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

Mexican authorities tracked down and killed “El Mencho,” one of the world’s most wanted drug traffickers, by following a romantic partner to his safe house near a picturesque mountain town, the country’s defense secretary revealed.

In a press conference, officials provided 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).

The raid on Sunday led to an upsurge of retaliatory violence by cartel gunmenwhich closed all but the entire areas of western Mexico.

The 59-year-old cartel leader, whose real name is Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervanteswas fatally injured when the Mexican army tried to capture him in the operation, which was supported by intelligence from Washington. The US has urged its southern neighbor to act more aggressively against groups that trade fentanyl, methamphetamine and cocaine.

Defense Minister Ricardo Trevilla Trejo said El Mencho’s bodyguards opened fire on the military as they surrounded the cabin in a wooded area outside the town of Tapalpa, about 80 miles southwest of Guadalajara.

The gunfire forced a helicopter to make an emergency landing – in an echo of a failed attempt in 2015 to capture El Mencho, when his gunmen shot down a helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade.

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

Apart from El Mencho, seven of his men were killed in the firefight, while two soldiers were wounded. Rifles and grenade launchers were seized.

The operation immediately sparked a wave of violence across Mexico, with cartel gunmen blocking nearly 100 major roadsburning vehicles and attacking security forces, especially in the states of Jalisco and Michoacán.

Security Minister Omar García Harfuch said that 25 members of the National Guard were killed and 14 wounded in those clashes, along with 34 gunmen and one bystander. Another 70 people were arrested across the country.

Trevilla confirmed that Hugo César Macías Ureña, alias “El Tuli”, a close ally of El Mencho’s who coordinated the outbreak of violence after his death – and even offered a reward for every dead soldier – was also killed in a confrontation.

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

However, there were still sporadic reports of burning vehicles in Michoacán, and schools remained closed as a precaution in many states. Some airlines have yet to resume normal service to the cities of Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta, both in Jalisco, which took the brunt of the cartel’s wrath.

Stephen Woodman, a security analyst in Guadalajara, said the violence “kicked off pretty much immediately” when news of the operation broke on Sunday morning.

“(These groups) have plans in place to coordinate quickly in the event of a major arrest, to cause the maximum amount of trouble,” he said. “It was quite overwhelming with reports coming in from everywhere.”

The sense of panic was compounded by the amount of misinformation, some using AI-generated photos and footage, circulating on social media. “You had to question everything,” he said.

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

On the northern outskirts of Guadalajara, Tanya Dittmar, a trainee doctor, hid in fear in a closet as an hour-long gun battle erupted near her home, as cartel gunmen attacked a National Guard base.

“I made breakfast with a Netflix series on in the background,” Dittmar said. “At first I thought I heard drills from a construction site. But I have six dogs and they got very nervous. I interrupted the sequence and then executed it was gunshots.”

“I never heard a bullet,” she said. Then the sounds began to change—as if they were getting closer. “That’s when I got really scared.”

The National Guard piled in reinforcements with vans and helicopters. Finally the gunfire died down. Then the silence was broken by the sounds of ambulance sirens.

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

Sunday’s violence was a worrying reminder of the cartel’s ability to incite fear and panic in Mexico’s second-largest city, which is scheduled to be one of the 2026 World Cup host cities.

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

Authorities there have issued a public advice to stay indoors, and routes to airports may be blocked, Britain’s Foreign Office said in a travel advisory on Monday. The U.S. Embassy in Mexico City also reached out a security alerturging citizens to “shelter in place” in affected regions.

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

Nothing like this had happened before in Puerto Vallarta, Carreño said. “Maybe some (tourists) left with the idea that this was a rare, isolated event,” Carreño said. “But when you see these kinds of things, I don’t think you want to come back, to be honest.”

While less well-known internationally than the Sinaloa cartel of now-captured Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the Jalisco group is a household name in Mexicowhere it is notorious for its displays of ultra-violence and its large arsenal of weapons, which it in military parades.

The cartel, which was founded about 16 years ago, has also been accused of trying to kill Mexican government officials – including García Harfuch, whose car was riddled with hundreds of bullets in an upscale neighborhood of Mexico City in 2020wounded him and killed two of his bodyguards and a bystander.

Washington offered a $15m (£11m) reward for his capture, and the White House confirmed that the US had provided intelligence support to the operation. Senior US officials celebrated the killing, which follows months of pressure from Donald Trump about the influx of drugs and migrants across the 1,954-mile (3,145 km) border between the two countries. The Trump administration has designated the Jalisco cartel a “foreign terrorist organization,” and the U.S. president has even threatened direct military action against cartels he claimed “run Mexico.”

Writing on X, US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau called El Mencho “one of the bloodiest and most ruthless drug queens”. I posted: “This is a great development for Mexico, the US, Latin America and the world.”

While the killing may ease pressure on Mexican President Trump, it will 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.

Chris Dalby, an expert on organized crime who has written a book on the Jalisco cartel, said one of the biggest questions facing Mexico now is who – if anyone – would fill the dead criminal’s boots.

“If no one can, if the CJNG eventually splinters, you have four or five different lieutenants with the manpower, the weaponry and the criminal empires to build their own fiefdoms — and that could plunge Mexico into near-record levels of violence,” Dalby said.

Some sources have cited El Mencho’s stepson, Juan Carlos, as a possible successor with enough support to keep the cartel together. “If (he) can unite the CJNG, we can avoid that kind of civil war,” Dalby said, although he believes that is far from guaranteed.