Jalisco New Generation Cartel

• 1. Introduction

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  The Jalisco New Generation Cartel, known by its initials CJNG, lost its founder on the 22nd of February 2026. Mexican soldiers killed Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, better known as El Mencho, in Tapalpa, Jalisco. He had founded this Mexican criminal syndicate and headed it until that day. The Mexican government calls the CJNG the most powerful drug cartel in the country. It also considers it the cartel with the most paramilitary firepower. Its weapons have included drones and rocket-propelled grenades, and it runs a hitman training program that officials describe as strict and professional. Yet the group did not begin as a giant. It began as one fragment of a larger organization, and it introduced itself to Mexico as an enemy of kidnapping and extortion. How did a splinter faction reach so many states so quickly? Why did it present itself as a patriotic force while leaving mass killings in its wake? Where did its money come from, beyond cocaine and methamphetamine? And what happens to an organization built around one man and his relatives when that man is gone?

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• 2. The Zeta Killers

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  In June 2009, Mexican authorities opened an abandoned truck in a residential neighborhood of Cancún, Quintana Roo, and found the bodies of three men. Beside them lay a message: "We are the new group Mata Zetas (Zeta Killers) and we are against kidnapping and extortion, and we will fight them in all states for a cleaner Mexico." The dead men were linked to people shown in an online video, being questioned by masked men with assault rifles. More videos followed. In them, captives confessed their crimes and named the police commanders and politicians who had protected them. The targets were members of Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel. On the 1st of July 2009, the government agency SEIDO took a call from an unidentified man. He said Zeta members would be "kidnapped and eliminated" from Cancún and Veracruz.

  Behind the masks stood a family tree of Mexican smuggling. The Milenio Cartel was then loyal to the Sinaloa Cartel. After the capture of Óscar Orlando Nava Valencia and the death of Ignacio Coronel Villarreal, a power vacuum opened, and Milenio broke into smaller factions. Two mattered most. One was the CJNG, headed by El Mencho, who suspected that the Sinaloa Cartel had betrayed its leaders. The other was La Resistencia, headed by Ramiro Pozos, known as El Molca. Sinaloa had founded La Resistencia to counter Los Zetas, yet it now formed a brief alliance with them, and a turf war began.

  The breakaway Milenio members who formed the CJNG included Érick Valencia Salazar, called El 85, and Martín Arzola Ortega, called El 53. Emilio Alejandro Pulido Saldaña, known as El Tiburón, is also considered a co-founder. The CJNG won the contest. It defeated La Resistencia and took over Milenio's smuggling networks. Within six months its operation stretched from coast to coast, and by 2012 it ranked among the criminal groups with the greatest operating capacity in Mexico. Homicides, kidnappings and discoveries of mass graves all spiked in Jalisco after it emerged. In spring 2011, the group declared war on every other cartel and named Guadalajara as the city it wanted. By midsummer it seemed to have reunited with its old partners in the Sinaloa Cartel.

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• 3. Veracruz 2011

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  On the 20th of September 2011, at around 17:00, vehicles blocked a major avenue in Boca del Río, Veracruz, near a shopping mall. Armed men abandoned two trucks in the road and pulled out 35 corpses. Other gunmen aimed weapons at the frightened drivers, and then everyone fled. Stunned motorists began posting warnings on Twitter. The dead were said to be members of Los Zetas. Later it was shown that only six had been involved in minor crime incidents, and none had ties to organized crime. Some had their hands tied and showed signs of torture.

  The gunmen left a message with the bodies. It warned Zetas and the politicians helping them that the same would happen to them, and it ended: "This territory has a new proprietor." The Blog del Narco reported on the 21st of September that the message was supposedly signed by Gente Nueva, an enforcer group working for Sinaloa boss Joaquín Guzmán Loera. On the 27th of September 2011, the CJNG released a video claiming the attacks. It apologized for the massacres but insisted that Los Zetas "are not invincible." Five men in balaclavas and black clothing sat behind a table. They called the Matazetas "warriors without a face, but proudly Mexicans." They said they respected the Armed Forces and the government's refusal to negotiate with cartels, and they described themselves as the "armed wing of the Mexican people."

  On the 6th of October 2011, authorities found 36 bodies in three houses in Boca del Río. The Navy discovered 20 in the first house and 11 in the second, and the third held one. The state's Justice Attorney General, Reynaldo Escobar Pérez, resigned the next day, citing the violence. The CJNG was also blamed for 67 killings in Veracruz on that same day. By the 9th of October, only eighteen days into the surge, the state had reported 100 killings.

