Mexico Is at War: The Killing of El Mencho and the CJNG's Day of Vengeance

Terrifying. Surreal. Scary. These were among the words an American tourist named Jim Beck reached for to describe what he watched unfold in Puerto Vallarta, a resort town on Mexico’s Pacific coast, as the streets around him collapsed into a warzone on Sunday, February 22, 2026. Even those words felt inadequate against the scale of what was happening.

The footage that emerged left little room for doubt. One video obtained by Fox News showed fires lit at a gas station, helicopters circling over the city, and armed government forces riding in the backs of pickup trucks as they patrolled the streets. Another, posted on X, allegedly captured gang members firing from a moving vehicle as they barreled toward a confrontation with Mexican forces. And the violence reached far beyond Puerto Vallarta.

Much of it erupted in Guadalajara, the capital of Jalisco state, more than 300 kilometers away, with further reports of unrest in more than ten other states.

Key Takeaways

The killing of CJNG founder Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, known as El Mencho, on February 22, 2026 triggered coordinated cartel violence across roughly 20 Mexican states, with more than 250 roadblocks reported.
Mexican special forces killed El Mencho in a raid in Tapalpa, Jalisco; he was wounded in the firefight and died en route to Mexico City. The White House confirmed U.S. intelligence agencies supported the operation.
The CJNG operates on a corporate, franchise-style model that lets local groups buy the right to use its brand, a structure U.S. officials say made the cartel one of the gravest drug threats the United States has ever faced.
The DEA holds the CJNG responsible for trafficking vast quantities of fentanyl into the United States, fueling an overdose crisis that kills tens of thousands of Americans every year.
With El Mencho’s brothers, son, and other relatives jailed or extradited, the cartel faces no obvious successor, raising the prospect of fragmentation, succession wars, or absorption by rivals such as the Sinaloa Cartel.
The violence threatens Guadalajara’s role as host of four 2026 FIFA World Cup matches, jeopardizing an expected influx of more than a million visitors and roughly $37 million in state infrastructure spending.
Analysts caution that removing a single kingpin does little to disrupt the fentanyl supply chain; the most lasting consequence may be a surge in violence rather than a meaningful dent in trafficking.

All of it traced back to a single event: the killing of one of the nation’s most powerful cartel bosses, Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, founder and leader of the notorious Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or CJNG. An elusive figure known by the nickname El Mencho, Oseguera had been widely regarded as the most powerful cartel boss in Mexico since the 2016 arrest of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. He was the last of the narco kingpins to capture the public imagination through flashy living and brutal theatrics, in the mold of El Chapo and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada.

His death was a major coup for the United States and Mexico in their shared war on drugs. But it also raised an uncomfortable question that the day’s chaos made impossible to ignore: how could the henchmen of a single gang boss bring an entire nation to its knees?

A Country On Its Knees

Even by the standards of a drug war as brutal as Mexico’s, February 22 was on another level entirely. Jim Vawter, an American with permanent residency in Puerto Vallarta, described armed men ordering people out of their vehicles at gunpoint. One resident who had lived in the town for 23 years said he had never seen anything like it. Another witness told the American outlet KWTX that he had passed what looked like execution-style killings on his way to the airport.

Armed gang members seized control of major roads, torching buses and trucks to build burning barricades that trapped tourists and residents inside cordoned-off zones. Smoke billowed over the resort town as cartel members set fire after fire. Streets that had been crowded with tourists only hours earlier emptied out, left to armed men cruising in pickup trucks. A Jalisco state official, speaking anonymously, said seven members of Mexico’s National Guard had been killed by that point.

The bloodshed was not confined to Jalisco. At Guadalajara’s international airport, travelers ducked behind check-in counters and workers in high-visibility vests abandoned their posts in a frantic scramble for cover. In Guanajuato, authorities reported dozens of coordinated attacks across 23 municipalities, with cartel members setting systematic arsons at banks and convenience stores. In Zapopan, just outside Guadalajara, six more National Guard members were killed.

A jail guard died as prisoners rioted in Puerto Vallarta, and an agent from the Jalisco state prosecutor’s office was murdered in Guadalajara. The body count climbed with each passing hour.

The aviation response was immediate. Southwest, Alaska, and Delta all canceled flights into Puerto Vallarta and Guadalajara, leaving thousands of tourists stranded with no way out. The U.S. Embassy issued urgent shelter-in-place warnings for Americans across multiple states. In total, Mexican authorities counted more than 250 roadblocks spread across 20 states, effectively paralyzing huge swaths of the country.

