Cop turned crime boss, Nemesio ‘El Mencho’ Oseguera leaves bloody legacy
By Drazen Jorgic
MEXICO CITY, Feb 22 (Reuters) – Mexican drug lord Nemesio Oseguera, widely known as ‘El Mencho’, famous for the bloody trail of corpses he left behind in clashes with government forces and rival gangs, was killed in a military raid on Sunday.
Oseguera, 60, a former police officer, was the suspected leader of the powerful Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), an international criminal organization considered one of Mexico’s most powerful cartels.
In a relatively short time, Oseguera masterminded the emergence of the CJNG as a criminal empire to rival his former allies in the Sinaloa Cartel. He managed to evade arrest for years, despite a $15 million reward from the United States for information leading to his arrest or capture.
CJNG is accused of smuggling large quantities of drugs into the United States, including the synthetic opioid fentanyl, which has been linked to hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths in recent years.
“With the exception of the heads of the Sinaloa cartel, ‘El Mencho’ has been the biggest prize for years,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a security expert and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
“And just like the leaders of the Sinaloa cartel, it is truly astonishing that he managed to evade the armed attacks against him by U.S. and Mexican law enforcement for so long.”
DEBEADINGS
Arguably Mexico’s most influential crime boss after kingpin Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, who is currently in a US prison, Oseguera has turned to scams such as stolen fuel, forced labor and human trafficking.
But unlike Guzman, who became famous in the media, El Mencho chose to remain in relative obscurity. He gained notoriety after expletive-laden recordings of him threatening enemies and officials were leaked to social media.
Oseguera was also known for his spectacular evasion of capture. In May 2015, as Mexican forces closed in on him, his reported henchmen shot down a military helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade to give their boss time to escape.
His hitmen’s targets were rarely this lucky. His gang routinely used beheadings and other bloody intimidation methods.
The gang killed two dozen police officers in western Mexico during a six-week period in 2015 as a warning to authorities.
In 2020, Mexico City’s then-police chief Omar Garcia Harfuch survived an assassination attempt that killed two of his bodyguards in an attack that authorities blamed on the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Harfuch is now the country’s security chief and helped oversee the operation against Oseguera.
Oseguera was born in 1966 in a poor village in the mountains of Michoacan, a notoriously rugged and lawless western state. There, poppy and marijuana cultivation have competed with avocado production for decades.
He worked in the fields as a child and later went to the United States to seek his fortune, where prosecutors say he became involved in the heroin trade. He was arrested a few years later and served time in a US prison.
He was sent back to Mexico, where he joined the police before entering the Milenio Cartel, a satellite of the Sinaloa Cartel. He eventually became a top enforcer after serving as a sicario, or cartel assassin.
After a failed attempt to take over the Milenio Cartel, he struck out on his own, declared war on Sinaloa, and formed the CJNG in alliance with a local money launderer ring.
The cartel takes its name from the western state of Jalisco, home to Guadalajara, one of Mexico’s largest cities.
The CJNG mixed Sinaloa-style drug trafficking and community outreach activities with the ultra-violent methods of the Zetas Cartel, a gang that uses paramilitary tactics to engage in criminal enterprises such as extortion and kidnapping.
Oseguera has paid police to cover his back for years as he operates with near impunity in Jalisco. He also sought political protection.
“El Mencho’s Jalisco New Generation Cartel was one of the largest buyers of politicians and political campaigns, which gave it a tremendous social base,” said Edgardo Buscaglia, an organized crime expert at Columbia University.
Noting El Mencho’s ability to win public support, Buscaglia pointed to published images during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic of people lining up for CJNG-stamped food packages distributed by cartel gunmen, not government workers, to help cushion the economic blow of quarantines.
“Compared to the Mexican government, it was the least bad option,” Buscaglia said.
(Reporting by Drazen Jorgic, Laura Gottesdiener and Emily Green; Additional reporting by Stephen Eisenhammer; Editing by Christian Plumb and David Gregorio)