  The federal government answered with a military-led effort called Operativo Veracruz Seguro. Interior Secretary Francisco Blake Mora said it would send the Armed Forces and Federal Police to "recover the areas controlled by the cartels." It would also build intelligence agencies to dismantle financial networks and examine local police for cartel links. Violence continued anyway. Seven bodies turned up in a Ford Lobo on the 8th of October. On the 22nd of December 2011, attackers hit three public buses on Federal Highway 105, leaving 16 dead, including three U.S. citizens. On the 9th of February 2012, authorities exhumed 15 bodies from clandestine graves in Acayucan. By March 2012 the homicide rate had fallen, and President Felipe Calderón credited the operation.

  On the 3rd of May 2012, three photojournalists who covered crime in Veracruz were killed and dumped in plastic bags in a canal in Boca del Río. Press freedom groups said they had fled the state temporarily after threats in 2011. Seven journalists were killed in Veracruz over eighteen months. After several arrests, authorities confirmed in August 2012 that the CJNG had killed five of them. Only a few reporters still cover crime in the state.

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• 4. Bodies as Messages

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  On the 23rd of November 2011, police in Culiacán, Sinaloa, put out a burning vehicle and found a dozen burned bodies inside, all handcuffed. A Ford Ranger on fire elsewhere held four more bodies in bulletproof vests, also handcuffed. By night, 26 bodies had been found, 16 of them burned. The killings were allegedly the work of Los Zetas, answering the Veracruz massacres. The analysis firm Stratfor read the attack as proof that the Zetas could strike the heart of rival territory.

  The next day, the 24th of November 2011, three vehicles holding 26 male bodies were left on an avenue in Guadalajara. Police received calls around 19:00 about cars abandoned with more than 10 bodies. They found a green Dodge Caravan in the middle lane, a Nissan Caravan 66 feet away, and a white van in the far right lane. Reports blamed Los Zetas and the Milenio Cartel, and three Milenio men were arrested in November. Investigators found that only six of the dead had criminal records, and families had reported ten others missing. The victims included a cook, a mechanic, a dentist, a truck driver, a house painter and small-business owners.

  Families described armed men taking people by force. One witness said teenagers drinking soda in front of a store were seized by men in two trucks. One relative called the missing young man "a teenager without vices or problems." The arrested men told interrogators the dead were not innocent and belonged to Los Torcidos, another name for the CJNG. One of them confessed that he had wanted to leave the organization but was threatened with death. Authorities called the massacre almost a replica of Veracruz, two months earlier.

  On the morning of the 9th of May 2012, an anonymous call led police to two vehicles beside a highway in Chapala, Jalisco, near communities of U.S. retirees. A Toyota Sienna and a Ford EcoSport held the dismembered remains of 18 bodies and 18 heads. Some heads had been frozen, others covered in lime, and the rest were badly decomposed. Jalisco's attorney general, Tomás Coronado Olmos, called it revenge for the 23 killed in Nuevo Laredo. Proceso magazine reported that Los Zetas had meant to kill 50 people that day, a day before Mother's Day. A cartel member arrested afterward said the plan was to repeat the Guadalajara display.

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• 5. Rival Fronts and Raids

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  On the 17th of April 2012, the dismembered remains of 14 men, all between 30 and 35, were found in plastic bags in a Chrysler Voyager in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas. Officials said a group had signed a message, but they did not release its text. Reports disagreed about who died. A source cited by The Monitor said the victims were Los Zetas members killed by the CJNG, by then described as a Sinaloa branch. Afterward, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo, sent Los Zetas his own message. In it he vowed to "teach these scums to work Sinaloa style." He also told a Zeta leader known as "40": "Don't forget that I'm your true father."

  The analysts at InSight Crime identified "40" as Miguel Treviño Morales of Los Zetas. They read the "H" in the message as probably Héctor Beltrán Leyva. The prize was a crossing that handles over 1.7 million trucks a year, more than double any other crossing on the Mexico-United States border. Analyst Patrick Corcoran expected a wave of violence, and he thought the Sinaloa Cartel's alliance with the Gulf Cartel might finally push Los Zetas out.

  On the 21st of March 2012, the Matazetas posted a video of slightly over four minutes on the Blog del Narco. Heavily armed men in black ski-masks, some seated at a table, promised to "clean up the states of Guerrero and Michoacán." They told the federal government and Armed Forces they had no quarrel with them. Their enemy was the Knights Templar, accused of kidnapping, extortion, protection racketeering, property theft and rape. Local vigilantes called autodefensas had already fought the Templarios for years. The CJNG's funding let it supply them with military-grade arms, and each side gained from the arrangement. By the 12th of April 2012-21 bodies had been found across Michoacán, with cardboard signs written by the CJNG.

