Mexico’s military killed the country’s most powerful drug kingpin, Nemesio “Mencho” Oseguera, escalating the government’s war against cartels amid pressure from President Trump to curb narcotics trafficking and sparking a widespread, violent gang response.
Oseguera, a former Mexican police officer, was the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. The cartel also controls vast fuel-smuggling schemes and other underworld rackets across Mexico and the U.S., Mexican authorities said.
Oseguera’s killing marks the most significant operation yet in Mexico’s recent crackdown on cartels.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has expelled more than 100 convicted drug traffickers to the U.S. to appease rising demands from Trump, who has pressured Sheinbaum to allow U.S. military forces in the fight against drug gangs. So far she has rejected direct U.S. involvement but has strengthened security and intelligence cooperation.
Mexico’s Security Ministry said the country’s special forces killed Oseguera in the rural municipality of Tapalpa—close to Ajijic, a lakeshore community with a large American retiree community.
The ministry said the country’s central military intelligence unit planned and executed the operation with Mexico’s armed forces, including the country’s air force and an elite national-guard unit trained to fight cartels. U.S. authorities provided “supplementary information.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Oseguera was a top target for the Mexican and U.S. governments. Last year, Trump designated the Jalisco cartel as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, she wrote on X.
Oseguera controlled vast swaths of territory in Jalisco state and beyond and was known for sophisticated paramilitary tactics. He had been expanding his influence and was locked in a bloody struggle for control of neighboring Michoacán state.
The U.S. had a $15 million bounty on Oseguera. He rarely left his mountain compound, according to authorities. Few photos of him circulate. The cadre of men protecting Oseguera, known as the Special Force of the High Command, carry heat-seeking, shoulder-fired rocket launchers capable of piercing a tank, people familiar with cartel operations said.
U.S. and Mexican law enforcement saw capturing Oseguera as a high-risk operation because of his military might and the risks of widespread violence. With this strike, Mexico had provided a “scalp to the U.S., putting off the threat of unilateral U.S. military action against the cartels,” said Mike Burgoyne, a former U.S. military attaché in Mexico City.
The Security Ministry said special forces were attacked during the raid. “They returned fire,” the ministry said.
Four cartel members were killed at the scene, while three others, including Oseguera, died from their wounds during air transport to Mexico City.
Oseguera, who grew up poor selling avocados, became the top trafficker of cocaine globally, say U.S. and Mexican authorities, eclipsing the better-known Sinaloa cartel’s dominant position in recent years. Oseguera’s cartel transports the addictive powder by the ton from Colombia to Ecuador and then north to Mexico’s Pacific Coast via speedboats and semisubmersibles.
Oseguera’s gunmen responded to his death by burning cars and trucks and blocking roads in Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest city, as the government deployed security forces across western Mexico.
Oseguera’s death poses an immediate challenge to Mexican authorities, said Mike Burgoyne, a former military attaché in Mexico who is now a professor at the University of Arizona. The government already faces one bloody cartel civil war in Sinaloa, and now it could have an even larger one in Jalisco.
“The Mexican government will have to fill that vacuum or the organization will fracture,” said Burgoyne. “There will be infighting and more violence.”
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