Rosalinda González Valencia

• 1. Introduction

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  Rosalinda González Valencia once looked at a Mexican judge and said, "Yes, your honor... I am not a criminal, I've been defamed". She was born in 1963 and is a Mexican businesswoman. Authorities describe her as a convicted money launderer tied to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, known as the CJNG. Her husband was El Mencho, once one of Mexico's most-wanted criminals. Inside the organization she was reportedly called La Jefa, which means The Boss.

  This documentary asks how a girl from a poor avocado-growing family ended up near the center of a criminal group's money. It asks what prosecutors managed to prove against her, and what a judge chose to set aside. And it asks why her name still carried weight after her husband was gone.

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• 2. The Cuinis Clan

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  In El Naranjo, a rural community in Aguililla, Michoacán, neighbors gave one sprawling family a nickname borrowed from a squirrel. The animal is known locally as the cuinique, and a mother often has more than a dozen babies at once. The family became known as the Cuinis.

  Mexico's government counts at least 18 siblings in the household of Rosalinda, whose parents were J. Abigael González Mendoza and Estela Valencia Farías. She was the eldest of the sisters and is also known as Rosalía. Her brothers included Abigael, Gerardo and Luis Ángel. Her sisters included Noemí, Berenice and Érika.

  In her childhood the family was poor and lived off avocados from a plantation field it owned. By the 1970s the relatives had turned to growing marijuana and opium poppy and smuggling both to the United States. Money improved in the 1980s, when her siblings emigrated north and entered the drug trade in California. She managed to move to the United States too.

  Her siblings worked for the Milenio Cartel, a Michoacán group formed by several of her relatives. Its main leader was Armando Valencia Cornelio, nicknamed El Maradona and also El Juanito. He was responsible for large narcotics shipments to the United States from Michoacán and Jalisco.

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• 3. Two Marriages

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  Armando Valencia Cornelio was born in 1959, which made him only somewhat older than Rosalinda. Security forces believe she was married to him. In November 2021 it was reported that she was also his niece. They had at least one child, Juan Carlos Valencia González. The couple separated in the 1990s.

  Then she began dating Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as El Mencho. He had grown up in the same rural community as her siblings and was close to them. He first worked as a guard on the clan's marijuana plantations. Later he joined her siblings in the drug trade in the United States.

  After being deported to Mexico, Oseguera joined a local police force. In 1996 he married Rosalinda, and the union tightened his ties to her clan. They had three children: Laisha, Jessica Johana, and Rubén Oseguera González, called El Menchito.

  In the 2000s, arrests of several of her relatives split the Milenio Cartel into two factions, Los Torcidos and La Resistencia. Oseguera and several González relatives led Los Torcidos, which defeated its rival and consolidated its influence. The CJNG sprang from this splintering in the 2010s, and Oseguera was among its founders. When Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán was extradited to the United States in 2017, Oseguera became Mexico's most-wanted man. His marriage ended in separation in 2018, the same year Rosalinda was arrested.

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• 4. Keeper of the Money

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  Mexican authorities arrested her brother Abigael on the 28th of February 2015, and they suspect that is when Rosalinda took on a larger role. According to Mexico's Secretariat of the Interior, known as SEGOB, she oversaw the CJNG's financial and legal resources. She reportedly managed affiliated businesses and handled the fines and taxes those firms owed.

  With Abigael behind bars, the government cracked down on Los Cuinis, the clan's own group. Several of her siblings were arrested or charged. Los Cuinis had been a sister organization to the CJNG, but it stopped existing as a separate cartel and folded into the larger group. It played a vital part in the CJNG's rise.

  The U.S. Departments of the Treasury, Justice and State describe Los Cuinis as the financial bloc of the CJNG. They say it is made up of her clan, with Abigael as its main figurehead. The two groups are intertwined through drug trafficking, money laundering networks and family ties. Their dealings reach the United States, Latin America, Africa, Europe and Asia.

