Mexico's Most Sociopathic Druglord: El Mencho & CJNG
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April 2015, around 3pm, on a winding pass in western Jalisco State, Mexico. Blue skies and a burning sun, and a road carved between two mountainsides.

A convoy of police officers is snaking along the Sunkiss Highway towards Guadalajara, the country's third largest city. These are no ordinary beat cops, they're elite troops of the Fuerza Única Jalisco, the state's top men. As the convoy rounds a curve in the road, just outside the town of San Sebastian del Oeste, there it is, a barricade of burning vehicles, an impassable inferno.

The cops are blocked in, no way out. Then from above, a deafening explosion of fire. High powered machine guns and grenades raining down on the trucks from either side of the valley. No chance to fight back. Those who climb out of the vehicles are cut down by gunfire. Those who can't are burned alive. Within moments it's over. 15 cops are dead, 5 are wounded. The gunmen escape unhurt.

It's the deadliest attack on state forces since 2010, a new grim chapter in a Mexican drug war that to date has claimed a hundred thousand lives. Its brutal episodes are often met with indifference by a jaded population that's had to cope with daily threats of death for years. This slaughter however shocks the nation. Shootouts with criminal groups are common says security expert Alejandro Hope.

What is rare for government forces to come off worse than the criminal groups. Within hours Jalisco officials have their perps. The Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, CJNG for short. A Sinaloa splinter cell led by a madman named El Mencho. These guys are something different. The drug war metastasized into a cult of personality that kills for fun.

The CJNG are "people without scruples of conscience who, with their vile actions, harm Mexicans, their families, their heritage and their way of life," says Mexico's defense secretary. This cowardly attack, he adds, will not go unpunished. The Jalisco ambush is more than murder. It's an all-out assault on the state, a changing of the guard in Mexico's dizzying cartel history.

Welcome to the Underworld Podcast. Welcome to the Underworld Podcast.

Hi guys, and welcome as always to the show that teaches you how actually, despite tons of fanboys online, the war of drugs is actually like a massive failure. I'm your host, Sean Williams, and I'm joined as ever by Danny Gold, and I think we're about to head out on assignments, which I'm going to call a late Christmas miracle. Is there much going on over there? Good New Year? Yeah, dude, I'm heading to St. Louis in January. Where would you rather be? You know, a little fentanyl, a little murder, all that fun stuff. That's your beat.

The murder beat. Yeah. Where are you going? I'm off to Sicily in a couple of weeks, actually. That's going to be nice. Some sunshine. I mean, it's grim over here. Definitely worse than St. Louis in January. Jesus. Yeah, slightly fewer murders, but also Matthew had a lot of grim shit.

Yeah. Back in, back in the game. So I think this is our second episode into the new year and our Patreons up and running again, guys. Like we've got a couple of interviews going on there. You've got a pretty cool one, right? Yeah. On, on, on Captagon with Caroline Rose, who's like one of the premier exports on the drug, but yeah, patreon.com slash the underworld podcast. Throw us some pocket change, bonus episodes, help keep supporting us and whatnot. Yeah. Those gym memberships don't come cheap and I'm right. I really need to get over the bread sauce over Christmas, but yeah,

Yeah, I did a bonus with Keegan Hamilton of Vice a few days ago. And actually, we spoke all about his trips to Michoacán with the CJNG and their rivals, the Carteles Unidos and Alto Defensas and how he basically shat himself calling out the wrong patron or boss at a cartel checkpoint. You should definitely listen to that. And like we said then in that interview, despite El Mencho being the most powerful, rich, god-awful, bloodthirsty gangster pretty much anywhere on Earth...

There's a massive black hole of info about him and a ton of the US TV coverage is just like outright bullshit. Josh Eels published a cracking feature on him back at Rolling Stone a few years back. But yeah, this is like a show where the reading list we posted to Patreon is really going to come in handy if you want to learn more off the back of it.

Yeah, I just want to say too, you know, I think we've kind of stayed away from the cartel stuff a bit, especially the leaders. You know, I did do that Acapulco episode, but, you know, a lot of them, there's just so much out there. And there are some people that really know the intricacies so well. They know all the players, every commander. Like, have you ever seen the Narco footage board on Reddit? It's just, you know, we aren't going to bring you that level of detail, but we will tell you the story. And if we get something wrong, email Sean, because I really don't care unless you're a Patreon member. But anyway, let's...

Let's get going. Yeah, if you're on like r slash elmencho and you're an admin, maybe like skip this episode and go back to one of our other amazing ones. But I mean, I know like, yeah, a lot of our listeners keep a keen eye on a drug war south of the East Border. But for those of you who might not, your main encounter with the Jalisco New Generation is...

Might be a 2020 video released by them featuring like row upon row of armored tacticals, tanks and guys dressed in military facades, sporting US machine guns, sniper rifles, grenade launchers, the works. Scary shit and a massive show of force and loyalty for the guy they call Mencho.

which is a phonetic derivation of his name, Nemesio Osiguera Cervantes. Some people also call him El Señor de los Gallos, or Lord of the Roosters, or Lord of the Cocks, if you prefer, because apparently he's into dropping 100 grand a pop on cockfights.

