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Rosalinda González Valencia, “La Jefa”, woman from “EL Mencho”
Cartels are not sustained by spectacle alone. They endure because someone moves the money, launders the profits, manages the assets, cultivates facades and consolidates networks of loyalty through the family. In the case of El Mencho, these functions were the responsibility of his wife, Rosalinda González Valencia, “La Jefa”.
The death of Nemesio Oseguera Cervantesor ““, the leader of Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), on February 22, was immediately framed as the fall of a drug lord.
Images of shootings and burning vehicles dominated newspaper headlines and flooded social media. Commentators spoke of a void of powerof fragmentation, of the weakening of one of the largest cartels in Mexico.
The event was presented as the elimination of a male figure singular and hyper-violent at the top of a criminal empire. But this reading tells us more about the How we imagine organized crime than about how it actually works, says Adriana Marinprofessor at Coventry University , in an article in .
A obsession with barons is based on a dramatic understanding of cartel power: a gun in one hand, territory in the other, a masculinity asserted through brutality. El Mencho embodied this image.
However, cartels are not sustained by spectacle alone. They last because someone moves the money, launders the profitsmanages assets, cultivates legitimate facades and consolidates networks of loyalty through the family.
In the case of CJNG, this figure wasn’t just El Mencho. She was also, allegedly, his wife, Rosalinda González Valencia.
González has often been described as “The Boss” (“the boss”, in Spanish). It is a label that points to a position of authoritymore than still in relation to her husband.
However, González was not simply the wife of a drug lord. It came from Valencia family, historically linked to the Cuinisa network deeply rooted in CJNG’s financial operations.
Authorities allege that supervised dozens of companiesproperties and shell companies linked to the cartel’s money laundering apparatus. Arrested several times and sentenced to 5 years in prison for money laundering in 2021, she was released last year for good behavior.
It occupied the gray area where the Criminal capital infiltrates the legal economy. If El Mencho represented the violent face of the cartel, González represented his economic backbone.
This is where gender matters. Organized crime is often portrayed as a stage for exacerbated masculinity. Women appear in these stories as victims, girlfriends, trafficked bodies or glamorous accessories.
Even when they are judged, they are often presented as appendices: “the wife of”, “the daughter of”, “the companion of”.
This language, although sometimes difficult to avoid, obscures reality structural principle that many cartels operate through kinship capitalism, in which the family is not sentimental, but strategic.
In these systems, wives are not accessory figures. They help keep business secrets in environments where betrayal is commonl. In patriarchal criminal orders, loyalty is controlled by blood ties.
A spouse who manages accounts does not represent a deviation from powerbut rather a extension of it. Gender does not exclude women from authority, but reshapes how that authority is exercised and perceived.
The truth, as surprising as it may seem, is this: violence can conquer territory, but it is the financial power that governs it — which does not mean romanticizing the role of women in organized crime, nor suggesting that crime constitutes a path of emancipation.
The power supposedly exercised by figures like González tends to be inserted into male-dominated hierarchies and violent systems who are equally responsible for extreme forms of violence against women, including feminicide and sexual exploitation.
The same structures that allow certain elite women to exercise financial authority simultaneously reproduce brutal patriarchal control in other contexts. This contradiction is not accidentalit’s the way things work.
El Mencho’s death exposes this contradiction. When the state eliminates a male leader, it is assumed that the organization will collapse or descend into chaos.
But cartels are not built around a single figure dominant. They are hybrid companies that combine coercion, corporate structures and family governance. Eliminating public face does not automatically dismantle private architecture.
By focusing the narrative exclusively on El Mencho, the media perpetuate blindness regarding the role of women in cartels. They equate power with violence and masculinity with control, leaving the economic and relational dimensions of authority unexamined.
There is something disturbing in recognizing the strategic authority of cartel wives. This complicates comfortable dichotomies between victim and perpetrator. Challenges the idea that women in violent systems are, or coercedor just marginal figures.
In Italy, Rafaella D’Alterio will have maintained the operational and financial coherence of her Camorra clan after her husband’s death. He did so, not through spectacular violence, but through administrative control, building alliances and family networks.
His case, like so many others, highlights that the durability of cartels and mafia organizations often resides in governance and not in the power of weapons.
As “decapitation” strategieswhich involve eliminating the leader of a cartel, are politically dramatic and symbolically powerful.
But they are based on the assumption that criminal organizations depend vertically on a single man. If financial governance and kinship networks remain intact, the system regenerates itself.
Understanding cartels only through their barons is misunderstanding them. Power in organized crime does not only reside in the man with the gun, but also in women who, whether publicly recognized or not, are often at the center of this architecture, concludes Marin.