By the morning of Monday, February 23, most of those roadblocks had been cleared, but the damage was done. Schools stayed shut across several states. Guadalajara, a city of five million people slated to host four FIFA World Cup matches in June, had been transformed into a warzone overnight. The message from the cartel was unmistakable: it could bring an entire nation to its knees whenever it chose.

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The Anatomy of a Cartel

That message was not new. The CJNG had been broadcasting it since its formation in 2011, when it emerged from the fracture of the Milenio cartel and the leadership struggles that followed, with El Mencho at its head. In September 2011, cartel members dumped 35 bodies on a busy avenue in Veracruz at rush hour, an early advertisement of the brutality that would become its signature.

But the CJNG is not merely violent. It is also sophisticated, and that sophistication likely made the February 22 onslaught possible. Unlike many of its rivals, the cartel runs on a corporate structure that more closely resembles an American company than a traditional criminal syndicate. According to the U.S.

National Counterterrorism Center, the CJNG used a franchise model to expand well beyond its home strongholds in Jalisco, Nayarit, and Colima. As the Spanish-language outlet El País has reported, local criminal groups can effectively buy the right to use the CJNG brand by paying tribute to the cartel.

As the head of the organization, Oseguera let regional leaders manage day-to-day operations while he held centralized strategic control through a hierarchical chain of command. Local commanders were free to chase whatever profits they could in their own territories, but the overall direction flowed from the top. That combination of decentralized hustle and centralized command gave the cartel both reach and discipline.

The scale of the threat is reflected in how senior U.S. officials describe it. Anne Milgram, the DEA Administrator, told Congress that the CJNG and the Sinaloa Cartel together posed the gravest criminal drug threat the United States has ever faced. The reasoning is grim and direct: according to the DEA, the CJNG is now responsible for trafficking enormous quantities of fentanyl into the United States, where it has fueled an overdose crisis that kills tens of thousands of Americans each year.

That is precisely why Washington and Mexico City had been hunting the cartel’s leadership so aggressively. Among those targeted were Oseguera’s brothers: Abraham, currently in custody in Mexico, and Antonio, who was extradited to the United States in 2025. Antonio’s extradition stoked fears inside the cartel that, should he cooperate with American authorities, he could help them locate, capture, or kill El Mencho himself. Those fears would prove prophetic.

The Operation

From what is publicly known, Mexican special forces launched what the Defense Secretariat described as a coordinated effort to capture Oseguera in Tapalpa, a small town in Jalisco. During the raid, the operators came under fire before managing to kill four cartel members and wound three more, including Oseguera. He would later die while being transported to Mexico City. Two additional suspects were arrested, and authorities seized armored vehicles, rocket launchers, and other weaponry.

Three Mexican soldiers were wounded in the firefight.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, in a post on X, confirmed U.S. involvement, stating that American intelligence agencies had provided support for the operation. She emphasized that Oseguera had been a top target for both governments as one of the principal traffickers pumping fentanyl into the United States.

Beyond that, details remain sparse. Mexican authorities have not disclosed how they located Oseguera, how long they tracked him before the raid, or any other operational specifics. That silence is almost certainly deliberate. Because the same methods may be used to hunt down other gang leaders in the future, it is more than likely the authorities will keep their tradecraft hidden rather than hand the cartels a window into how they work.

What followed Oseguera’s death was swift and brutal, a demonstration that even with their founder gone, the CJNG remained one of the most dangerous organizations in the country. The reaction mirrored what has followed other high-profile cartel arrests and deaths, only at a far larger scale than is typical. When authorities captured El Chapo in 2016, the Sinaloa Cartel erupted in violence aimed at local businesses and the authorities. Such outbursts are usually a calculated message: a cartel signaling to the government, the public, and rival organizations that, despite the capture or death of its leader, it still retains the capacity for extreme violence.

Sheinbaum, Trump, and the Politics of a Kingpin’s Death

Despite the carnage that followed, President Claudia Sheinbaum is likely to count the operation as a success, because it lets her government demonstrate that it is tough on crime. Since Trump returned to office, she has faced relentless pressure to crack down harder on cartels, and on fentanyl traffickers in particular. In February 2025, Trump designated six Mexican cartels, the CJNG among them, as foreign terrorist organizations, and he has repeatedly floated sending U.S. troops into Mexico to strike cartels directly, proposals Sheinbaum has firmly rejected as violations of Mexican sovereignty.

