There were only three photos of him. They were all typical (U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency) portraits and were taken in the early 1990s. First they caught him with some marijuana. Then selling heroin to undercover cops in a San Francisco bar. He was just over 20 years old and was trying to enter the United States wet (without papers), he was detained and deported. He always found a way to cross back. But after serving a few years of his sentence he decided to stay in Mexico. From there, there are no more photos of a criminal career that would lead Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes to become the boss of the most powerful mafia, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), which revolutionized the business beyond drugs – extortion, robberies, migrant trafficking – with tentacles throughout the country and a good part of the United States, capable of assassinating judges, politicians and soldiers, paralyzing entire cities, hiring foreign mercenaries and demolishing with cannon fire from Army helicopters. El Mencho, was Mexico’s number one target and the most wanted kingpin by the United States.
The story of Mencho begins following the patterns of Mexican drug trafficking. Son, like so many others, of a poor family of farmers in Michoacán, land of poppies and marijuana, after his adventures as a young man on the other side of the border, he begins his rise from the bottom, as a simple hitman in the pay of one of the factions associated with the Mexican. With a mix of betrayals and strategic alliances, in 2009 he sold out his boss in the so-called Millennium Cartel to gain the favor of one of the Sinaloa bosses and position himself as one of his trusted men. This is how the Jalisco New Generation Cartel was born in 2010, as one of the armed arms of the Sinaloan mafia.
A year later, his most notable letter of introduction arrives. On September 20, 2011, at five in the afternoon, six vans blocked traffic on the Boca del Río highway, one of the most popular tourist areas in Veracruz. They opened the floodgates and placed 35 bodies on the asphalt. They were supposedly a bloodthirsty group made up of former elite military personnel who were at war against Sinaloa at that time. The coup earned him the nickname of the matazetas.
The alliance with Sinaloa did not last long. After the death of his boss, Ignacio Coronel, in a police operation, Mencho is again accused of treason, cementing his reputation as a cold, calculating and, above all, discreet guy, far from the luxury and ostentation that have ended up precipitating the fall of so many bosses. Police reports underline in the growth of the Mencho mafia its cunning in taking advantage of the gaps left by the most classic cartels. While the governments in power for 20 years focused on Sinaloa, the Zetas or the Templars, the people of Mencho were occupying those spaces and learning the lessons of the fallen bosses.
From the old thugs of the Pacific he learns the importance of negotiating power and weaving networks of complicity with politicians. From the Zetas, founders of the as, precisely, negotiation card. From their neighbors in Michoacán, narcopropaganda techniques and the expansion towards new synthetic drugs, especially methamphetamine. And perhaps its greatest creation, a new formula was invented, that of a modern and decentralized mafia that functions as a kind of franchise, a brand far removed from the old codes of the underworld, which were dedicated to drugs and left out extortion and kidnapping of the population.
In recent years, it was common to find on social networks videos of groups dressed in paramilitary clothing, assault rifles, trucks modified from the wheels to the roof with iron plates as if they were homemade tanks and the CJNG logo on the chest praising the Lord of the Roosters, another of Mencho’s nicknames for his love of animal fights in the palenques. This display of firepower was complemented by propaganda actions, especially on the border of Michoacán with Jalisco, the fiefdoms of Mencho. Actions that seek to build legitimacy and a social base in the most forgotten towns in Mexico, often promising that under their yoke threats and extortion from other groups would end.
Propaganda and extreme violence. The reign of Mencho and his persecution by the State have been crossed by an endless succession of attacks and revenge. In 2015, when the Michoacan boss was already beginning to establish himself in the global imagination as the heir to the almost mythical figure of El Chapo, the death of one of his men at the hands of the Army was responded to with an ambush on a military convoy and 15 agents murdered. The arrest of several of the alleged hitmen involved was followed by narcoblockades throughout Jalisco and a military helicopter shot down with a bazooka.
The extradition in 2020 of his son, Rubén Oseguera, El Menchito, was responded to with the murder of the judge who tried him by shooting him in his home in Colima, one of the areas controlled by the cartel and a route for chemical precursors from the Pacific ports. At the end of that same year, the shadow of Mecho is also behind the murder in the bathrooms of a bar in Puerto Vallarta, the tourist heart of Jalisco, of former governor Aristóteles Sandoval.
One of the turning points occurs that same year. The then chief of the Mexico City police, Omar García Harfuch, now federal secretary of Security, was leaving one morning by car through the Lomas de Chapultepec, one of the most exclusive areas of the capital. A group of 28 hitmen blocked his path and for four minutes they fired more than 100 bullets from military rifles. Harfuch survived, but CJNG’s display of fire in the heart of Mexico’s political and economic power represented a challenge rarely seen in a country sadly accustomed to shocking events.
