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claudia sheinbaum
Can Sheinbaum Avoid A Death Spiral After the El Mencho Killing?
On one hand, demonstrating the ability to confront organized crime may help counter the narrative that progressive governments are soft on violence. On the other, history suggests that decapitation strategies rarely defeat cartels.
Mar 04, 2026
On February 22, 2026, Mexican special forces in Tapalpa, Jalisco, authorized by left-wing President Claudia Sheinbaum and acting on intelligence from the US military, killed Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, Nom de Guerre “El Mencho,” the 59-year-old leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) and the most-wanted man in Mexico.
Within hours, the cartel put up roadblocks, arson attacks, and running gun battles across a dozen states, ravaging Tapalpa and other cities. By the time the violence subsided, over 70 people were dead, including 25 Mexican National Guard troops. The entire country is holding its breath as it prepares to enter a new phase of its decades-long Drug War.
Does decapitating a cartel end the Drug War?
The operation was also the culmination of a strategy that Claudia Sheinbaum's predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had promised to abandon, namely, the militarized war on drugs that since 2006 has left between 350,000 and 400,000 Mexicans dead and more than 130,000 disappeared. Instead, while making some initial welcome gestures, he militarized the Southern Border, created the National Guard, and continued the War on Drugs.
Removing El Mencho may weaken CJNG in the short term. But it could also ignite the next phase of Mexico’s drug war, one that extends far beyond the country’s borders and deeper into the Western Hemisphere.
The Mexican drug war has never been Mexico's responsibility alone. It is the product of an insatiable American thirst for drugs that has only intensified with the opioid crisis, as fentanyl has flooded US streets, claiming tens of thousands of lives annually, with support from Big Pharma. The United States remains the world’s largest consumer market for narcotics; American demand generates billions of dollars annually for trafficking organizations.
Mexican cartels such as the CJNG and the Sinaloa Cartel now supply fentanyl, cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin to a US market whose demand keeps increasing, according to new reporting.
American guns are also at the center of this crisis. There are exactly two legal gun stores in all of Mexico, operating under strict military supervision. Across the border, in the four US border states, there are more than 9,000 legal gun sale points.
An estimated 250,000 to 500,000 guns are trafficked from the United States into Mexico each year. Roughly 70% originate north of the border. These include .50-caliber rifles capable of piercing armored vehicles and downing helicopters; many of them were from the American military. A new raid on a CNJG ammo depot revealed that 47% of the ammunition came directly from one US Army plant in Kansas City. That very same ammo was used to kill 13 police officers in Michoacán in 2019.
The CJNG now dominates 23 out of Mexico’s 32 states, with operations stretching from the Pacific Coast all the way to the Northern border. The cartel's estimated worth exceeds $20 billion, drawn not only from drugs but from a diversified portfolio of extortion, petroleum theft, human trafficking, and kidnapping.
It has used extreme force and military-level tactical planning against its rivals, including the state itself. In 2015, it shot down a Mexican military helicopter in Jalisco. It has assassinated mayors, attacked police convoys with improvised armored vehicles, and used drones and explosives against state security forces.
Internally, polls suggest support for the operation is between 80 and 90%. After years of feeling helpless before cartel violence, many Mexicans welcome any action that produces “results.” With this, we see the rise of “penal populism” across Latin America, where electorates increasingly embrace tough-on-crime approaches, even when those approaches destroy democracy and human rights.
The high popularity of El Salvador's right-wing dictator Nayib Bukele, whose approval ratings have hovered around 90%, testifies to the political appeal of iron-fist tactics, regardless of their clear governance costs. Bukele's mass incarceration model, where tens of thousands have been jailed without due process in inhumane conditions where torture is common, has become a model that politicians across the region now invoke, including in Honduras, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Peru.
That comes despite his success being predicated on secret deals with gangs, not on a War on Drugs—most countries that have tried his militarized tactics have suffered increases in the violent crime and homicide rates, at the same time as their economies have become increasingly unequal and democratic societies have cratered.
Externally, President Donald Trump has made clear his view that “cartels are runnning Mexico” and that Sheinbaum and other Latin American leaders should go to war with them, otherwise he will do it for them. His administration has designated Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and considered military intervention in Mexico. A US intervention would be disastrous for both Mexico and Sheinbaum, so the El Mencho operation is the price they settled on.
To add insult to injury, this summer, Mexico will host numerous World Cup matches, including four in Guadalajara, the capital of Jalisco state. The Sheinbaum government is trying to give the allure of tightening security ahead of the games.