  Later attacks targeted the state itself. On the 7th of April 2015, CJNG gunmen blocked a mountain road in Jalisco with burning vehicles, then ambushed a police convoy. They killed 15 officers and seriously wounded five, using machine guns and grenade launchers. On the 1st of May 2015, gunfire forced a Mexican army helicopter to land during an operation to detain the cartel's leaders. In August 2016, the CJNG kidnapped two sons of El Chapo, Jesús Alfredo and Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar, at a restaurant called La Leche in Puerto Vallarta. They were released after negotiations, a humiliation for Sinaloa. On the 2nd of December 2018, two grenades landed on the grounds of the American consulate in Guadalajara. One blew a 16-inch hole in a wall while the office was closed, and no one was hurt. Nobody has confirmed that a cartel was behind it.

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• 6. Money and Influence

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  By 2018, the CJNG was believed to run over 100 methamphetamine labs across Mexico. At average street prices, its trade could net upwards of $8 billion a year from cocaine and $4.6 billion from crystal meth. Tracing its finances is difficult, but some estimates put its assets above $20 billion. Drug sales to the United States and the European Union are the main income. Laundering runs through real estate, front businesses, cryptocurrency and offshore institutions. Seizing key ports of entry on the Gulf and the Pacific since 2009 helped it control more of the supply chain.

  Avocados, which the source calls Mexico's "green gold," show how the cartel earns beyond drugs. It extorts existing growers and, with help from corrupt federal officials, sets up illegal farms of its own. The tortilla, lime and chicken markets have seen similar pressure. Unlike the Sinaloa Cartel, which inserts itself into whole supply chains, the CJNG usually taxes many businesses at the same level of the chain. Fuel theft adds more. Illegally drilled pipelines have cost the state oil company Pemex hundreds of millions of dollars. Timeshare fraud adds another stream, with scammers demanding premature taxes and fees for sales that do not exist. Individuals and several Mexican companies have been sanctioned over it.

  Politics bent under the same pressure. During the 2018 election cycle, over 130 political candidates died in a single year, and the CJNG is blamed for those deaths. One 2020 account holds that it has killed thousands of civilians. It has also been reported to threaten top officials, including President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard and Omar García Harfuch.

  The cartel also courts public approval. In June 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, it handed out toys to children in Veracruz communities where it fights Zeta splinter groups. Members delivered boxes of goods in Guadalajara and other places. Online videos present the group as "righteous" and "nationalistic" in its fight against Los Zetas. Observers worry that Mexico, like Colombia a generation earlier, may be watching paramilitary drug gangs rise.

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• 7. Splits and Pressure

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  In March 2017, El Mencho ordered the murder of Carlos Enrique Sánchez, called El Cholo, a high-ranking CJNG member. Sánchez had killed a CJNG financial operator nicknamed El Colombiano. The plot failed. Sánchez and co-founder Érick Valencia Salazar then left and formed the Nueva Plaza Cartel, with Sánchez as leader. In August 2017, according to InSight Crime, the new cartel killed the head of the CJNG hit squad, known as El Kartón or El Marro. El Tiburón defected as well. By 2019 the breakaway group was still at war with its former cartel and had allied with the Sinaloa Cartel.

  By 2020, U.S. officials called the CJNG their "biggest criminal drug threat." Mexico's former security commissioner called it "the most urgent threat to Mexico's national security." From 2018 to 2020 it was linked to 298 reported acts of gang-related violence, more than any other cartel. On the 11th of March 2020, a secret six-month DEA effort called Operation Python ended with 600 arrests and about $20 million in seized cash. The arrest count was later revised to 750, with 250 in the United States. On the 2nd of June 2020, Mexico's Financial Intelligence Unit announced that it had frozen 1,770 bank accounts of CJNG-linked people, along with accounts of 16 companies and two trusts. By the 3rd of June, the frozen assets totaled $1.1 billion.

  On the 29th of May 2020, armed assailants stormed a CJNG-provided concert in Tierra Blanca, Veracruz. They killed six people and injured two. The dead included regional leader and newspaper owner Francisco Navarette Serna and the full lineup of the band La Calle. Then, on the 11th of June 2020, InSight Crime journalist Victoria Dittmar dismissed talk that the CJNG was Mexico's dominant cartel. She said it was losing influence to smaller groups. Los Viagras and the Cartel del Abuelo held a profound advantage in Tierra Caliente, and the CJNG had failed to weaken the Sinaloa Cartel in Tijuana. It also remained unable to establish a major presence in Morelos, the State of Mexico and Mexico City.

