graves to find bones from more than two thousand bodies.

The modern Mexican drug war, as it is often called, began when the Mexican military first deployed troops in large numbers to dismantle the cartels, in 2006. Mencho’s contribution to this decades-long conflict was to match the military’s firepower and raise the bar of narco-paramilitary forces. During his tenure, he built up squads of highly trained and well-armed killers with names such as Los Deltas, Grupo Elite, CJNG 2000, and the Special Forces of El Mencho. He approximated military technology, using armored drones and makeshift land mines against Mexican soldiers. And he brutally conscripted gang members, using methods comparable to those of warlords who have forced children to be soldiers in West and Central Africa. The Mexican government hopes that Mencho’s death will reduce narco-violence, but the fear is that his style of war will be waged by a new generation.

When I began working in Mexico City as a foreign journalist, in 2001, I became fascinated by the cultural celebration of narcos. They were looked upon as legendary outlaws that made billions trafficking drugs to Americans, while somehow evading the Mexican Army and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, or D.E.A. They even had their own genre of songs, narcocorridos, giving them a reputation somewhere between a rock star, a C.E.O., and a paramilitary general. In the decades since, the Mexican government has arrested or killed dozens of top narcos, with the most infamous, Joaquín (El Chapo) Guzmán, convicted in a major trial in New York City. Yet, until now, Mencho survived. Benjamin Lessing, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, described the logic behind strategies of unleashing mayhem, like the C.J.N.G.’s, as “violent lobbying.” By using road blockades, assassinations, and other conspicuous acts of violence, Mencho showed the Mexican government that he could make it very costly to dismantle C.J.N.G.’s operations.

It can be difficult to document figures like Mencho. Their legends often grow larger than life, and even their real names and ages are disputed. Before his death last week, various reports had even alleged that Mencho was already dead. Mencho was born in 1966 in the municipality of Aguililla, in Michoacán, a state south of Jalisco that runs along Mexico’s Pacific Coast. I’ve visited Aguililla several times, and it’s a roughneck hill town with a long history of producing drugs such as cannabis and opium. On his birth registry, Mencho’s name is Rubén Oseguera Cervantes; he adopted Nemesio as his first name, the origin of his “Mencho” nickname, later. (Some reports claim that it was to honor a godfather; others say it was to confuse the D.E.A.) Like many Michoacános, Mencho went north as a teen-ager to seek his fortune in the United States, ending up in the Bay Area, where he got his start in heroin dealing. He was arrested in 1986, for possession of stolen items and a loaded gun, and a mug shot shows him at the age of nineteen, a pudgy youth of five feet eight in a blue hoodie with thick, curly hair.

In California, Mencho got together with Rosalinda González Valencia, the daughter of a powerful narco family from Aguililla, and he eventually married her. Their son Rubén (El Menchito) was born in San Francisco in 1990. Cartels often operate like royal families, with strategic marriages being used to secure alliances. Mencho’s union with Rosalinda gave him crucial connections to build his empire. In those years, Mencho was arrested twice more in the Bay Area for dealing heroin, and ultimately served about three years in prison before being deported to Mexico. Back home, he had a short tenure working for the Jalisco state police, a tactic often used by narcos to infiltrate law enforcement. But, before long, he left to join a gang run by the biggest drug lord in Jalisco, Ignacio (Nacho) Coronel, a local kingpin allied with the Sinaloa cartel, who became known as the King of Crystal, for building supersized meth labs.

I’ve become acquainted with several former narcos over the years, including the cocaine pilot Fernando Blengio, whom I visited at a prison in North Carolina. Now free, he told me about working with Mencho in the mid-two-thousands, describing an easygoing guy completely unlike the warlord he would become. Blengio used to call him Rubén, and fondly reminisced about the time Mencho traded him some kilos of cocaine for a Cessna 210 single-engine plane. “He put on a dinner for us, I don’t remember if it was roast beef, or birria, or barbacoa, and he was cheerful, attentive, respectful of hierarchies,” Blengio told me. “In truth, I didn’t think he would transform like that. It was a radical change. His ascent was surprising. . . . He wasn’t a bloodthirsty individual. Necessity made him bloodthirsty.”

Mencho rose from lieutenant to kingpin in 2010, when the Mexican Army killed Nacho Coronel. He used the assassination as an opportunity to consolidate control of the criminal factions in the area, Blengio explained. “He took the reins of Guadalajara, of Jalisco, that Nacho had.” Around this point, Mencho’s demeanor changed, and he became more aggressive. I talked to Margarito Flores, a major Chicago cocaine trafficker who later became a D.E.A. informant. He worked alongside Mencho and told me about an argument he once had with him over a deal. “He was not someone I wanted to do business with, because he already had that chip on his shoulder,” Flores said. “That was the beginning of ruthless taking over business,” adding, “it’s always about someone with a small-man complex.” Mencho’s new crime network, which he baptized as the C.J.N.G., broke away from the Sinaloa cartel.