She has modeled aspects of her approach on Brazil. Before the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics, Rio de Janeiro launched aggressive “pacification” campaigns in favelas, military occupations that temporarily suppressed violence but failed to address its roots while killing high rates of civilians and eroding civil liberties. The War on Drugs has not stopped there, either. We have to wait and see if Mexico follows this tragic pattern.
Across Latin America, the right has successfully framed security as a question of toughness versus weakness, where, as Bukele would put it, “All the gangs know is violence,” and thus must be met with violence. This framing leaves progressive governments perpetually on the defensive, forced to prove their bravado by adopting policies that at the very least, in theory, fly in the face of leftist principles.
The left's consistent (and successful) approach, emphasizing socioeconomic development, public health interventions, drug decriminalization, negotiation, and targeted intelligence rather than mass militarization, has struggled to gain traction in a climate driven by right-wing narratives and fearmongering.
The fundamental problem is that leftist programs take years to bear actual results, while voters demand immediate security. The right, meanwhile, offers quick and strong-handed solutions that reassure voters. It is harder to kill monsters with microloan programs and harm reduction clinics than with tanks and M-16s.
When Former Mexican President Felipe Calderón launched his war on drugs in 2006, he targeted the Gulf Cartel and its armed wing, Los Zetas. The kingpin strategy eliminates cartel leaders, but each decapitation meant groups splintered, and each splintering produced more violence, creating an endless loop of violence until neoliberal President Enrique Peña Nieto was able to sign pacts with certain gangs before resuming the military approach.
During this period, the number of major cartels grew from about half a dozen to more than 200, operating across the country and the entire world. The homicide rate tripled, while many border cities have homicide rates well over 100 per 100,000. Now, hundreds of thousands are dead as a direct result.
Mexico finds itself once again at this crossroads, where it must choose wisely. El Mencho’s bras droit, “El Tuli,” was killed in a clash with security forces hours after. But, the pattern suggests that new leaders will emerge, and the violence will continue. Cartels are resilient, and can adapt to new leadership, new business structures, and market forces very reactively. Taking out one leader, or even the drug trade, won’t put them out of business.
Left-wing governments have struggled to respond without appearing weak. Some voices, particularly those outside of direct political power like academics, human rights advocates, and a few leftist intellectuals, have pointed out the dangers of returning to kingpin strategies, the inevitability of retaliation, and the way military operations invariably claim civilian lives.
So far, however, the Sheinbaum coalition and the left in Mexico have, for the most part, supported the operation, praying that embracing these shows of force can help the left reclaim dominance over the security debate. But, ceding ground to the right on security might risk alienating the rest of the left; shifting the Overton window to the right; and making politics, rather than policy solutions, determine the direction of Mexico’s Drug War.
Sheinbaum’s operation thus creates a profound paradox.
On one hand, demonstrating the ability to confront organized crime may help counter the narrative that progressive governments are soft on violence. On the other, history suggests that decapitation strategies rarely defeat cartels.
Removing El Mencho may weaken CJNG in the short term. But it could also ignite the next phase of Mexico’s drug war, one that extends far beyond the country’s borders and deeper into the Western Hemisphere.
Can you win the politics of security without reproducing the failures of the war on drugs? It may buy Sheinbaum and the left time to continue expanding the welfare state, strengthening institutions, and foolproof Mexican democracy, but it may also open the door for further weaponization of security to destroy that very progress later on.
The better alternative may be to instead embrace a true leftist, principled defense of nonviolent solutions, or, to theoretically and politically justify a security progressivism. Such will be the test of the Latin American left in the wake of rising right-wing populism on the back of security fears.
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US-Backed Killing of Cartel Boss Unleashes Wave of Violence Across Mexico
The killing of Mexico's top cartel leader, known as "El Mencho," has created a power struggle that "could plunge Mexico into almost record levels of violence," said one expert.
Feb 23, 2026
With support from the US, Mexican security forces killed one of the nation's most powerful cartel bosses on Sunday. Almost immediately, the country descended into violence and chaos.
The killing of Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes—known as "El Mencho"—has set off a violent power struggle within the organization he led, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), which has left civilians caught in the crossfire.
As NBC News reported on Sunday evening:
Cars set on fire by cartel members blocked roads in nearly a dozen Mexican states and left smoke billowing into the air. Jalisco’s capital, Guadalajara, was turned into a ghost town Sunday night as civilians hunkered down. Later, authorities announced they had cleared most of the more than 250 cartel roadblocks across 20 states.