  Since 2015, authorities have suspected she headed a network of over 70 businesses affiliated with the CJNG. They said she laundered over 1 billion Mexican pesos, more than 50 million U.S. dollars, in 2015 and 2016. Some of these firms were sanctioned under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act.

  Other women in her family had similar suspected roles. Her sisters María Ivette and Noemí were suspected of laundering money. So were Jennifer Beaney Camacho Cázares, wife of her brother Abigael, and Wendy Delaithy Amaral Arévalo, wife of her brother Gerardo. The businesses linked to these women spanned healthcare, tourism, hospitality, retail, consulting, agriculture, advertising, real estate and international trade.

  On the 8th of April 2015, the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned Oseguera and Abigael under the Kingpin Act. That date is when she began fearing her own arrest. Between then and the 12th of February 2018, she and her daughter Jessica Johana filed six writs of amparo in courts in Jalisco and Mexico City. The writs were meant to block their arrest. Over the same years, her siblings and in-laws were also sanctioned.

  Every one of her writs was denied, because the courts noted that no arrest warrant against her was active in Mexico. That reasoning would not hold beyond May 2018.

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• 5. Arrest Without a Shot

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  On the evening of the 26th of May 2018, the Mexican Navy arrested her outside a 7-Eleven in Puerta de Hierro, an upscale neighborhood of Zapopan, Jalisco. She lived close by in Torre Aura Altitude, a luxury residential tower 171.6 meters tall.

  Authorities filmed the moment. When they asked her name, she answered that it was hers. When they asked about her daughter Jessica, she confirmed Jessica was not with her. Officers then told her about the warrant and the money laundering and organized crime charges. She was told to hand her car keys to the friend beside her, and she asked that friend to call her lawyer.

  She was taken to the Estadio Akron, a multipurpose stadium in Zapopan, and flown by helicopter to Mexico City. There she gave her legal declaration at SEIDO, Mexico's organized crime investigatory agency. On the 28th of May she was imprisoned at Federal Social Readaptation No. 16, a women's maximum-security prison in Coatlán del Río, Morelos. Heavy security surrounded her arrival. Mexico's National Human Rights Commission had already found multiple deficiencies at that prison, including too few staff, inadequate healthcare and weak inmate categorization.

  On the 27th of May, SEGOB head Alfonso Navarrete Prida confirmed the arrest at a press conference. He said it belonged to Operation Escudo Titán, a campaign against organized crime launched on the 28th of January 2018. The National Security Commission and the Federal Police led it. He stressed that she was not caught in the act. The arrest came out of a long investigation with court backing, and no shot was fired.

  He also said she was not on Mexico's list of 122 most-wanted people, created under President Enrique Peña Nieto, who governed from 2012 to 2018. Gerardo Botello Rosales, known as El Cachas and suspected of being a high-ranking CJNG member, was arrested alongside her. Navarrete Prida would not say whether forces were close to catching Oseguera.

  Authorities said they had boosted security in Jalisco since the 21st of May. That day, CJNG affiliates tried to kill Luis Carlos Nájera Gutiérrez de Velasco, Jalisco's Secretary of Labor and a former state Attorney General. He survived with non-threatening injuries. Several civilians were wounded, and an eight-month-old baby was killed. Shootouts and roadblocks broke out in Guadalajara.

  The morning after her arrest, Jalisco raised security again to head off a CJNG response. Rumors spread that Governor Aristóteles Sandoval had activated the state's red code, its highest alert. The governor denied it and asked citizens not to pass rumors along on social media.

  On the 29th of May, a court granted her a writ of amparo so she could speak with her defense. She had complained that the PGR was blocking contact and violating Articles 14, 16 and 22 of Mexico's Constitution. On the 31st of May, a court at the Altiplano maximum-security prison in Almoloya de Juárez confirmed her first hearing would be held there the next day.

