Mexican drug cartel boss ‘El Mencho’ tracked through romantic partner | Mexico

Mexican authorities captured and killed “El Mencho,” one of the world’s most wanted drug traffickers, by tracking a romantic partner to his safe house near a picturesque mountain town, the country’s defense minister said.

At the press conference, authorities gave the first details about the operation that led to the death of the leader of Mexico’s most powerful organized crime group, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG).

Sunday’s raid sparked a wave of retaliatory violence by cartel gunmen and shut down nearly entire regions of western Mexico.

Real name: 59-year-old cartel leader Nemesio Rubén Oseguera CervantesHe was mortally wounded when the Mexican army tried to capture him in the operation, which was also supported by intelligence from Washington. The United States is pushing its southern neighbor to take more aggressive action against groups trafficking fentanyl, methamphetamine and cocaine.

Defense minister Ricardo Trevilla Trejo said El Mencho’s guards opened fire on the military surrounding the cabin in a wooded area outside the town of Tapalpa, about 80 miles southwest of Guadalajara.

The gunfire echoed a failed attempt to capture El Mencho in 2015, when the helicopter’s gunmen shot down a helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade.

The fighting continued as El Mencho fled the cabin into a nearby forest, where he was wounded and captured. He died while being transported to Mexico City for medical treatment.

In the conflict, seven of his men, except El Mencho, were killed and two soldiers were injured. Rifles and grenade launchers were seized.

The operation sparked a wave of violence across Mexico, primarily in the states of Jalisco and Michoacán, with cartel gunmen blocking almost 100 major roads, setting vehicles on fire and attacking security forces.

Security minister Omar García Harfuch said 25 national guard members were killed and 14 wounded in the clashes, while 34 gunmen and one bystander were also injured. 70 more people were arrested across the country.

Trevilla confirmed that Hugo César Macías Ureña, alias “El Tuli”, who coordinated the violence after El Mencho’s death and even offered a bounty for each soldier killed, was also killed in a firefight.

Authorities reported that all blockades across the country had been lifted by Monday. “Mexico is at peace, it is calm, and we are working in all states,” said Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum.

But there were still occasional ones Reports of vehicles being burned Schools in Michoacán and many states remained closed as a precaution. Some airlines have yet to resume normal service to the Jalisco cities of Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta, which have been hit hard by the cartel’s wrath.

Stephen Woodman, a security analyst in Guadalajara, said the violence “started immediately” when news of the operation broke Sunday morning.

“[These groups] “We have plans to coordinate quickly to cause the maximum amount of trouble in the event of a major arrest,” he said. “The reports from everywhere were pretty overwhelming.”

The sense of panic has been compounded by the amount of misinformation circulating on social media, some of which uses AI-generated photos and images. “You had to question everything,” he said.

As chaos spread, Jalisco governor Pablo Lemus Navarro urged the state’s 8 million citizens to stay home and suspended public transportation.

In the northern tip of Guadalajara, trainee doctor Tanya Dittmar hid in a closet in fear when an hour-long gunfight broke out near her home as cartel gunmen attacked a National Guard base.

“I was eating breakfast with a Netflix series on in the background,” Dittmar said. “At first I thought I heard drilling from a construction site. But I have six dogs and they became very agitated. I paused the sequence and then realized it was gunfire.”

“I’ve never heard a gunshot before,” he said. Then the voices began to change; It’s like it’s getting closer. “That’s when I got really scared.”

The National Guard massed reinforcements with pickup trucks and helicopters. Finally the gunfire stopped. Then the silence was broken by the sound of ambulance sirens.

Dittmar has hardly left the house since then. Woodman ventured out late on Sunday afternoon, when the initial action in his part of town appeared to be over. “It was eerily quiet; everything was closed, no traffic,” he said. “But there was a very strong smell of smoke in the air.”

Sunday’s violence was an alarming reminder of the cartel’s capacity to sow fear and panic in Mexico’s second-largest city, which is scheduled to be one of the host cities of the 2026 World Cup.

Other video footage showed tourists on the beach as huge plumes of smoke rose into the sky over Puerto Vallarta, a popular west coast resort city known for its stunning Pacific beaches. Most flights to the city were suspended and international airlines canceled dozens of trips.

Authorities have issued a public warning about staying indoors and roads to airports may be closed, the UK Foreign Office said in a travel advice on Monday. The US embassy in Mexico City also published a security warningurges citizens to “shelter in place” in affected areas.

Susana Carreño, a local journalist, spent the day documenting the damage in a city where more than 200 vehicles were set on fire by young men on motorcycles dressed in black with their faces covered.

Carreño said nothing like this has ever happened in Puerto Vallarta. “Maybe some [tourists] “I left with the idea that this was a rare, isolated incident,” Carreño said. “But when you see these things, I don’t think you’ll like going back, to be honest.”

Although less internationally famous than the Sinaloa cartel of currently jailed Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the Jalisco group is a well-known group in Mexico, famous for its displays of extreme violence and the massive arsenal of weapons it displayed in 2015. military parades.

The cartel, founded about 16 years ago, is also accused of attempting to assassinate Mexican government officials, including García Harfuch, whose car was riddled with hundreds of bullets in an upscale neighborhood of Mexico City in 2020, wounding him and killing two of his bodyguards and a bystander.

Washington had offered a $15 million (£11 million) reward for his capture and the White House confirmed the US was providing intelligence support to the operation. Senior US officials celebrated the killing, which came after months of Donald Trump’s crackdown on the flow of drugs and immigrants across the 3,145 km border between the two countries. The Trump administration has designated the Jalisco cartel as a “foreign terrorist organization” and the US president has even threatened direct military action against the cartels he claims “run Mexico”.

Writing about X, US assistant secretary of state Christopher Landau called El Mencho “one of the bloodiest and most ruthless drug lords.” “This is a great development for Mexico, the United States, Latin America and the world,” he shared.

While the murder could ease Trump’s pressure on the Mexican president, it would also create a cartel power vacuum. Sheinbaum has previously criticized the discredited “war on drugs” strategy, in which military action often triggers major violence only for new cartel leaders to emerge.

Organized crime expert Chris Dalby, who wrote a book about the Jalisco cartel, said one of the biggest questions facing Mexico now is who, if anyone, will fill the dead criminal’s boots.

“If no one succeeds, if the CJNG eventually disintegrates, you have four or five different lieutenants who have the manpower, weapons, and criminal empires to build their own fiefdoms, and that could plunge Mexico into almost record levels of violence,” Dalby said.

Some sources point to El Mencho’s stepson, Juan Carlos, as a possible successor with enough support to keep the cartel together. “If [he] If we can unite the CJNG we can prevent this kind of civil war,” Dalby said, but he believed this was far from guaranteed.