On one side of the operation, Mencho was developing a global financial empire, an effort led by his wife’s many business-savvy brothers and sisters. A former Mexican federal investigator described Rosalinda’s family to me as the best money launderers in the world of narco-trafficking, also washing cash for other cartels and moving billions from China to Dubai. On the other side, the C.J.N.G. forged a vast street-level fiefdom that controlled pueblos and barrios across Mexico, operating drug gangs like franchises. I was given access to Mexican federal records of the cellphones of one of the local C.J.N.G. bosses, and it showed the extensive network of killers, lookouts, and lawyers on the C.J.N.G.’s payroll, with local police often neutralized by bribes. I also found videos on the phone showing cartel operatives giving out presents to children on Three Kings Day in the name of Mencho, a tactic to portray Mencho as a benevolent godfather.

As Mencho and the C.J.N.G. consolidated power, corpses piled up across Jalisco. The state now has the highest number of disappearances in the country since the drug war began, with an official government estimate of sixteen thousand victims. I visited Guadalajara shortly after Mencho’s death and came across a roundabout plastered with the faces of missing people. There are regular search parties organized by families who dig up fields around the state to find the bones, skulls, and decaying flesh of their loved ones.

Later that day, I visited the home of Héctor Flores, whose nineteen-year-old son, Danny, was abducted by the C.J.N.G. in 2021. Flores, forty-five, is slim with tattooed arms and a skin condition on his face that he developed because of the stress of his son’s disappearance. He is open and warm, despite the pain of loss that radiates from him. The worst thing about a disappearance is that the affected families are denied closure. As Flores describes, Danny’s pregnant girlfriend witnessed cartel gunmen abduct Danny. Later, a witness told Flores that he saw Danny in a C.J.N.G. safe house, being told that he had to join the cartel or they would kill him. Last year, a court recognized the case as a forced disappearance, meaning that the state had been involved, in the form of corrupt Jalisco security forces. “It’s difficult to comprehend that the government, whose principal function is to look after its citizens, can turn against them, how it can take part in acts of torture, of murder, of disappearances,” Flores told me. Flores now works with the state legislature on efforts to help victims of cartel violence, and he volunteers with a group of families searching for their loved ones. He finds fault with the government’s official tally of victims in Jalisco, estimating the real number is closer to twenty-six thousand. “Argentina had thirty thousand disappeared during the dictatorship. Here in Jalisco, we are close to this figure,” Flores said. “We are finding graveyards everywhere. You don’t know if in the house in front of you, they are using it to store bodies.”

After years of successfully evading capture, Mencho was finally tracked to Tapalpa; the security forces had followed a woman whom they believed to be his girlfriend, according to Mexico’s defense secretary Ricardo Trevilla. When agents spotted her leaving a country club on the outskirts of the town, special forces moved in. The Mexican government has provided sparse details on the ensuing gunfight, but it said that eight cartel gunmen and three soldiers died in the battle. Mencho and two bodyguards tried to flee, but were wounded and captured, then perished in transit to a hospital, the government said.

I visited the country club four days after Mencho’s death. At first, the security guards lied and told me that this hadn’t been Mencho’s hideout. But when I kept going back, they finally relented. An administrator for the club told me that the Mexican government had ordered them not to let any more journalists into Mencho’s compound; local Mexican camera crews had made it inside on the first day after his death and found a well-stocked medicine cabinet, including medication for kidney problems, food still on the tables, and handwritten records, including payroll lists. Close by were holiday cabins, many of which were reportedly home to Mencho’s henchmen. Mencho apparently fled to these cabins during the initial raid; neighbors told me that they heard a fierce gunfight near them, but nothing from the country club itself. Surprisingly, the cabin doors were ajar, and no policeman or security guard was in sight. Inside, the cabins showed signs of being lived in, with deodorant, decaying fruit, nut bars, and clothes strewn around the rooms. Barbecue grills were charred and oily, while prayer cards depicting the Virgin of Guadalupe and Jesus Christ were taped up on the walls, alongside mounted heads of a stag and a zebra. Gun lubrication, laser sights, and holsters were openly displayed, and dozens of .50-calibre-bullet shells were scattered across the floor.

Mencho’s funeral was held in Guadalajara, on March 2nd. He was buried in a gold-plated coffin, and guests, including one of his daughters, left elaborate wreaths of flowers at his graveside. One was in the shape of a rooster, a reference to his love of cockfighting. Mexican soldiers formed a ring of security around the funeral site, and there were few photos; a young Italian photographer was interviewed by local media with blood on his face, saying that he had been beat up trying to take a look at the funeral and that thugs had stolen his camera.

The Mexican government is in a difficult bind with kingpins like Mencho. It cannot allow them to operate with impunity. But when it takes them down, it ultimately provokes more bloodshed. The C.J.N.G. insurgency across the country in the days after Mencho’s death put this tension on full display. Now rumors abound that Mencho’s stepson, Juan Carlos Valencia González, alias 03, will take command of the C.J.N.G., while others suggest there could be a bloody fight for succession.

Hector Flores believes that Mencho will be remembered for the brutality he unleashed in Mexico. “His calling card was the savagery with which they operated,” he said. “We celebrated the operation to arrest him.” But, he explained, when families whose relatives had been killed saw gunmen blockading streets with burning trucks, it brought back trauma. “To see the images on television of these people, blockades, it was in a certain way to relive the disappearance.” When I asked Flores if he had hope that the government’s action against Mencho could substantially reduce the power of narco gangs in Mexico, he was skeptical. “My hope is not in the institutions, not in the government. My hope is in the people, and in the love of my son,” he said. ♦