Post Mortem: Mencho Is Dead, El 3 Is In, Questions Remain

El Armadillo for Borderland Beat

On the morning of February 22nd, Mexican special forces killed Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, El Mencho, in the mountain town of Tapalpa, Jalisco, ending an over decade long manhunt for the most powerful and elusive drug lord in Mexico. 

The official account is straightforward: an army helicopter dropped more than a dozen special forces near his hideout before sunrise, a firefight erupted, and Mencho was found gravely wounded in the underbrush where he had fled with only two bodyguards. He died during the air transfer to a hospital in Mexico City. The official account says Mencho died of his wounds during the air transfer to Mexico City. But veteran cartel journalist Ioan Grillo, writing for his outlet CrashOut, reports that multiple Mexican and U.S. security sources told him the decision had been made before boots ever hit the ground: Mencho was not to be taken alive. When soldiers pulled him wounded from the underbrush and loaded him onto a military plane, two of his operatives also reportedly died in transit. Three people dying of wounds on the same military aircraft is a hard thing to swallow, and Grillo doesn’t shy away from what that implies. Whether Mencho was executed on that plane will likely never be officially confirmed. But as Grillo points out, given the thousands CJNG has killed and the mass graves it has left across Mexico, the line of people demanding answers is going to be pretty short.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the circumstances that made the operation possible tell their own story. Mencho had hosted a party at the property the night before the raid. A romantic partner who was being tracked had left that morning. Authorities reportedly had only a few hours to plan once the location was confirmed. When the helicopters arrived, Mencho had roughly a dozen bodyguards with him, a fraction of his normal security apparatus, and was accompanied by just two when soldiers finally found him hiding in the underbrush.

The cabins where he spent his final hours had previously been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for ties to CJNG. Staying at a location already on Washington’s radar would seem like an obvious risk. Yet for a man who reportedly moved every two days, there may have been a certain logic to it. A property already scrutinized and passed over can start to feel, however foolishly, like one hiding in plain sight.

Striking at precisely this moment made every bit of sense. Mencho without his normal security apparatus was almost certainly a rare occurrence and with the Trump administration bearing down on Mexico with demands for tangible results against the cartels, the window was not one the Mexican government could afford to leave open.

To understand what has been lost, and what has been unleashed, it helps to understand what Mencho represented. He was the most consequential figure in Mexican organized crime in the last decade, transforming CJNG from a regional outfit into a national force that has a presence in nearly every state. He demonstrated his capacity for survival, and for audacity, as far back as 2015, when CJNG shot down a Mexican military helicopter during an attempted capture of Mencho in Jalisco, an act of open warfare against the state that announced the cartel’s arrival on the national stage in terms no one could ignore. 

But the scale of Mencho’s rise should never be separated from the scale of the suffering it produced. CJNG’s expansion across Mexico left a trail of mass graves, displaced communities, and destroyed local economies in its wake. The cartel became one of the primary suppliers of fentanyl to the United States, a drug that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. Its territorial battles, fought with military-grade weapons, drones carrying explosives, and a deliberate strategy of spectacular brutality, gutted whole regions and drove entire populations from their homes. Journalists, police, local officials, and ordinary civilians paid with their lives for existing in spaces CJNG wanted to control. 

The response to his death was immediate and fierce. Cartel operatives launched coordinated roadblocks and set fire to vehicles across Mexico. Whether this began as a frantic attempt to force the government to hand over Mencho, a last desperate bid to reverse the irreversible, or whether it was ]retaliatory once his death was confirmed, or some volatile mixture of both, remains an open question. What it demonstrated, unambiguously, is that CJNG retains the capacity to destabilize the country without its founder. 

And the question of who leads that organization now has been answered. Multiple sources, including several contacted directly by this writer, point to Juan Carlos Valencia González, known as El 3, as the new leader of CJNG. El 3 is Mencho’s stepson and the son of Armando Valencia Cornelio, the former kingpin of the Valencia cartel, giving him a bloodline that runs through two of the most powerful criminal organizations in modern Mexican history. His emergence as successor is not a surprise. El 3 has been considered a serious contender for succession since at least 2019 and has long operated within CJNG at the highest levels. One detail about El 3 stands apart from everything else. He was born in the United States, making him, if these sources are correct, the first American citizen ever to lead a major Mexican cartel.

Sources acknowledge, however, that there is a distinct uneasiness across the organization. CJNG is not a unified chain of command but a patchwork of semi-autonomous cells spread across the country, and several powerful lieutenants are now expected to bend the knee to a new leader. That deference may hold in the short term. Whether it holds beyond that is a different question entirely. The prospect of the organization fracturing is not a cause for optimism. A weakened but unified CJNG is the devil we know. A splintering CJNG, with powerful regional lieutenants suddenly freed from central authority and competing for dominance, is something far more dangerous and far harder to manage.