That refusal does not mean Mexico has declined to cooperate. Since Trump’s inauguration, the country has extradited dozens of suspected cartel members to the United States, deployed thousands of National Guard troops to the border, and intensified operations against trafficking networks. The killing of El Mencho is the most dramatic expression yet of that hardened approach, and it allows Sheinbaum to show Trump that Mexico can handle these threats without American boots on Mexican soil.

The flip side is that the violent backlash may become one of the defining headaches of Sheinbaum’s presidency. Guadalajara is set to host four matches during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, and Jalisco officials expect more than a million visitors to pour into the city, including a highly anticipated clash between Mexico and South Korea on June 18. With the tournament only months away, images of burning vehicles, roadblocks, and armed cartel gunmen in the streets, paired with travel advisories from multiple governments, are likely to discourage a meaningful number of would-be visitors.

That would be a costly blow for a state that has invested roughly $37 million to prepare its infrastructure for the expected surge of tourists. The risk may extend nationwide. Some estimates suggest Mexico could welcome as many as 5.5 million visitors over the tournament, with the consultancy Deloitte projecting a direct economic impact of about $1.24 billion, or roughly 0.14 percent of Mexico’s GDP, from tourist spending.

But that forecast predates the violence that sent visitors already in the country scrambling for safety and forced airlines to cancel flights. If Jalisco remains unstable, many international travelers may stay away entirely or redirect their trips to World Cup matches in the United States and Canada instead.

In a sense, that may be exactly the reaction the cartel wants. The February 22 meltdown was a demonstration not just of the CJNG’s power and reach but of its ability to bring the nation to its knees, accompanied by an implicit warning that it could do so again at will. Across the border, the Trump administration is likely to tout both the operation and the fallout as vindication of its hardline stance.

Trump has framed fentanyl trafficking as a chemical war against America and has designated the drug and its precursors as weapons of mass destruction, expanding the federal government’s authority to combat cartels. The elimination of one of the world’s most wanted traffickers hands him political ammunition for his aggressive posture toward Mexico and lends weight to his threats of military action.

What Comes Next for the CJNG

The CJNG now faces a deeply uncertain future, because its top leadership has been systematically dismantled over the past several years. As Al Jazeera’s John Holman has noted, there is no obvious successor positioned to take over quickly. Oseguera’s brothers are in prison. His son, Rubén Oseguera González, known as El Menchito, was sentenced in March 2025 to life in prison plus 30 years.

Without a clear heir, the cartel confronts two likely paths. The first is fragmentation. Regional commanders who had been running semi-autonomous operations under Oseguera’s oversight may decide to break away on their own or pledge loyalty to rival organizations. Several figures could step forward to claim the throne.

Among them is Juan Carlos González Valencia, Oseguera’s stepson, known as El 03, who has long been considered the cartel’s operational boss. Oseguera’s daughter, Jessica Johanna Oseguera González, who goes by La Negra, could also make a bid for leadership.

Other possible successors include Audias Flores Silva, a senior regional commander who controls large stretches of CJNG territory along the Pacific coast, and Gonzalo Mendoza Gaytán, who oversees operations in Puerto Vallarta. None of them, however, commands the respect or fear that Oseguera did, and infighting among these factions could tear the cartel apart from within. It would not be the first time; the CJNG itself was born from exactly that kind of collapse, emerging from the wreckage of the Milenio cartel.

The second path involves a single leader, most likely one of those named above, consolidating power quickly enough, with the backing of the other commanders, to hold the organization together. That would demand someone with both operational experience and the ability to command loyalty across the cartel’s many regional cells. Even then, any new boss would face immediate pressure from rival cartels eager to exploit the CJNG’s moment of weakness, which could see the cartel, or splinters of it, absorbed into other groups.

The Rivals Circling for Territory

The organizations best positioned to profit from a weakened or fractured CJNG are its long-standing rivals, locked in territorial wars across Mexico. Chief among them is the Sinaloa Cartel, which has competed with the CJNG for control of key trafficking routes in several states. Although Sinaloa has been battered by its own internal conflicts following the arrests of its leaders, it remains a formidable force with established networks and deep experience. If the CJNG fractures or its commanders become consumed by succession battles, Sinaloa could move aggressively to reclaim territory it lost over the past decade.

