Bad Hombres

By James P. Sutton, Peter Gattuso, & Ross Anderson

Thursday, May 14, 2026

 

On February 22, Mexican special forces cornered Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes—better known as “El Mencho,” Mexico’s most-wanted man and the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel—at a ranch in Tapalpa, in the state of Jalisco. Wounded in the ensuing firefight, he died on a helicopter ferrying him to a military hospital. His men retaliated within hours, torching cars, blockading highways, and shutting down parts of nearly a dozen Mexican states. The blockades—which spread to 20 of Mexico’s 32 states—killed at least 25 members of the country’s National Guard.

 

Eduardo Guerrero, a former Mexican security official, said the killing was “the most important blow that has been dealt to drug trafficking in Mexico since drug trafficking existed in Mexico.” And it wasn’t a one-off operation.

 

In the months since, Mexican authorities have seized or killed major leaders of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, the Sinaloa Cartel, and the Northeast Cartel—and on Monday, Mexican security forces arrested José Antonio Cortes Huerta, a top operative of a Northeast Cartel cell, during a raid in Nuevo León. During the operation, they seized narcotics, cash, 10 firearms, 11 cars, six motorcycles, and seven tigers.

 

Publicly, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum—of the left-wing populist Morena party (formally the National Regeneration Movement)—has moved against the cartels amid economic threats from the White House. President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened tariffs to force Mexico’s hand, writing to Sheinbaum in July that “Mexico still has not stopped the Cartels who are trying to turn all of North America into a Narco-Trafficking Playground,” and telling reporters in October that “Mexico is run by the cartels, and we have to defend ourselves from that.”

 

Sheinbaum has insisted that Mexico “coordinates and collaborates” with Washington, “but does not subordinate itself.”

 

But America may be doing more than urging Sheinbaum on. A U.S. military-led task force provided intelligence support for the El Mencho operation, and U.S. authorities supplied intelligence ahead of April’s capture of CJNG commander Audias Flores Silva, known as “El Jardinero.” On Tuesday, CNN reported that the CIA’s paramilitary Ground Branch unit was leading an extensive campaign inside Mexico that included a car bombing that killed a mid-level member of the Sinaloa Cartel near Mexico City in March. (Mexican officials issued angry denials. A spokeswoman for the CIA referred to CNN’s story as “false and salacious reporting.”)

 

In January 2025, Trump signed an executive order directing the State Department to designate cartels and other criminal organizations as foreign terrorist organizations. The following month, the State Department named six Mexican cartels—including the Jalisco group—as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs), and in August, Trump signed a secret directive ordering the Pentagon to use military force against them.

 

Sheinbaum’s tenure has ushered in a new phase of Mexico’s decades-long war against drug cartels and criminal violence, one marked by more intensive operations and greater cooperation with its northern neighbor. What remains to be seen is whether Sheinbaum is willing to confront the network of corruption that has long sustained the cartels—and that her own party has done little to dismantle.

 

When her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador—known as AMLO—entered office in 2018, cartel and other criminal violence was surging. Mexican police reported 33,341 homicides that year, the highest level since national record-keeping began in 1997—a record that would itself be surpassed within a year.

 

AMLO—the founder of Morena—proclaimed a “hugs, not bullets” approach toward drug cartels, prioritizing social programs over military and police actions. Homicides climbed through 2019 and 2020 before falling modestly, but the 2024 toll—33,550 killed in the year he left office—roughly matched 2018’s. Mexico’s homicide rate of 25.6 per 100,000 in 2024 was roughly five times the U.S. rate—higher than that of any American state, including Mississippi and Louisiana, the two most violent. The worst Mexican states (Colima, Morelos, Sinaloa) recorded rates above 80 per 100,000.

 

Since succeeding AMLO in 2024, Sheinbaum has taken a different approach. The former Mexico City mayor has deployed National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, intensified the crackdown on fentanyl labs and cross-border drug smuggling, and signed a constitutional amendment passed in November that gave Omar García Harfuch’s federal security ministry the authority to conduct its own criminal investigations and centralize intelligence across Mexican law-enforcement agencies.

 

The strategy may be showing results. Since 2024, Mexico’s prison population has increased 11 percent, to more than 260,000 people, a signal that not just the kingpins but also the mid-level criminals who frequently provide the cartels with weapons and vehicles are getting swept up in the crackdown.

 

Last year, authorities in the western state of Michoacán arrested 53 foreigners accused of cartel links, including 23 Colombians and 22 Venezuelans—some former soldiers brought in to train cartel fighters. Harfuch said intentional homicides have dropped about 40 percent since 2024, falling from roughly 86 violent deaths a day to 51. But some outside observers are more skeptical.

 

Nathan P. Jones, an associate professor of security studies at Sam Houston State University, pointed out that more than 130,000 people in Mexico are officially considered missing, a number that may reflect a rise in kidnappings for ransom.

 

“Is the homicide rate really going down, or are the disappearances going up, because people are getting better at hiding the bodies?” Jones asked TMD.