  On the 26th of June 2020, Mexico City police chief Omar García Harfuch survived an attack that left him with three bullet wounds. Two of his bodyguards and a woman passing by were killed. He tweeted from his hospital bed and blamed the CJNG, and 12 suspects were arrested that day. The number reached 19 within two days. Another target was José Antonio Yépez Ortiz, leader of the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel, also called El Marro. The CJNG sent killers after him several times, including at his sister's wedding.

  The pressure kept coming. Sánchez was found stabbed and wrapped in plastic on a park bench in Tlaquepaque on the 18th of March 2021. In February 2022, Miguel Ángel Fernández, known as El M2, a trusted El Mencho associate in Michoacán, was found murdered. In May 2022, InSight Crime reporter Peter Appleby tied rising infighting to El Mencho's poor health and rumored death. José Bernabé Brizuela Meraz, called La Vaca, defected and took over the Mezcales, who had been the CJNG's local enforcers in Colima. In February 2022, banners in Colima, written by the Mezcales, had already claimed that El Mencho died in a private hospital in Guadalajara.

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• 8. Family and Succession

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  On the 15th of November 2021, Mexican forces recaptured Rosalinda González Valencia in Zapopan, Jalisco. Known as La Jefa, she was El Mencho's wife and was found to control the CJNG's finances. Her family was tied to drug trafficking, and her marriage helped him recruit numerous former Milenio members, since she was a niece of Milenio founder Armando Valencia Cornelio, called El Maradona. By then five of her brothers and two of her children were also jailed. In December 2023 she received a five-year sentence for failing to disclose transactions of a car wash she owned in Puerto Vallarta. She was released early in February 2025. El Mencho had separated from her in 2018.

  On the 30th of January 2014, Mexican authorities arrested his son Rubén Oseguera González, called El Menchito, the cartel's second-in-command. He was extradited to the United States in 2020, convicted in two trials in September 2024, and given a life sentence in March 2025. Several of El Mencho's brothers-in-law, including Abigael, Gerardo and José González Valencia, were arrested and extradited. Gerardo received a life sentence in July 2023, and José received 30 years in June 2025. His daughter Jessica Johana, known as La Negra, was arrested in Washington D.C. in February 2020 while visiting her brother. She was sentenced to two years in June 2021. His brother Antonio, called El Tony Montana, was captured on the 20th of December 2022 and extradited in February 2025. Another brother, Abraham, known as Don Rodo, was recaptured on the 28th of February 2025, a year after being held for nine days.

  The most unusual relative was his son-in-law, Cristian Fernando Gutierrez-Ochoa, called El Gaucho. He faked his own death and lived in California under an assumed identity. He was arrested in Riverside on the 19th of November 2024. In June 2025 he pleaded guilty to international money laundering conspiracy, using real estate deals, shell companies and international transfers. On the 18th of December 2025 he received 140 months in a U.S. federal prison. In February 2025, the United States State Department designated the CJNG as a terrorist organization, and Mexico sent large groups of suspects north that year. In August 2025 it extradited 26 people, with assurances that the death penalty would not be pursued.

  After El Mencho's death, retaliation attacks set off widespread violence across Mexico. Security consultant David Saucedo told CNN that the line of succession "has been broken," because El Menchito sits in a U.S. prison. Saucedo named four or five commanders as likely heirs, including Ricardo Ruiz Velasco, Audias Flores and Hugo Mendoza Gaytan. David Mora of the Crisis Group told AFP that without a direct successor, a power vacuum "opens the door to violent realignments within the organization." Former DEA official Mike Vigil called it "a big opportunity for Mexico and the United States if they work together."

  On the 18th of March 2026, the Wall Street Journal reported that Juan Carlos Valencia González, called El Pelón, was the CJNG's new leader. He is El Mencho's stepson and a U.S. citizen, and El País confirmed his rise on the 6th of April 2026. The U.S. National Counterterrorism Center had called him the "de facto second-in-command." It offered $5 million bounties each for him and for Audias Flores Silva, known as El Jardinero. Mexican special forces arrested Flores on the 27th of April 2026. The Navy's secretary said he was second in command and had tried to take over the organization. The operation drew on 500 personnel and six helicopters, and the Navy said its surveillance had begun in October 2024, long before the succession fight.

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