Several Mexican states canceled school Monday, and local and foreign governments warned citizens to stay inside as violence erupted.
The sudden outbreak of violence has created a state of terror for many ordinary people in Mexico. One Guadalajara resident, Maria Medina, told Agence France-Presse that men with guns showed up at the gas station where she works, ordered everyone to leave, and set the building on fire.
"I thought they were going to kidnap us. I ran to a taco stand to take cover with the people there," Medina said.
The US State Department has urged Americans in parts of Mexico to “seek shelter and remain in residences or hotels.” Many flights out of the country have been canceled, leaving tourists stranded.
Visitors at the popular Jalisco beach resort of Puerto Vallarta have been forced into hiding as gunmen have taken over the streets.
One father in Seattle told the local news station Fox 13 that he received frightened texts from his daughter, who was visiting the area, around 3:30 in the afternoon, describing the chaos.
“The text she sent, talking about, ‘The whole city is on fire, and we are hiding at home,'" he said. "'The cartel are outside right now watching the citizens and making sure the military does not come in. The police are not here to help. We are hiding.’“
According to one open-source effort to map the fallout, at least 19 of Mexico's 32 states had seen outbreaks of violence as of Sunday evening.
So far, no civilian deaths have been confirmed. However, according to the Associated Press, at least 25 members of the National Guard have been killed since El Mencho's death.
United States forces were not reportedly involved in the operation that led to El Mencho's death. However, US fingerprints are all over the attack.
In a statement on Sunday night, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the US "provided intelligence support to the Mexican government in order to assist with an operation" in which El Mencho was killed.
She added that "President [Donald] Trump has been very clear—the United States will ensure narcoterrorists sending deadly drugs to our homeland are forced to face the wrath of justice they have long deserved."
The attack comes after months of threats from Trump to use US military force to take out cartel leaders, against the wishes of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum.
At a press conference on Monday, Sheinbaum said that despite the previous day's chaos, "the country is at peace."
"We awoke today with no blockades,” she said. “All activity has practically been reestablished.”
Several news outlets have described the killing of El Mencho as a direct response to US sabre-rattling, which has ramped up following last month's operation to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
El Mencho, who founded CJNG around 2010, has been "public enemy number one" for the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) for nearly a decade, for his role in turning the cartel into a hyper-violent organization that coordinated global drug operations.
While CJNG has been considered one of the largest suppliers of Mexican fentanyl, heroin, and methamphetamine to the US—even greater than the more famous Sinaloa Cartel—experts say it’s unlikely that the killing of its 59-year-old kingpin will do much to solve the problem.
"What we've seen in the past is that the removal of the kingpin doesn't necessarily affect significant network disruption," Anthea McCarthy-Jones, an expert in Latin America at the University of New South Wales, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. "The removal of the leader doesn't have any impact on the day-to-day relations and the relationships that facilitate this kind of global drug trafficking operation."
US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau boasted that taking out “one of the bloodiest and most ruthless drug kingpins” was “a great development for Mexico, the US, Latin America, and the world."
But David Mora, the senior Mexico analyst at the International Crisis Group (ICG), said it will likely trigger more instability.
"In the absence of a direct succession, a power vacuum is created that opens the door to violent realignments within the organization," Mora told AFP.
Chris Dalby, an organized crime expert who has written a book about the Jalisco cartel, told The Guardian that this power struggle could culminate in a full-scale civil war if no successor emerges to fill El Mencho's shoes.
“If no one can, if the CJNG finally 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 almost record levels of violence," said Dalby.
The explosion of violence and instability following the death of just one cartel leader has mirrored what critics warned may follow if the US attempted to bring about the “total elimination” of drug cartels using airstrikes and special operations forces.
"At best, US military strikes in Mexico will weaken the cartels over the short term," wrote fellows Daniel DePetris and Christopher McCallion in a July paper for the think tank Defense Priorities. "At worst, they will cause the cartels to splinter even further, spiking the level of violence, straining the Mexican government’s military resources, and causing significant blowback against Americans in both Mexico and the United States."
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As Trump Issues New Threats to Mexico and Colombia, Democrats Push to End Unauthorized Aggression
Rep. Gregory Meeks, who introduced a war powers resolution, said Trump’s actions combine the “worst excesses of the war on drugs and the war on terror.”
