By Laura Gottesdiener and Emily Green
MEXICO CITY, Feb 23 (Reuters) – The Mexican military raid that killed the country’s most wanted cartel leader on Sunday was President Claudia Sheinbaum’s biggest bet yet, doubling down on her historic offensive against the country’s most powerful organized crime groups.
The Mexican Army launched a surprise operation on Sunday against Nemesio Oseguera, or “El Mencho,” the shadowy leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Known as CJNG for its Spanish acronym, the cartel has rapidly become Mexico’s largest and bloodiest, dwarfing even the infamous Sinaloa Cartel in territorial reach.
El Mencho had a $15 million bounty on his head from U.S. authorities and was considered all but untouchable after he had evaded capture through multiple U.S. and Mexican administrations.
His killing on Sunday – the biggest security-related operation in Mexico in at least a decade – marks a potential inflection point in the country’s war against the cartels.
The U.S., which provided intelligence support for the raid, has been pressuring Sheinbaum to do more to crack down on the cartels, with U.S. President Donald Trump repeatedly threatening to take unilateral military action in Mexico.
For Sheinbaum, the raid was a successful way to send a signal to Washington that it can pull off sophisticated operations against the most powerful criminals in the country without U.S. troops on the ground. But in Mexico, the operation also risks triggering a backlash against the popular leader if violence spins out of control in its wake.
“It was a huge bet to go against the most powerful criminal group in the country,” said David Mora of the International Crisis Group in Mexico. “The stakes are really high.”
The office of Mexico’s presidency did not respond to a request for comment.
BREAKING WITH HER PREDECESSOR
El Mencho’s loyalists launched a wave of retaliatory attacks on Sunday that illuminated – in flames – the sweeping and unprecedented territorial grasp of the crime group.
The henchmen torched cars and businesses and set up more than 250 roadblocks in 20 of Mexico’s 32 states in attacks that stretched from the U.S. border to Mexico’s frontier with Guatemala, according to Mexican authorities.
Most of the roadblocks were dismantled by Monday morning, but the spasms of unrest sparked fears in a nation weary after nearly two decades of its bloody war on the cartels.
The political risks are particularly sensitive for Sheinbaum, whose leftist MORENA party’s rise to power in 2018 was in large part fueled by Mexicans’ anger over the drug war that has left tens of thousands of people dead or missing.
Her predecessor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, prioritized alleviating poverty and other root causes of violence through social programs, embracing a slogan of “hugs not bullets.” But critics say that his approach allowed crime groups like the CJNG to entrench their territorial holdings and expand into a dizzying array of industries, from the extortion of avocado producers to complex fuel smuggling schemes.
While Sheinbaum has mostly followed Lopez Obrador’s political map, with the killing of El Mencho she has definitively broken from her predecessor’s security policy, said Jeronimo Mohar, CEO of Aleph, a risk analytics company.
The operation won immediate praise from U.S. officials. On Sunday White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the Trump administration “commends and thanks the Mexican military for their cooperation and successful execution of this operation.”
Still, on Monday, Trump again heaped pressure on Sheinbaum, writing in a social media post: “Mexico must step up their effort on Cartels and Drugs!”
OPENING UP ANOTHER FRONT IN THE WAR?
Since taking office, Sheinbaum has presided over a dramatic drop in homicide rates, but experts questioned whether violence in the aftermath of the raid could stall some of this progress.
Carlos Perez Ricart, a Mexican security expert, said that one of the explanations for the falling murder rate has been that the CJNG has achieved a monopoly on power in various parts of the country. With the killing of its leader, this dynamic could collapse.
Unlike more traditional cartels, CJNG is organized as a franchise – Perez Ricart compared it to a network of Mexico’s ubiquitous Oxxo convenience stores – with dozens of smaller groups operating under the CJNG banner. After El Mencho’s death, some of these semi-autonomous groups could switch alliances, said Carlos Olivo, a former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent and an expert on CJNG.
The Mexican government must now decide whether to open up a full-scale front against CJNG while its military is already in the midst of a year-long offensive against the infamous Sinaloa Cartel. Mexico has deployed hundreds of troops to Sinaloa state, but violent crime persists, including the kidnapping of 10 workers at a silver mine operated by a Canadian company in January.
Matthew Smith, a former commander of Joint Task Force North, who is familiar with anti-cartel operations in Mexico, said it could be difficult for the Mexican military to wage full-blown military offensives against both the Sinaloa Cartel and the CJNG at the same time.
“The Mexican military couldn’t seize and hold terrain when they were fighting only the Sinaloa Cartel. There’s no way they could do it with both,” Smith said.
(Reporting by Laura Gottesdiener in Monterrey and Emily Green in Mexico City; Editing by Christian Plumb and Mark Porter)
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