What is it with gangsters loving cockfights? I mean, I've been to them. They're not that much fun, but these guys just love it. You know, like the Cuban guy that we did the story on. Yeah, I've been to a couple and they're just awful. Like, they're really disgusting. And there's no major climax or anything. They're just rubbish. Anyway. Boring. Yeah, they suck. Cockfights suck. Here is an intro to Mencho from Josio's Rolling Stone piece I just mentioned. Quote,

Only a handful of photos of Mencho are known to exist, and even the State Department's description of him is comically nondescript. He's 5'8", 165 pounds, brown eyes, brown hair. Wait a minute, is that me? Narco balladeers have celebrated his rumored love of fast motorbikes and $100,000 cop fights, but otherwise he's a cypher.

Over 25 years of working in Mexico, you'd run into guys who had met Chapo, who would talk about him. The former DEA agent says, that's in the piece. But with Mencho, you don't hear that. He's kind of a ghost. And it's true that in many ways, Mencho is sort of the anti-Chapo. He doesn't care about partying or women or celebrities or the high life.

Well, it's kind of like El Mayo too, right? I mean, I know he does care about some of that stuff, but he's supposed to be a lot more disciplined behind in the shadows and, you know, operating like that as opposed to Chapo. Yeah. I mean, as this show goes on, I think you're going to see that we kind of get the narcos that we deserve from this drug war and it really does get worse.

Mencho rarely spends more than two nights in the same spot. Some say that's one of the reasons for this so-called homecoming in Michoacan that we'll get to a bit later that was in the intro. And in many ways, yeah, he's the devil that this disastrous war on drugs deserves. He's psychopathic, he's ruthless, and he's been on nothing more than the complete domination of the drugs trade.

He's also the most wanted person in Mexico, no? Oh, yeah. Yeah. And worth a billion bucks. Although, you know, what does that mean? But...

Yeah, I mean, we get a lot of like, I wanted to say this actually, we get a lot of like weird cartel fanboys and girls on our IG popping up. So let me tell you off the tail of this guy with some of the things his cartel has actually done. So in 2013, for example, CJNG foot soldiers raped, murdered and set fire to a 10 year old girl. They'd misidentified as a rival cartel member's daughter. Two years later, 2015.

CJNG Sicario's duct-taped sticks of dynamite to a man and his high school-aged son, laughing and filming their subsequent grisly deaths. There's a reason the Fed's like comparing the CJNG to ISIS. Quote, "...the manner in which they kill people, the sheer numbers, it's unparalleled even in Mexico," a DE agent has told Rolling Stone before.

Yeah, I mean, we all love to watch narcos and make jokes here and there, but these are extremely bad people. Yeah, I mean, like, you know, who doesn't like a gold-plated 9mm? But yeah, this is something a little bit different.

And the ISIS comparison actually, it kind of bears out beyond the acts of violence alone. It's also about how a state breakdown and a lack of underworld control leads to the birthing of an event way more horrible, even worse monster. But before we get there, let's head back to 1966 or 1964, depending on your source. In the two-horse town of Naranjo del Chila, in the Michoacan municipality of Aguililla,

This little scratch is where Mencho's born into poverty, skipping school to help his family grow avocados. These are the primary export of Michoacan, actually, alongside lime. So if you're fond of guac, chances are you've been eating produce grown in the territory of the CJNG. The whole cartel's controlling the avocado market, right? That was a thing a couple of years ago. I feel like I saw a bunch of stories on that. Yes, huge thing, and it's still going on. I mean, like, whole turf wars are being fought over the avocados alone, like...

aside from the drugs and it's in these avocado fields that the young mencho actually gets his first taste of organized crime when a local family called the valencias hires him to keep an eye on things make sure folks aren't stealing the crop and so on now this valencia family is known as the avocado cartel because they like stashing weed inside the fruit and they'll eventually level up into into the millennio cartel when they start planting marijuana and poppy for dope

These guys are so powerful that one of them, a patriarch named Jose, becomes local mayor in 1989. But by then, Mencho himself, he's actually in the States. He immigrates to California as a 14 year old and immediately gets in trouble a bunch of times. In September 1992, Mencho's older brother Abraham heads to a San Fran bar called Imperial to do a dope deal and he tagged along as a lookout.

But he realizes that the buyers are using neat stacked hundred dollar bills instead of used loose ones and he calls them out as cops, that's Mencho. He tells his brother never to do business with these guys again but it's too late. Cops arrest the pair and sentence Mencho to five years at West Texas prison. Three years later he's released on patrol and deported back to Mexico. Then he becomes a state cop in the Jalisco town of Tomatlan.