Nov 18, 2025
As Democrats in the US House of Representatives introduced their latest measure to stop President Donald Trump from continuing his attacks against alleged drug cartels without approval from Congress, the president said he wouldn't "rule out" deploying US ground troops in Venezuela—and warned he could escalate attacks across Latin America, with possible strikes in Mexico and Colombia as well.
Shortly after the Department of Defense, called the Department of War by the Trump administration, announced its 21st illegal airstrike on what they've claimed, without evidence, to be "narco-terrorist" vessels mostly in the Caribbean—attacks that have killed at least 83 people—Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday that he may soon begin similar operations against drug cartels in mainland Mexico.
“Would I launch strikes in Mexico to stop drugs? It’s OK with me. I’ve been speaking to Mexico. They know how I stand,” he said. “We’re losing hundreds of thousands of people to drugs. So now we’ve stopped the waterways, but we know every route."
Earlier this month, following reports from US officials that the Trump administration had started “detailed planning” to send US troops to Mexico, the nation's president, Claudia Sheinbaum, retorted that "it’s not going to happen."
In his comments Monday, Trump threatened to carry out strikes in Colombia as well, saying: "Colombia has cocaine factories where they make cocaine. Would I knock out those factories? I would be proud to do it personally.”
Colombian President Gustavo Petro has been one of Latin America's fiercest critics of Trump's extrajudicial boat bombings, last week referring to the US president as a "barbarian." Trump, meanwhile, has baselessly accused Petro of being "an illegal drug leader," slapping him and his family with sanctions and cutting off aid to the country.
In response to Trump's threats on Monday, Petro touted the number of cocaine factories that have been "destroyed" under his tenure. According to figures from the Colombian Ministry of Defense, around 18,000 of them have been taken out of commission since Petro took office in 2022, a 21% increase from Colombia's previous president.
Immediately after Trump issued his threat against Colombia, he backpedaled, saying: "I didn't say I'm doing it, I would be proud to do it."
However, reporting from Drop Site News earlier this month has suggested that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) "was briefed by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on the new list of hard targets inside Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico in early October, and lobbied fellow senators on expanding the war to include drug-related sites in Colombia."
The senator had alluded to the plans on CBS News' "Face the Nation," saying: “We’re not gonna sit on the sidelines and watch boats full of drugs come into our country. We’re gonna blow them up and kill the people who want to poison America. And we’re now gonna expand our operations, I think, to the land. So please be clear about what I’m saying today. President Donald Trump sees Venezuela and Colombia as direct threats to our country, because they house narco-terrorist organizations.”
On Tuesday, a group of Democrats in the US House of Representatives introduced another measure that would stop Trump from continuing his attacks against alleged drug cartel members without approval from Congress.
The measure would require the removal of “United States Armed Forces from hostilities with any presidentially designated terrorist organization in the Western Hemisphere,” unless Congress authorizes the use of military force or issues a declaration of war. Previous measures to stall Trump’s extrajudicial attacks have been narrowly stymied, despite receiving some support from the Republican majority.
“There is no evidence that the people being killed are an imminent threat to the United States of America,“ said Rep. Gregory Meeks (NY), the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who introduced the resolution.
Meeks added that Trump’s campaign of assassinations in Latin America combines “the worst excesses of the war on drugs and the war on terror.”
Trump's threats of military action come after Hegseth announced what he called "Operation Southern Spear" last week, which he said would be aimed at "remov[ing] narco-terrorists from our hemisphere." In a description that evoked the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, Hegseth wrote on social media that "the Western Hemisphere is America's neighborhood—and we will protect it."
In the Oval Office, Trump declared, without evidence, that with each strike his administration carries out against Venezuelan boats, "we save 25,000 American lives," which experts say is obviously false since Venezuela plays a very minor role in global drug trafficking.
Several international legal experts have said Trump’s strikes constitute a war crime. Earlier this month, Oona A. Hathaway, a professor of international law at Yale Law School, said that members of the Trump administration “know what they are doing is wrong.”
“If they do it, they are violating international law and domestic law,” Hathaway said. “Dropping bombs on people when you do not know who they are is a breach of law.”
The Trump administration has argued that its actions are consistent with Article 51 of the UN’s founding charter, which requires the UN Security Council to be informed immediately of actions taken in self-defense against an armed attack.
The administration has not provided evidence that its attacks constitute a necessary form of self-defense. But last month, a panel of independent UN experts said that “even if such allegations were substantiated, the use of lethal force in international waters without proper legal basis violates the international law of the sea and amounts to extrajudicial executions.”
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