 

Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, acknowledged the statistics are contested but said the trend is real. Independent think tanks, like México Evalúa, estimate that the homicide reduction is smaller than the government claims, but still a substantial 22.2 percent. That would put the daily toll at about 67 deaths—roughly 19 fewer per day than before Sheinbaum took office.

 

While temporary agreements between law enforcement and cartel gangs have managed to reduce violence in particular regions, “nothing has ever held on the level of an entire country effectively,” Freeman told TMD. “I have to think that some of it is because of the strategy led by Omar García Harfuch.”

 

Harfuch, nicknamed “Batman” for his crime-fighting reputation, has applied technology and elite investigative units against criminal networks.

 

Some Mexico analysts think the Sheinbaum government’s strategy contains a flaw that will make it difficult to maintain any gains against the cartels: its focus on the drug war, motivated by the desire to appease the U.S.

 

“What has changed during this administration is the narrative,” driven by Trump’s desire to focus on the fentanyl trade, Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, co-director of the Corruption, Networks, and Transnational Crime Research Center at George Mason University, told TMD. “There is [a] lack of understanding in both countries, and especially in Washington, that we’re not dealing with these powerful organizations that produce fentanyl mainly,” Correa-Cabrera said. “We’re dealing with a very complex network.”

 

But the drug trade is hardly the only source of the cartels’ power, or the reason for Mexico’s endemic violence. Independent investigations and government reports have shown that Mexican criminal syndicates’ revenue streams are increasingly diversified—ranging from migrant smuggling to kidnapping and extortion to fuel theft from Pemex pipelines, and including thriving protection rackets in the tortilla and avocado industries. Among its various businesses, the Jalisco cartel traffics cocaine and methamphetamine as far as Australia, smuggles Chinese migrants into the United States, and runs illegal gold mining across South America.

 

Regional officials’ tolerance of cartel activity—and sometimes outright cooperation—is a key pillar of cartel strength, and a major problem for politicians who want to take on organized crime.

 

“In comparative terms, there is no other country in the history of mankind with the size of the criminal power that Mexico has,” Sergio Aguayo, a professor at El Colegio de México who studies national security and organized crime in Mexico, told TMD.

 

In 2023, Genaro García Luna—Mexico’s public security secretary from 2006 to 2012—was convicted in a U.S. federal court of accepting millions of dollars in bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel, becoming the highest-ranking Mexican official ever tried in the United States. He joins a long list of senior figures—Cabinet ministers, generals, governors—accused of working for or with the cartels.

 

Late last month, U.S. Justice Department prosecutors unsealed an indictment against Rubén Rocha Moya, the governor of Sinaloa state and one of Sheinbaum’s most powerful allies, accusing him of acting with nine others to protect the Sinaloa Cartel’s drug smuggling in exchange for bribes and the intimidation of Rocha’s political rivals.

 

Sheinbaum has resisted U.S. requests for Rocha’s extradition. She declared that she would allow Rocha to be sent to the U.S. only if it provided “solid and irrefutable” evidence of crimes under Mexican law or if the Mexican Office of the Attorney General’s own investigation uncovered crimes. (Rocha has temporarily stepped down while the investigation proceeds and denies wrongdoing.)

 

But a single high-profile prosecution—even of a governor from her own party—is unlikely to deter other officials from cutting deals with the cartels. Among state leadership alone, five former governors have been imprisoned by the Mexican government for making deals with criminal groups, and two more have been extradited to the U.S. in the past 10 years. “Even those exemplary prosecutions haven’t been enough,” Freeman said.

 

Sheinbaum may prove unwilling or unable to dismantle Mexico’s entrenched corruption, capping how far crime can fall. Mexico’s homicide clearance rate is around 10 percent, and corruption prosecutions of mid- and senior-level officials are rare. Those incentives—for the cartels and for the officials they pay—are what continue to drive the country’s rates of murder, kidnapping, and extortion.

 

Aguayo noted that many of the places in Mexico that have been able to bring violence under control are cities where leaders focus on coordinating multiple levels of government and society to fight criminal groups. When Sheinbaum was mayor of Mexico City, she and Harfuch developed a strategy to improve intelligence and target specific criminal networks, which helped bring homicides there down by roughly half from 2019 to 2023. “When you combine all those elements, then you can achieve some serious advances,” Aguayo said.

 

America’s impact is also not entirely positive. Mexican officials estimate up to 500,000 firearms are smuggled south each year. Sheinbaum’s government reports that 70 percent of weapons seized from organized crime originate in the United States. Last year, the Mexican government sued American gunmakers for fueling an “iron river” of arms, but the Supreme Court unanimously rejected it in June. Cartels now field IEDs, attack drones, and armor-piercing rounds.

 

But so far, it appears that Sheinbaum’s strategy—and desire—for confronting the cartels has clear limits.

 

Mexico’s murder rate is still far higher than it was in 2006, when the Mexican military first intervened against the cartels, Jones noted: “When it comes to Mexico, always bet on the status quo, even when it’s a negative equilibrium.”