Wow, that paragraph needs a lot of processing, but also like sharp kid, right, with the bills and more practical advice from the podcast for everyone out there. Yeah, I mean, this guy is pretty dead eyed, like, and it's gonna, it's gonna come out a lot more as we go through the show. I mean, Mencho kicks off his criminal career south of the border as a cop.

Which is pretty much all you need to know about police corruption in Mexico. He works his way through the ranks of the Millenio Cartel, which now has close connections to South American narcos like the Mejalliangais, and by the early 2000s they're getting into synthetic drugs alongside the Mexican-Chinese kingpin, Shen Li Ye Gong, who we should probably do a different show about sometime.

Yeah, I mean, I'm interested already. And also, Chinese laborers, like immigrants, they were the first ones who brought opium to Mexico, I think, in the 1920s, around then. And they were actually kicked out in the 30s after locals took over the rackets post-prohibition. So that's kind of how the opium market started there and heroin. Yeah, absolutely. We actually got into that a bit with the kind of like past of El Chapo as well with Noah, that episode we did, I think, like a few months ago.

And in 2003, the state actually captures the Millenio cartel's leader, Armando Valencia Cornelio, and it sides with the burgeoning Sinaloa cartel as part of this so-called Pax Sinaloa that's kind of holding the drug industry together, just, in Mexico, under El Chapo.

So where is Mencho in this? He's a leader in the millennial cartel. Well, the millennial cartel is essentially a family business. So he's not like right at the top, but he's worked his way through. So he's a pretty prominent figure in that cartel by this point.

And by the way, it's no coincidence that all this millennial stuff playing out in Jalisco State. There's pristine beaches, mountains, but it's way more than a tourist paradise. It's warm, temperate, perfect farmland. A bit like Israel, right? You throw anything in the ground, it grows. It's also a cultural ground zero. Mariachi, tequila, sombreros, they're all from Jalisco. The state motto is Jalisco es Mexico. Jalisco is Mexico.

If you're looking at Mexico on a map, like where is it geographically? It's kind of on the Pacific coast as the country bends around kind of on a parallel longitudinally. Is that the right way with Mexico City? So it's not a billion miles away, but it's like Guadalajara is just slightly inland. Yeah, just as the country kind of bends around as it goes towards Central America. So sort of two thirds of the way down the country.

What's more, Jalisco's state capital city, Guadalajara, is home to a thriving pharma industry. I mean, that is ever so slightly useful if you're an upstart cartel and you want to pivot to cheap, easy-to-make methamphetamine. Oh yeah, and where are you going to get the precursor drugs? Well, there's a giant port on the Pacific coast where boats are just pouring in from all over Asia.

It really is amazing the role that ports play in a location becoming a burgeoning organized crime location. I mean, it makes obvious sense, but still interesting to think about. Yes. I mean, it's almost 100% of the time. Here's a September 2021 report by Vander Felbad Brown at the Brookings Institute. Quote, For decades, the state has been a major drug trafficking hub and since 2006, the symbol of Mexico's anti-crime policies.

But while former President Felipe Calderón made Michoacán the original epicentre of the war against the cartels, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador essentially gave up on tackling them.

However, the absence of a central government policy to confront the cartels has neither lessened violence in Mexico nor reduced CJNG repression and brazenness. So we're going to get to Lopez Obrador, known to many by his initials AMLO, soon. But at this point, 10 to 15 years back from now, Jalisco is a big fat tinderbox. And that Paxton and Loa that I mentioned, it's pretty much all smoke and mirrors.

On October 28, 2009, a gun battle breaks out between Millenio men and Mexican army troops in Tlalocumoco de Zuniga, Jalisco. Those indigenous names really screw me up, so sorry guys. Anyway, Mexico, after this point, extradites Oscar Orlando Nava Valencia, El Lobo, or The Wolf, after the shootout.

And suddenly there's a massive power vacuum in that cash cow state helisco and a bunch of splinter organizations come out of it.

And parsing through the cartel wars is exhausting, seriously. I mean, you can look back on the Acapulco episode 2. There's just so many splinterings and alliances and people turning on each other. It's really a tough thing to figure out. Yeah, I mean, it's another practical way that we don't just want to do cartel stuff all the time because it's like... I mean, there are two reasons for me. One is this and the other is just it's depressing, man. It's like so depressing. Yeah.

Anyway, I'm not going to get too into the weeds about all of these different warring factions, micro cartels and leaders that pop up during this era.

But essentially, former members of the Sinaloa, Millenio and other groups break off and they start sparring for control. When I say sparring, it's a bit worse than that. Los Zetas, they're the scary former army guys. They form an alliance with a mishmash alliance of self-styled autodefensas. That's basically paramilitary vigilantes called the Carteles Unidos or United Cartels or more simply La Resistencia.

When a former Sinaloa capo, Nacho, is killed by security forces in 2010, that is when Mencho makes his move. At first, his guys go by a simple name, Matazetas, the Zetas killers. Soon after, the mutilated bodies of three men are found in Cancun next to a message, quote, We are the new group Matazetas, and we are against kidnapping and extortion, and we will fight them in all states for a cleaner Mexico.

