The famously energetic streets of Guadalajara, Mexico, have been eerily silent since the killing of Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho,” leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (JNGC). Just hours after he was killed on February 22, violence erupted throughout Guadalajara as cartel members sought retribution. Cars and gas stations went up in flames, shootouts erupted around the city, the airport was blockaded, and highway exits were blocked. While the immediate violence has calmed, the city appears to be holding its breath—unsure of what will come next.
The killing of El Mencho was part of a high-risk Mexican security operation aided by U.S. intelligence. The cartel leader was captured at a resort in the mountain town of Tapalpa—a pueblo mágico (towns labeled by the Mexican government as being “historically significant”) known for its ecotourism. Authorities revealed that his location was identified by tracking one of his romantic partners.
Before dawn on February 22, military aircraft and helicopters sealed off the area around El Mencho’s house. After a shootout between cartel members and the Mexican National Guard, which left twenty-five soldiers dead, Cervantes was eventually found wounded alongside two of his bodyguards. The authorities airlifted him to a medical facility; he died during the flight.
Shortly after El Mencho was killed, cartel members unleashed violent retaliation across Mexico, hitting the western state of Jalisco the hardest. The violence killed seventy people and Mexican authorities reported at least eighty-five cartel-related roadblocks on Sunday alone.
Maria Garibay Corona was at mass with her daughter and grandchildren in Guadalajara when they were told to go home early because violence was erupting on the streets. “We saw that people started to panic and run and that made us really scared,” she says.
As they ran home, Corona and her family saw a convenience store go up in flames. “When they threw the bottle of gasoline [into the convenience store], two women ran out with their backs on fire. People yelled for them to throw themselves to the ground [to put out the fire],” she says. “It was a very ugly and tragic thing.”
The killing of El Mencho represents a classic application of the kingpin strategy—a law enforcement approach developed by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) that targets criminal organizations by eliminating their top leadership. This strategy has been employed in Mexico for decades, dating back to President Felipe Calderón’s 2006 declaration of war on the drug cartels.
What followed Calderón’s aggressive approach was a heavily militarized, U.S.-backed campaign featuring endless arrests and killings of high-level narcotraffickers. Yet critics argue that this approach failed to reduce the steady flow of drugs into the United States. Instead, the strategy created power vacuums within cartels that triggered violent rivalries between criminal groups, leading to horrific violence, the paramilitarization of drug gangs, and the emergence of a narco-state.
“[The cartels are] like a hydra: Where one head is cut, eight more grow in its place,” says Andre Quintero Castillo, a Guadalajara local and history graduate from Universidad Panamericana Campus Guadalajara. “It’s insufficient to just take the head of [a criminal organization] while the structure continues to function . . . . What really matters isn’t prioritized: where they get their money, what they sell, how they launder that money, and how they keep operating regardless of who falls or who stays.”
The killing of El Mencho highlights the complex and often contradictory relationship between Mexico’s cartels and the United States government. Following the killing of El Mencho, President Donald Trump posted on social media that “Mexico must step up their effort on Cartels and Drugs!” Throughout his second term, Trump has repeatedly threatened unilateral military intervention against Latin American cartels.
The U.S. government has taken increasingly aggressive steps against the JNGC and escalated U.S. involvement in the operation that ultimately killed El Mencho. In December 2024, the DEA offered a $15 million reward for information leading to El Mencho’s capture, and last year the White House designated the JNGC as a foreign terrorist organization. The intelligence behind the February 2026 operation came from a new U.S. Joint Interagency Task Force called Counter Cartel, based in Southern Arizona with 300 military and civilian employees. This task force is part of the Trump Administration’s widespread expansion of U.S. military involvement in the war on cartels in Mexico.
As the U.S. increases its military presence in Mexico, critics point to the country’s complicity in creating the very problem it claims to solve. “The role of the United States in Mexican cartel violence is paramount, since the United States provides the addicts and the weapons,” Castillo says.
The illicit trafficking of guns by U.S. manufacturers is estimated to provide at least 70 percent to 90 percent of cartel weapons. In 2021, Mexico filed a $10 billion lawsuit against top U.S. firearm manufacturers, which was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court last year. This lawsuit underscores how the black market firearm industry, raking in more than $250 million annually, plays an undeniable role in cartel violence. Meanwhile, the consumption of drugs in the United States is still on the rise.
“You can see it as a win-win for the United States. [They] get the drugs, sell the weapons, and everything continues,” Castillo says. “And [the United States] applauds [themselves] for saying that [they] intervened in the Mexican operation . . . when in reality [the problem] is inside their country, not outside.”
As the smoke clears in Guadalajara, people remain fearful and unsure of what to expect next. “The killing of El Mencho isn’t something to enjoy or a trophy,” Corona says, “because innocent people are always the ones to pay the price, and we’re witnessing so much disaster with still no certainty about what will come next.”