The El Mencho death Mexico cartel turning point raises urgent questions about violence, migration pressures, and security policy affecting communities on both sides of the border.
When the Mexican Navy killed Heriberto Lazcano, the leader of the feared Los Zetas cartel who pioneered narco-terrorism in Mexico, in 2012, El Mencho was just beginning to emerge. He had helped weaken that group of elite ex-military personnel and was already plotting a break with the Sinaloa Cartel to launch his solo career.
By 2014, with Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán’s second arrest, he was already running his own cartel, but thanks to maintaining a low profile, he had kept a surprisingly clean criminal record. During El Chapo’s definitive capture, he had even managed to shoot down a military helicopter with cannon fire and bring Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest city, to a standstill. A couple of years later, he made a pact with the remnants of the Tijuana and Juárez cartels, bled dry by the war against Sinaloa, to consolidate his power.
And when Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada was arrested last year in Texas, he had long since established himself as the head of Mexico’s most powerful cartel and the most-wanted man in the United States. El Mencho was the last great drug lord and, at the same time, the first to emerge from the disintegration of the classic cartels. Now, after his death on Sunday at the hands of the Mexican military, none of those things exist anymore.
Mexico faces a new scenario where organized crime groups are leaderless. The big names that once personified the complex problem of violence in Mexico, elevated in the popular imagination as great villains, are gone. They are all either dead or in prison.
The strategy of targeting the top of the cartels has been the norm for Mexican governments for almost two decades, with a slight pause during the previous presidential term, since the start of the so-called war on drugs and the deployment of the military to confront organized crime head-on. The results of these high-profile operations have not been very encouraging, judging by the data. Murders and disappearances have broken historical records during this timeframe, in addition to spikes in relatively new crimes such as extortion.
The consequence has been not only a dispersal of crimes, but also the emergence of new groups. With the large criminal organizations decapitated, a new mutation occurred: a galaxy of new, atomized groups, more uncontrolled and unpredictable, eager to profit from any opportunity. A decade ago, the then-Office of the Attorney General of the Republic (PGR) had identified eight major groups; Today, the number has grown to over 80, according to military documents leaked a few years ago.
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