Maybe bear that emancipatory message in mind when I'm telling you this next story. So in September 2011, two trucks dumped 35 bodies on a main road in the port city of Veracruz, right in the middle of rush hour. 23 men, 12 women, half naked, face down on the tarmac, most of them tortured and strangled to death. Beside them a scrawled message, there's a new owner of this turf.

I mean, doesn't that sound like the start of a new shining era? It just so happens that state troopers are carrying out a bunch of raids on the Zetas at that precise time. Cleaning house, perhaps. Wait, so the state police are with Mencho?

Some people say yes, some people say no. It seems like Mencho is kind of piggybacking on the back of these massive anti-Zetas raids. And a local police chief actually claims that every single one of the 35 dead has a record in organized crime. Quote,

There is nothing in this event that affects the civilian population. I mean, I've got a few questions about that. If I saw 35 bodies on the highway, Russia, maybe it does affect people. A year later, the Mexican army narrowly avoids capturing El Mencho after a raid on a Guadalajara apartment.

The next spring, he releases a video to YouTube, flanked by balaclava-clad mercenaries, in which a spokesman delivers yet another message. Bark dogs, he says. But while you're barking, know that I am advancing.

So does he have a big force here? Because it sounds like he's taking on Zetas, who are just like, you know, known for being pretty ferocious and pretty violent. Like they were the first iteration, I guess, of the hyper-violent cartel group thing. Yeah, at this point, I think both Zetas and Mencho's guys are pretty relatively small in number compared to the major cartels. But like Mencho's definitely sort of snowballing his men and trying to sort of completely run over the Zetas.

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Here's Eduardo Buscaglia, an organized crime expert, speaking to MVS Radio. Quote,

What we are seeing in Mexico is typical of a process of paramilitarization in which different groups seek to wipe territories clean of their rivals. The groups are fighting over 22 different illegal markets, not just drugs, and that produces an orgy of violence.

So remember those avocados and limes and the ports obviously? I mean there's plenty more besides drugs to leech off in Jalisco. And despite their good guy image, the CJNG have no problem extorting farmers and threatening, torturing or murdering any civilians in their way. At first Menchos Capos carry out killings on behalf of the Sinaloa cartel. In 2012 they actually perpetrate a massacre in Nuevo Laredo.

So they're like an enforcement wing at this point? Yeah, he's kind of like just playing all sides. He's playing every single person off against themselves and just seeing how he can grow his own organization. But soon enough, they're big enough to strike it out alone. And a 2015 ambush on the highway outside Guadalajara in the intro to this show, that is a calling card to the state itself.

In response, the Mexican state launches "Operacion Jalisco", a massive assault aimed at cutting down Mencho's business. But he's ready for them. On May 1st 2015, CJNG soldiers lay siege to Guadalajara itself. They throw out 30 roadblocks and one henchman even shoots down a Cougar EC-725 helicopter. It's considered the most brazen attack on the Mexican military since the start of the drug war 10 years previous.

Here's Josh Eales again in that feature story for Rolling Stone. Quote, In the hours that followed the operation, Mencho doubled down on the terror, setting fire to dozens of hijacked buses, trucks, gas stations and banks throughout Jalisco, snarling traffic and bringing the state to its knees. The U.S. consulate warned its citizens to shelter in place. The Mexican government had to send in 10,000 troops to secure the state.

According to a former DEA agent, the chaos was designed to help Mencho escape, a tactic the cartel reportedly learned from Israeli commandos. I've heard about Israelis meeting with them, snipers and stuff, an agent tells him. It's a technical use of force you've never seen with Mexican cartels.

Yeah, it's going to be, I mean, mercenaries, I think there's a lot of those in Mexico. I know guys we were talking to that were in Altar, they had a bunch of Guatemalan mercenaries. I know that South African ones have been there as well. I feel like, you know, there's just a whole shady economy of mercenaries like that, that have worked the cartels before. Yeah, I mean, it's, I guess it's impossible to keep them away, right? Because there's billions of dollars at stake and a whole criminal economy that's just begging for them.

Yeah, this guy, when we were talking to him, he was like, this is my guys from El Salvador, these are my guys from Guatemala, and they're all just mercs. Nuts, yeah. And a lot of these guys, the Mexican guys, they're willing to die for El Mencho. It's this slender, quiet maniac who's into flash motorcycles and cop fights, stone-cold killer. In fact, one time there is a shootout at a fair, and a guy jumps on a grenade to avoid Mencho getting hit.

So like El Chapo, he's created this powerful cult of personality about himself. But he's different, he moves in the shadows. I read actually that he supposedly hides out in the mountains on a kidney dialysis machine, running things from beds, so no wonder he hates moving about, if that's true.

This is Chris Dalby of Insight Crime. Quote, He's very secretive. He does not show himself. He's not a man of the people like El Chapo who cultivated that cult of personality, who was seen engaging with people. A little bit like Pablo Escobar.