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• 6. Behind Closed Doors

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  At 1 p.m. on the 1st of June 2018, her hearing began, and it ran for about twelve hours. Her lawyers and the government had agreed to hold it in private. Prosecutors asked for this because much of their evidence was also being used against the CJNG in other investigations. She added that she feared for her physical integrity and did not want the press present. The judge ordered journalists and her family out of the room.

  Prosecutors pointed to a company they said she managed on the CJNG's behalf, JJGON, S.P.R. DE R.L. DE C.V., as proof of her link to the group. Her defense tried to discredit the claims. The judge said he was convinced she received illegal funds from the CJNG to buy and liquidate assets for them. He believed she then moved the proceeds into private CJNG bank accounts.

  The ruling split the case. The judge found the money laundering evidence sufficient. He judged the organized crime evidence too weak to tie her directly to the CJNG, and he dropped that charge. He sent her back to the Morelos prison in pre-trial detention, calling her a flight risk if freed on bail.

  Her defense filed two writs of amparo after the hearing. On the 6th of June 2018, a federal judge in Mexico City rejected the one that tried to reverse her detention status. The second asked for release on bail. It argued that money laundering was not a serious crime under Mexican federal law.

  On the 6th of September 2018, a federal judge granted that request. She left prison after paying roughly 1.5 million Mexican pesos, about 78,000 U.S. dollars. The judge reasoned that her romantic ties to Oseguera were not evidence of wrongdoing. He also noted she had no legal duty to know where her husband's money came from.

  On the 27th of October 2018, her defense filed another writ. It asked an appeals court to tell them if the PGR had opened new investigations against her since her release. The defense had made a similar request on the 26th of July, which was admitted into court on the 5th of November. The appeals court first rejected the motion, but a tribunal ordered the judge to reconsider, so the question stayed open.

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• 7. Recapture and Release

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  On the 15th of November 2021, members of the Mexican military arrested her again in the municipality of Zapopan. By then she was found to be the chief of the CJNG's financial operations. The Ministry of Defense called the arrest "a significant blow to the financial structure of organized crime in the state." Five of her brothers and two of her children were still in custody. That made her one of the last links in the alliance between the CJNG and Los Cuinis.

  Rumors about her declining health began after that arrest. In August 2023, the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia reported that she had hypertension and that her condition was extremely delicate. It also reported an undisclosed terminal illness. Her defense asked the justice authorities of Morelos for treatment of her illnesses, and the request was accepted.

  On the 17th of December 2023, she received a five-year sentence. The conviction was for failing to disclose transactions at a car wash she owned in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco. Her lawyer argued the verdict had nothing to do with the money laundering allegations and said he would appeal.

  On the 29th of January 2025, she was granted early release for good conduct, having served more than half of her sentence. She walked out of the Federal Center for Social Readaptation for Women in Coatlán del Río, Morelos, on the 27th of February 2025. About a year later, El Mencho would be dead.

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• 8. The Inheritance

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  By February 2026, when El Mencho died, reporting held that his marriage to Rosalinda had greatly aided his rise inside the CJNG. Through her, a niece of the Milenio Cartel founder Armando Valencia Cornelio, he could recruit numerous former Milenio members. Valencia Cornelio was imprisoned in 2003 and never resumed his lucrative drug trafficking relationship. Yet the Valencia clan kept some prominence. El Mencho's main link to Milenio veterans, some of whom later built the vital Los Cuinis faction, still ran through his marriage.

  At the time of his death, El Mencho was reported to have another romantic partner. Even so, her son Juan Carlos Valencia González was described as his stepson. The National Counterterrorism Center, under the Director of National Intelligence, regarded him as El Mencho's de facto second in command.

  On the 18th of March 2026, the Wall Street Journal reported that Juan Carlos Valencia González was now the CJNG's new leader. He is also known by the aliases El Tricky Tres, El Pelón, 03, El 3 and Pelacas. On the 6th of April 2026, El País confirmed the report. It noted that the standing he gained through his mother and her family helped him move through the leadership vacuum El Mencho's death had created.

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