THE MOST DANGEROUS DRUG LORD ON THE PLANET

El Mencho, a former cop, has replaced El Chapo as world’s most wanted

By Isabel Vincent

New York Post
August 18, 2018

He’s a former cop-turned-hitman whose paramilitary-style cartel once shot down an army helicopter and brought Mexico to an armed standstill.

Now Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes — known as El Mencho — has replaced El Chapo as the most wanted drug lord on the planet.

“He’s public enemy number one,” said Paul Craine, a Houston-based security consultant who headed the federal Drug Enforcement Administration in Mexico during the 2016 arrest of Joaquin Guzman “El Chapo” Loera. “And he’s got an army of thousands of bad guys.”

Last week, federal DEA agents and high-level Mexican security officials — the same group that captured El Chapo — met in Chicago to announce a series of joint initiatives against El Mencho and his criminal enterprise, the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación, or Jalisco New Generation cartel. The powerful criminal syndicate, which controls dozens of drug routes to the US, Europe and Asia, has now surpassed El Chapo’s Sinaloa cartel as the dominant underworld force in Mexico, according to the DEA.

Last year, El Chapo was extradited to New York, where his federal trial on murder, money laundering and drug trafficking charges is expected to begin in a Brooklyn federal courtroom in November.

After El Chapo’s arrest, rival drug dealers battled each other to fill the power vacuum, said Craine. Two of El Chapo’s children wanted to take over the Sinaloa cartel, but they came across as do-nothing rich kids and were muscled out of the way in a bloody battle led by Sinaloa capos. The cartel is now run by El Chapo’s former partner. But that partner, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, is a reclusive diabetic and former farmer who is close to 70, and his hold on the cartel may be slipping. Last month, another key Sinaloa chief, Damaso Lopez, was extradited to Virginia to stand trial. Lopez twice helped El Chapo escape from a Mexican prison, once through a mile-long tunnel. Now, he is expected to be an important witness against El Chapo.

“If you look at El Mayo, most of his family is in jail in the US.” said Craine, who headed DEA operations in Mexico and Central America until his retirement last year. “He is increasingly isolated.”

With the Sinaloa cartel’s leadership in crisis, El Mencho’s group has emerged as the most ruthless — and better organized — criminal force in the country, Craine told The Post. The cartel specializes in producing “multi-hundred kilogram quantities of methamphetamine and heroin, and traffics in multi-ton quantities of cocaine,” according to a State Department press release. Its army of thousands of well-trained hitmen wear black balaclavas and T-shirts emblazoned with the cartel logo, and are armed with assault rifles.

“Unlike the other cartels, they function like a paramilitary organization,” Craine told The Post. “They are like an iron hand taking control of Jalisco, and have set up carjackings and roadblocks to show their power.”

In May 2015, El Mencho, now 52, ordered a series of attacks against security forces in the western state of Jalisco, blocking highways with buses and trucks and fire bombing gas stations and banks. Cartel members also used rocket-propelled grenades to fire on a military helicopter, killing nine soldiers.

Mexican authorities are so keen to capture the brutal drug kingpin that last week, they added another $1.5 million to the State Department’s $5 million bounty for information leading to El Mencho’s capture.

El Mencho grew up in poverty and dropped out of elementary school in the fifth grade to work on his family’s small avocado farm. He got a job guarding a marijuana plantation when he was 14. Later, he illegally immigrated to the US, where he worked as a small-time drug dealer in California before he was deported in the early 1990s after a series of arrests. Back in Mexico, he got a job with the Jalisco state police force. Later, he joined the Milenio Cartel, marrying one of the cartel leader’s sisters in order to ensure his membership in the group.

Last May, Mexican authorities arrested El Mencho’s wife, Rosalinda González Valencia, who was acting as the cartel’s chief accountant.

More than 200,000 people have been killed and 30,000 have gone missing since Mexican authorities launched their war on drugs 12 years ago.

Last year saw a staggering 29,168 homicides in Mexico. The country experienced a 16 percent rise in the first half of this year with 15,973 murders, most of them recorded in states such as Sinaloa and Jalisco.

“I have no doubt that El Mencho will be caught, but the violence won’t end until the Mexican government gets serious about strengthening the rule of law and ending corruption,” Craine said.