He is part of an evolution of drug kingpins who want to keep themselves in the shadows. I guess I've got a bit of an issue with that quote because it is a cult personality. He just isn't out there like shaking hands. And Keegan Hamilton's vice doco got into this personality cult a bit too. Where he's talking to CJNG guys and they're speaking about Mencho like he's the Pope. I mean although he's given like to murdering anyone he doesn't like I guess they're not going to give the most balanced answer about their boss. One thing is definitely true though.

This guy is extremely rich and powerful. When Chapo himself gets nabbed in 2017, it causes yet another vacuum in the drug industry. And by all accounts, Mencho has filled it. Some think he's personally worth a billion, although, as I said before, these are pretty foggy figures at best.

Yeah, I mean, Mayo's kind of right there too, right? It's not just Mencho. Correct. Yeah. And they seem to not be stepping on each other's toes too much at the moment, although I'm sure I'll get loads of pelters for that. But the US has slapped a $10 million reward on Mencho's head, which I mean, I would really like to see that episode of Dog the Pounty Hunter. But you've got to doubt anyone is going to trade in Mencho given the risk.

According to the DEA, the Sinaloa cartel is still the most powerful in the US, controlling almost all of the eastern seaboard, much of the southwest and large parts of Florida. But the CJNG holds sway in tons of California, Rust Belt, Seattle, coastal Texas, Hawaii and Puerto Rico.

Mike Vigil, who's a former DEA chief, told British Rag the Sun that, quote, I would describe El Mencho as hyper-violent and extremely cunning, but not ostentatious like most drug traffickers. Make no doubt about it, El Mencho is deadlier than the rattlesnake, and totally more deadly than El Chapo.

El Mencho is very different from the Sinaloa Cartel and they have invested a lot of money in creating paramilitary forces which are very well armed and they operate in armoured vehicles. And Vigil goes on, quote, Most of the drug traffickers they invest in shopping malls, dairy farms, real estate, jewellery, but El Mencho is very astute and he invests more equipment for his men and to get more men into the ranks of Jalisco New Generation.

He's heavily protected by these individuals, so the chances of El Mencho being captured in the near future are very minimal. And here's a brief excerpt from the 2017 book Cartel Wives by Mia and Olivia Flores, who are two wives of high-ranking Sinaloa cartel members, quote,

Mencho uses shoulder-held rocket launchers to shoot down military helicopters and he actually set one part of Guadalajara on fire. Everyone, from the police all the way up to federal agents, feared him because he was a total maniac.

Is there any rhyme or reason to him just being a total psychopath? Like, is there any sort of armchair psychology analysis or anything in his background that kind of gives way to that or why he's pushed it so much further than the other cartels? Or it's just like the natural progression? I mean, to give you my own, like, armchair and possibly a couple of points, punditry, like, isn't the cartel stuff like the ultimate expression of just cutthroat business? So...

you know, whoever's winning that is just the person who's willing to go out and do the most extreme stuff. And Mencho is just like the ultimate encapsulation of that, right? He doesn't care about killing people. He has seemingly no morals. He doesn't even care about formulating some kind of an ego trip. Like he just wants to sit in the shadows and just fucking win this entire drug industry. So that's kind of why I see it. So yeah, I think there's like...

Pretty good basis to call him a psychopath. And a big reason for the rapid growth of the CJNG has been its reliance on weed, meth and more recently, fentanyl.

Now meth's reasonably easy to produce and you don't need to be taking producers from Peru, Colombia or wherever out for dinner to schmooze them. You're answerable to nobody. And one thing the Mexican state has been able to do reasonably well is seize and destroy poppy and weed seeds, uh, seeds fields. And besides, weed's mostly legal now in the states anyway, but that has caused synthetic production to skyrocket.

Meth seizures have more than doubled, from £120,000 in 2016-18 to almost £275,000 from 2018 until now. Anne Milgram, she's the current head of the DEA, has said that quote, the cartels are mass producing these pills in Mexico mostly, and they're making them look like they're real oxycodone, like they're real hydrocodone,

Percocet, Adderall and then they're bringing them flooding into the US and falsely advertising them, marketing them as if they were real pharmaceuticals. That's really interesting. The CG&G has also been busy diversifying into extortion, money laundering, kidnapping, petroleum theft on the Pacific coast and even human trafficking. You name it, these guys are deep into it.

In 2017, the CJNG even spawns its own splinter group, Nueva Plaza Cartel. In 2017, a finance guy for the cartel named Marcos Hernandez, or El Colombiano, I don't know why, tells El Mencho a bunch of robberies that one of his closest confidants, Carlos Enrique Sanchez, has committed without his boss's say-so. Sanchez, nicknamed El Cholo, I know Cholo is just a word for a guy who's tied up in crime, right?

It's like an LA thing for, you know, homeboy, fellow gang member, things like that. I think I know it from GTA 4 or something. But apparently it's also a derogatory word for someone, somebody of mixed indigenous heritage. Anyway.

