In early August, violence exploded in western Mexico.
We are people of El Mencho!
Roads were blocked,
cartel gunmen cruised the streets at will,
and in the city of Guanajuato,
25 outlets of a popular convenience store
were burned to the ground.
This was not a random eruption of violence
or rival crime groups fighting over turf.
This was a coordinated operation by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel,
or CJNG,
specifically designed to disrupt an attempt by the Mexican military
to arrest two of its bosses.
And it worked.
The two bosses, known as “Double R” and “El Apa”, both got away.
The Jalisco New Generation Cartel have become known as
Mexico’s most violent and dangerous drug empire
and the most serious challenger to the mighty Sinaloa Cartel.
But how have they achieved this?
How have they risen from nothing
to command a paramilitary-style narco army?
And amid rumors that their leader is actually dead,
could they be about to disintegrate into chaos?
[THE WAR ON DRUGS SHOW]
[CJNG]
Like many modern cartels,
the CJNG got their start with the destruction of another, older cartel.
The Milenio Cartel was founded back in the 1970s
by the Valencia crime family in Michoacán.
By the early 2000s, they had grown to become
major allies of the Sinaloa Cartel,
particularly notorious for their role in the crystal meth trade.
The Milenio Cartel used to be
one of the most financially powerful cartels in Mexico.
But in 2009, the leader of the Milenio Cartel was captured.
And in 2010, the local Sinaloa boss was killed by Mexican special forces.
This led to a splintering of the Milenio Cartel into rival factions.
The Milenio Cartel splintered over,
and one of those splinters was Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación,
the CJNG.
The houses are not the same. They’re all shot up now.
This is where the Jaliscos were stationed before.
This was their barricade.
All of this.
They had about 20 gunmen.
Maybe two here, two there.
But they had to be rotating.
This is where Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes,
or “El Mencho”,
comes onto the scene.
El Mencho had been working in the narco trade
since he was a teenager,
crossing back and forth between Mexico and the US.
He married into the Valencia family,
creating an alliance that would eventually grow into what became
the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
The economical power behind the Cartel Jalisco,
they literally started with avocados, so they were farmers.
They literally started moving from avocados to chemical precursors
to make drugs like methamphetamine.
It’s like, “OK, so what do the US market like?
They like their avocados from Mexico and their meth from Mexico.”
Since they formed, the CJNG’s calling card
has very simply been to make themselves the most brutal
and violent cartel around.
They dress in army-style uniforms
and make a great show of using heavy, military-grade weaponry.
And in July, footage emerged of that CJNG convoy.
These gunmen call themselves the elite group
and pledge allegiance to El Mencho.
They’re armed with assault rifles
with grenade launchers attached to the barrel,
heavy machine guns, and also this gun.
This is a .50 caliber sniper rifle.
It’s a powerful weapon that the CJNG loves to show off.
Where organizations like the Sinaloa Cartel
will often lean towards bribing police and politicians,
the CJNG tend to rely more on intimidation
and the threat of extreme paramilitary violence.
They have a very intelligent strategy,
which is basically branding themselves
and looking like paramilitary power.
They do have their four letters, the CJNG, on their vests.
They dress as proper military.
They also have these high-caliber guns.
They have what they call
which are basically handmade, man-made tanks, you know.
So their firepower is incredible.
The CJNG learned many of their methods
from an earlier hyper-violent cartel, Los Zetas,
who they originally fought a major war against.
Even with help from the military,
making El Aguaje liveable again won’t be easy.
This is the Jalisco Cartel commander in the area,
fighting from his armored truck.
I’m simply a commander here in the Michoacán region.
A commander of Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación.
No one can tell me that we kidnap people,
that we steal, that we extort.
We don’t do that. We are drug dealers.
We produce, export, and sell drugs.
That is how our “father” makes money. That’s our business.
Despite what cartel propaganda may claim,
their links to extortion and brutal violence against civilians
is well documented.
I know who the boss is—
Señor Don Mencho, a very honorable person.
And people who know him know his quality as a person.
If I didn’t think the way I do,
I wouldn’t belong to or be a part of this cartel.
But what sets the CJNG apart from all other rivals,
even the Zetas and the Sinaloa Cartel,
is their willingness to directly confront and attack
the Mexican military itself.
The latest cartel target— Mexico’s military.
The Jalisco New Generation Cartel took the fight to the next level,
shooting down a military helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade.
In May of 2015, the CJNG used RPGs
to shoot down a military helicopter thought to be tracking El Mencho.
They’ve undertaken organized assassination campaigns against
officers of Mexico’s elite police units
and used armored cars to attack
the convoy of the president of Guatemala.
And so far, we can say that Jalisco New Generation
is enemy number one of President Enrique Peña Nieto’s government.
Meanwhile, the CJNG have also
pioneered the use of weaponized drones
to attack both the security services and rival cartels.
...above you, a small device.
A drone or what?
Yes, exactly. Exactly.
Where’s the drone?
Right above you.
There’s a drone.
The Cartel Jalisco, they are very well consolidated as one group.
And so that means that they can really put up
really organized attacks against the Mexican government.
And all that violence is only to have leverage
in the negotiations with the government, with politicians.
They create this chaos to go and sit with local politicians
and say, “OK, do you want more or shall we negotiate this?”
The CJNG are now recognized as such a threat to US national security
that there have even been moves to officially designate them
a terrorist organization.
This is partly down to the fact that
they’ve been pumping fentanyl into North America
and fueling the region’s opioid crisis.
The CJNG is now the Sinaloa Cartel’s only major rival
in the amount of fentanyl being manufactured
and smuggled into the US.
The DEA says his cartel, called Cartel Jalisco or CJNG,
is responsible for roughly a third of the drugs entering this country
by land and by sea.
They own the two main ports where precursors are coming in from China.
It was my understanding that there was people from China
and from Colombia that were called upon [by] the Cartel Jalisco
to come to Mexico to teach their cooks how to make
methamphetamine and fentanyl with those precursors.
But around 2019, something crucial changed for the CJNG—
El Mencho disappeared.
He'd always been a reclusive leader,
never attracting the publicity of characters like El Chapo.
But reports and rumors began circulating
that he was completely removed from the day-to-day command of the cartel
and perhaps that he was actually dead.
So with all the rumors around El Mencho being dead,
or very ill, or out of the cartel—
I guess this started around 2021
when people started reading about
El Mencho being out of the Cartel Jalisco—
I reached out to two middle-range commanders
in Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación,
and one of them believed that he was literally out of the cartel.
He’s like, “He’s well, he’s alive.
He’s just stepped out of the cartel.”
And the other guy believes that El Mencho’s actually pretty ill
or might even be dead.
Without a body to show,
the DEA are still offering $10 million in reward money
for evidence leading to El Mencho’s capture.
But in the absence of clear command, factions within the CJNG
are beginning to assert their own independence,
causing increased violence.
Bring the drone, man!
The drone.
Bring me the drone, man.
The batteries.
I got hit.
Stay calm, Chivo, stay calm.
This is a transformational moment for the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
They may be able to hold together
and continue their brutal reign at the top.
Or they may dissolve into infighting,
as many other cartels that have expanded too fast for their own good
have done before.
For the Mexican civilians caught in the middle,
it will be hard to say which would be worse.
And whatever happens,
as long as there is a multibillion dollar market
for illegal drugs,
there will be violent, organized crime groups
ready to fight for their share.
We’d like to congratulate drugs
for winning the war on drugs.