Other groups are poised to capitalize as well. They include the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel in Guanajuato, La Familia Michoacana and Los Viagras across Michoacán and Guerrero, and various factions fighting for control in Zacatecas. These smaller outfits had been pushed back by the CJNG’s aggressive expansion, but they could now seize the chance to reassert control over lucrative smuggling routes, extortion rackets, and drug production sites. Oseguera’s death essentially opens a window for these rivals to strike while the CJNG is vulnerable, a dynamic that could reshape Mexico’s criminal landscape and make violence worse in contested zones.

The least likely outcome of all is the complete destruction of the CJNG as a force in Mexico. History suggests the country’s cartels do not really die; they evolve. Which leads to the final and perhaps most important question: how much will any of this affect the drug trade itself?

Why the Drug War Grinds On

The blunt answer is: not much. The fentanyl supply chain does not depend on any single individual. Mexican cartels import precursor chemicals from China, manufacture the drug in clandestine labs scattered across multiple states, and smuggle it over the border through hundreds of different routes. Even with Oseguera gone, the CJNG still controls ports, production facilities, and distribution networks.

Someone else will step into his role, or several someones will carve up his territory and keep operating independently.

The economics work against any lasting victory from removing kingpins. Fentanyl is cheap to produce, enormously profitable, and met by massive demand in the United States. As long as those fundamentals hold, traffickers will keep supplying the market regardless of who sits atop any one cartel. Eliminating a single supplier simply clears space for another to expand.

Mike Vigil, the former chief of international operations at the DEA, told Al Jazeera that killing or capturing cartel heads has little real impact on the drug trade. The way to force genuine change, he argued, is to go after the infrastructure: the logistics, the money laundering operations, and the armed wings of these organizations.

Perhaps the most consequential effect of Oseguera’s death will not be on trafficking at all, but on Mexico’s security. If the CJNG fractures, the country could see a wave of violence that eclipses even what unfolded on February 22, as factions battle for control and rivals like Sinaloa push into contested ground. For now, Mexican authorities say they have cleared most of the roadblocks, and the immediate violence appears to have subsided. But the fear is that the region could plunge back into chaos with little warning.

What remains to be seen is whether Oseguera’s death marks a meaningful blow against Mexico’s cartels or merely the prelude to another chapter of bloodshed. What is certain is that Mexico’s war against the cartels is far from over, and the battle for control of the CJNG’s empire has only just begun.

Presented by

Simon Whistler

Simon Whistler is one of YouTube's most prolific educational creators. WarFronts is his deep dive into military history and conflict analysis.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was El Mencho, and why did his death matter?

Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, nicknamed El Mencho, was the founder and leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG). He was widely regarded as the most powerful cartel boss in Mexico since the 2016 arrest of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, and the DEA considered him one of the principal traffickers moving fentanyl into the United States, which made his elimination a top priority for both Mexico and Washington.

How did El Mencho die, and what role did the United States play?

Mexican special forces launched a coordinated operation to capture him in Tapalpa, a small town in Jalisco, on February 22, 2026. The operators came under fire, killed four cartel members, and wounded three others, including Oseguera, who died en route to Mexico City. Armored vehicles, rocket launchers, and other weapons were seized. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that American intelligence agencies provided support for the operation.

Why did violence erupt across so many states after his death?

The CJNG responded with a coordinated show of force to prove it could still inflict extreme violence even without its leader. Gang members set up more than 250 roadblocks across roughly 20 states, torched vehicles, attacked banks and stores, and killed members of the National Guard, paralyzing large parts of the country and signaling to the government, the public, and rival organizations that the cartel retained the capacity for extreme violence.

Who could take over the CJNG, and what are the risks?

There is no obvious successor. Possible contenders include Oseguera’s stepson Juan Carlos González Valencia (El 03), long seen as the cartel’s operational boss; his daughter Jessica Johanna Oseguera González (La Negra); regional commander Audias Flores Silva on the Pacific coast; and Gonzalo Mendoza Gaytán, who runs operations in Puerto Vallarta. None commands the same authority Oseguera did, raising the risk of fragmentation, infighting, or absorption by rivals such as the Sinaloa Cartel.

Will El Mencho’s death disrupt the fentanyl trade?

Analysts say it will have little lasting effect. The supply chain relies on precursor chemicals from China, clandestine labs across many states, and hundreds of smuggling routes, none of which depends on a single individual. Former DEA chief of international operations Mike Vigil told Al Jazeera that real change requires targeting the cartels’ infrastructure, logistics, money laundering, and armed wings rather than their leaders.