When El Cholo gets wind of this, he gets Colombiano whacked in the coastal city of Puerto Vallarta, which enrages El Mencho, who dispatches a team of hitmen to knock off El Cholo at an operation he's running himself in Guadalajara. Does this all make sense? I feel like this stuff is dizzying sometimes.

It is. Yeah, it is. But in August 2017, before the hits carried out, the guy in charge of the hit squad is murdered himself, sparking Nueva Plaza's breaking off and a war between the two rivals. Now, the Nueva Plaza, I keep doing Spanish accents, I never did Mexican Spanish, sorry guys, never becomes a producer of drugs, and it never gets into the metropolitan center of Guadalajara, Mexico's third largest city.

But it's clearly a huge problem for El Mencho and El Cholo mostly follows his own boss's lead. He lays low and he goes by a bunch of different pseudonyms. The Sinaloa cartel even starts backing his plan to rob the CJNG of its territory. So you get these huge cartels paying little street gangs and smaller cartels to knock out rivals which is crazy.

In 2018, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, AMLO as we mentioned earlier, he wins Mexico's presidential election and he pledges something pretty radical. He is going to end the drug war.

Like, you know, plot twist. He doesn't. The leader, like he wins with slogans like hugs, not gunshots. And he says in his July 2018 victory speech, quote, the failed crime and violence strategy will change. We will address the root causes of crime and violence. Since then, AMLO has turned away from Mexico's previously stated mission to bring kingpins to justice.

In December 2019 he announced his official end to the drug war saying "There is officially no more war. We want peace and we're going to achieve peace. No capos have been arrested because that is not our main purpose. The main purpose of the government is to guarantee public safety. What we want is security to reduce the daily number of homicides."

Yeah, it doesn't appear to be working. No, it really doesn't. And I mean, like, on principle, fine. I mean, like, who wants the army rolling around killing people? Well, maybe some Mexicans, actually, given what's going on. At the same time, AMLO's trying to have his Gandhi moment. The country's statisticians are recording their highest ever murder rate with warring cartels and spiraling drug production.

A security expert that I mentioned earlier, Alejandro Hope, great name, tells AP, quote, his anti-crime strategy barely changes anything. It's not different from that of previous governments and even accentuates the use of the armed forces for public security. That's pretty damning. So in December 2018, early on a Saturday morning, just ahead of AMLO swearing in, this is how bad it is, someone actually tosses a grenade through the window of the US consulate in Guadalajara.

It's unclear whether the Nueva Plaza or CJNG is to blame, but like we say all the time, it's probably best not to be chucking grenades at the Americans if you want to continue running your illicit drug business in peace. Yeah, it's just good practical advice. It's really one of the evergreens that we do on this. And the worst episode of this bubbling cartel war comes in March 2019.

When three film students are kidnapped in Guadalajara, they're taken to a nearby house and tortured to death before one of the murder squad, a rapper called QBA, dissolves the students' bodies in acid. Apparently, the Nueva Plaza has mistaken these students for Mencho's men. And this brings back memories of 2014 and Ayotzinapa, and there's an outcry all over Mexico.

For those who don't know, that's when all the students on that school bus were disappeared. I mean, murdered. Yeah. Yeah. Just one of the more than 100 time worse. I think it was like 40 something, perhaps when they accidentally hired a truck that was allegedly being used to ship drugs. And the local cops worked with the cartels to have them killed and burnt. And yeah, just like one of the all time worst moments in the drug war.

In June 2020, Mexico City Police Chief Omar Garcia Harfuch is driving to work through the upmarket tree-lined Lomas de Chapultepec neighborhood. When three gunmen disguised as road workers, they open fire. They pepper his black SUV with bullets and kill two bodyguards and a passerby. Harfuch blames the CJNG, tweeting later that, quote,

Our nation must continue to stand up to this cowardly organized crime. This is fresh off the back of the Battle of Culiacan, when an entire city ground to a standstill over the arrest of El Chapo's son. So this latest episode is a massive embarrassment for the Mexican state and AMLO of course, but he remains unbowed.

He says the killing is, quote, undoubtedly related to the work that is being done to guarantee peace and tranquility. Yeah. How did CJNG become this, for lack of a better term, like kind of hottest new thing on the cartel scene? I hate phrasing like that, but I just remember even hearing about them back when I was in Mexico reporting in like 2017 as like this terrifying new group that was taking over. And I think before that it was like Las Zetas. I mean, is it just like...

the group that kind of comes in with the most barbarous just brutal activities becomes this like talked about group i i just it's interesting to think about because i don't think i mean were they ever the most powerful or most profitable did i mean it's it's kind of a tiny bit of column a and most of column b and column b being the kind of barbarity yeah like they they did

kind of sort of chop and change in their relations with various other cartels and they did really well at climbing sort of to the top money and kind of influence wise but it really was this idea that these guys are killing for fun

There's like a really weird refrain, I think, in the drug war where there's some degree of killing that's sort of accepted as part of a cartel's rise to the top. And I think the Sinaloa cartel has more or less managed to keep that rep subdued.

somehow as sort of only killing for business as if that's some kind of a positive thing but the CJNG have really turned killing into a bit of a sort of like gross art form I mean we heard about with these 35 bodies dumped on the highway all kinds of other disgusting ways of killing people when

And we're going to get back into this shortly. A kind of quiet, methodical approach to taking over various regions would actually probably be better. And that kind of instilling terror into people is one of the reasons that a lot of experts and officials compare them to ISIS. And I think it kind of I think it has a has a bit of track.

So perhaps at this point, and this is just after this June 2020 attack on the police chief, perhaps now the heat is getting a little too much for Mencho, and he's looking for a suitably grim way to backtrack from the attack on Harfitch. In March, El Cholo is captured by CJNG forces, handcuffed and thrown in front of a camera, flanked by men in body gear holding US military firearms. Quote,

I met in Mexico City with Omar Garcia Harfuch so that he could give me support since we were both against the CJNG. That's what Cholo tells the camera. He told me he would support me but he needed something relevant to send his people to the city so I made the graves. All the mass graves in Tonalá

Tlacepaque, Tlachemoco, Zapapan. Sorry guys, I'm really butchering these names. I made them and called the authorities to make it important. I mean, the fact that I haven't even mentioned these towns shows you how awful this is. Cholo also says he, quote, gave the order to throw the grenade into the U.S. consulate in Guadalajara.

And he finishes by saying, quote, you guys that still support me, that's the Nuevo Plaza, stop doing it and dedicate to your family. Look how I ended. So he's doing all this, obviously, after being beaten and tortured, probably. Is the thinking here that he's telling the truth or Mencho did some of this stuff and is making him say it?

I think it's Mencho seeing an opportunity to get him to take... I mean, like, there's plausible deniability for the cops, right? Because they really don't want to sort of have an all-night battle with Mencho. So if he throws someone in front of a camera and there's at least an inkling that he might have done these things, then, you know, maybe that kind of holds off an all-out war for a few more days, at least. And on March 18th, 2020, that's the day that the video goes viral...

A body is left on a park bench near the city hall of Tlaquepaque, a southeastern suburb of Guadalajara. It's wrapped tight in black plastic and knives are stuck into its chest and leg. Attached, a sign.

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Mother's Day gifts at Bath & Body Works. It's kind of like my favorite scent. Oh, this was good. This is literally the perfect gift for me. So don't just give mom a gift. Thank you so much. I love it. Thank you. Best Mother's Day ever. Give her a moment only at Bath & Body Works. The traitor El Cholo, it reads. So now there is no Nueva Plaza.

Mencho's biggest enemy is actually at this point the Carteles Unidos, the United Cartels or CU, which began as vigilantes, but nowadays they're basically just another cartel. They're made up of former members of smaller cartels like the Cartel de Tepec and Los Viagras.

Lately they've been fighting over control of Michoacan. That's this vast, fertile state that some believe is Mencho's kind of homecoming. It's a way to stay put rather than constantly be on the move and a citadel from which to control his empire. Here's an anecdote told by Evander Felpat Brown from a recent trip to Michoacan. Quote, After recent elections, several pickup trucks loaded with men armed with assault weapons pulled up next to the house of the recently elected new mayor.

They entered his house and told him that all law enforcement actions by municipal police forces would have to be cleared with the cartel and directed only against its rivals, and 20% of all public spending in the municipality would have to be handed over to the cartel. Otherwise, he and his family would be killed.

Although the mayor informed state authorities in the capital of Morelia, they failed to provide him any meaningful support. No state officers were stationed in the municipality. It would take them at least two days to get there during a violent action to investigate a particular egregious murder, if fuel happened to be available.

And she goes on, quote, several days later, I was told the mayor received a message from a rival group not to obey the first cartel, not to target their criminal group and to hand a portion of public spending to them instead. His sense apparently was that he could absolutely not trust the municipal police to defend him as he considered it to be infiltrated by at least one of the criminal groups. That's just not ideal. It's like,

Just crazy. I mean, like I said before, it's dizzying, right? And apparently once where this whole situation was the politicians picking and choosing which cartels would best suit their needs to cling on to power, which obviously is terrible in its own right. Now it's the cartels who pick the politicians. And that's a pretty terrifying thing for the civilians caught in the crossfire, right?

Thousands have been displaced and entire farms have been abandoned leaving a lot of Michoacan looking like the world's most beautiful ghost town basically. And there's been a particularly nasty battle going on in the Michoacan municipality of Aguililla where Mencho is actually from. The CJNG has employed drones to send audio threats to inhabitants and sometimes even drops bombs on them. In 2019 it tells folks to boot out the mayor in the town of Bonifacio Moreno

He's a former outer defenser guy called Juan Jose Farias. The message goes like this, quote, We already hear you, dogs. The pure four letters, that means the C, J, and G.

Sons of your whore mother, we're going to kill you all. Imagine getting that from a drone. Jesus Christ. In September 2020, Carteles Unidos men drive a military tank through the town of Bonifacio Merengue, recording themselves warning the CJNG of trying to take the place. A couple months later, the CJNG storms a CU trap house. A full-scale battle breaks out and dozens of men are aboard 40 trucks and it goes crazy.

Last March, that's March 2021, Farias, the mayor, he's arrested after he broke his multi-million dollar deal to deliver half a ton of meth hidden in concrete tiles to Florida on behalf of the CU. That prompts another flush of violence by the CJNG and the government under AMLO's doing just about nothing to change it. Cesar Nageli up east, quote,

What we need is for one cartel to take control, stop the fighting and impose some semblance of calm. Everything indicates that group is the Jalisco cartel. The only road into Aguililla is blocked and controlled by a cartel that is only 500 yards away from you and you, that's the army, are not doing anything to protect our right to travel freely. You don't know how hard it is to be paying a war tax that is being used to kill us.

I mean, this is really awful stuff. The murder rate is sky high. The Mexican state is becoming more and more compromised by corrupt officials, police officers. It's getting a lot like Colombia during the Medellin years. And I don't have the answers, but one thing's for sure. What we're doing now with this drug war is just flat out not working.

In 2020, authorities in Mexico discovered 550 mass graves across the country, where 80,000 people have gone missing. Authorities have recovered almost 1,100 bodies and 430 of them are in Jalisco. A security analyst says that, quote, "...unfortunately, the decapitated bodies and corpses hanging from bridges are part of the daily landscape of violence that is experienced in many parts of the countries."

So in case this gets like pitch black dark, there's one slight like tiny slither of good news buried in all of it. And that's that last November, Mexico's military capture El Mencho's wife, Rosalinda Gonzalez Valencia, a.k.a. La Jefa, the boss.

According to Mike Vigil, that former DEA chief, she's got, quote, all of the keys, all of the confidence of El Mencho, all of the information, as was responsible for laundering the cartel's money. Of course, being a Valencia, she's pretty much cartel royalty herself, the niece of Cornelio, the guy who founded the Millennials.

Her marriage to El Mencho was therefore a bit like a medieval royal wedding in a way, sealing the alliance of powerful clans. Although, given the bloodshed that's followed, I really hope they marry for love. Was that instrumental in his rise?

That sort of alliance marriage? I don't know if the alliance marriage itself was instrumental, but you would think so, right? Given that he basically instrumentalized his own position in the millennials who are breaking up to sort of splinter and form the CJMG.

And last month, that's like December 2021, that saw even more violence in Michoacan. This time, we see JNG gunmen blowing up buildings with C4 explosives. According to Mexico News Daily, quote, security footage shows gunmen shooting at homes and kicking down doors. Residents said gang members entered homes and beat the inhabitants, but no deaths or serious injuries have been reported. Okay.

So, quote again, if the Mexican army made a concerted effort, I'm sure they could find El Mencho and they could rub him out, said Insight Crimes' Chris Dalby. But, he adds, it would make no difference. It would perhaps weaken the Jalisco cartel and fragment them, but it would not make Mexico any safer because someone else would just take over.

This whole thing is whack-a-mole, right? Except every time you whack a mole, this fucking bigger, even shittier mole comes out of the next hole. And right now, El Mencho is the worst mole we've ever had to deal with. Do we get the world we deserve? Is there a lighter note to end this on? I don't know, but that is El Mencho, guys. Yeah, wow, what a... getting philosophical. Philosophy at the end of it. Yeah, I don't know, but distressing stuff.

Yeah, it's terrible. It's terrible. But I hope that kind of clears up some stuff because like there really is a bit of a black hole of information about this guy. So it was interesting seeing how much shit there is that's written that's completely untrue. Yeah, people always ask for the cartel stuff. But also if you want more, patreon.com slash underworld podcast. Keegan Hamilton, I think gives us some insight that he's got from the ground over there. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. People can see his doco on YouTube and whatever. And we had a really good chat about some of his experiences out there because it's like it's so fractious. Like these cartels who need us, they're just I mean, it's the ultimate expression of like giving vigilantes power and then watching them just try and take over themselves. So that's a really interesting interview that I did. And yeah, we've got those coming out every week. So sign up to the Patreon.

Yeah, I want to thank our hired tier members for supporting us. John Simon, Patrick Rowland, Tanner McCleave, Sam Ramsey, Juan Ponce, P. Thomas, Mike Ulrich, William Wintercross, Trey Nance, Matthew Cutler, Ross Clark, Jeremy Rich, and Doug Printerville. Thank you guys a ton. You make this worthwhile. I want to send a special shout out to my dog who's been sitting by my side and made no sounds.

throughout this entire record so yeah thanks to the class act all around and a good boy but um anyway thanks again and until uh until next week so

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