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A bus burned by cartel operatives after the killing of the kingpin known as \u201cEl Mencho.\u201d<\/p>\n
(Armando Solis \/ Associated Press)<\/p>\n
The fires are now out, but key questions remain. <\/p>\n
What will happen to the Jalisco New Generation cartel and its fragile coalition of ruthless leaders?<\/p>\n
Will they agree to share power? Or elevate a single man as head honcho? <\/p>\n
Many Mexicans fear a troubling third scenario: a bloody power struggle that fragments the cartel, opening new fronts of conflict in an already volatile<\/a> criminal landscape. <\/p>\n A photograph of Nemesio Rub\u00e9n Oseguera Cervantes, center, known as \u201cEl Mencho,\u201d provided by federal prosecutors.<\/p>\n (U.S. District Court)<\/p>\n \u201cWhat comes next will not resemble a clean succession,\u201d Ghaleb Krame Hilal, a former security advisor in the state of Tamaulipas, wrote<\/a> in the online magazine Small Wars Journal. \u201cIt will be a struggle over who holds the center of gravity inside the organization, and that result is not preordained.\u201d<\/p>\n The scenario is complicated because Oseguera\u2019s only son, Rub\u00e9n Oseguera Gonz\u00e1lez, known as \u201cEl Menchito,\u201d is serving a life sentence<\/a> on drug charges in the United States. <\/p>\n Juan Carlos Valencia Gonz\u00e1lez, seen in a wanted photo released by the U.S. Department of State in 2021. He is one of the possible successors to \u201cEl Mencho\u201d as the leader of the Jalisco New Generation cartel. <\/p>\n (U.S. Department of State)<\/p>\n That leaves Oseguera\u2019s cadre of regional commanders as the most likely inheritors of his drug empire.<\/p>\n Perhaps the most powerful among them is Oseguera\u2019s stepson, Juan Carlos Valencia Gonz\u00e1lez<\/a>, known as 03. Other monikers includ El Pelon, El JP and Tricky Tres.<\/p>\n Valencia, 41, is the commander of the paramilitary Grupo Elite and belongs to a clan that runs the cartel\u2019s money-laundering operation.<\/p>\n His mother, Rosalinda Gonz\u00e1lez Valencia, was arrested in Guadalajara in November 2021 and accused by Mexican authorities of being a \u201cfinancial operator\u201d for the Jalisco cartel. His biological father was the co-founder of the now-defunct Milenio cartel, where Oseguera got his start.<\/p>\n Valencia was born in the Orange County city of Santa Ana, one of many sons and daughters of high-ranking cartel figures born in the United Sates in recent decades. After Valencia\u2019s father went to prison, Oseguera married his mother. <\/p>\n The U.S. State Department is offering up to a $5-million reward for information leading to Valencia\u2019s arrest.<\/p>\n A group of Jalisco New Generation cartel fighters.<\/p>\n (Juan Jos\u00e9 Estrada Seraf\u00edn \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n Here are the other contenders:<\/p>\n Ricardo Ruiz, alias RR, is known for producing slick cartel propaganda, including a viral social media video that showed dozens of cartel fighters dressed in fatigues alongside a column of armored vehicles and homemade tanks. \u201cWe are Mencho\u2019s men!\u201d they shout while firing automatic weapons into the sky. <\/p>\n Authorities blamed Ruiz for the death of Valeria M\u00e1rquez, a 23-year-old model and beauty influencer shot to death last year while broadcasting live on TikTok.<\/p>\n Audias Flores Silva, a leader widely known as \u201cEl Jardinero,\u201d controls methamphetamine factories in Jalisco and Zacatecas states, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. He has a fleet of airplanes and tractor trailers used to traffic drugs from Central America into the United States, U.S. officials say.<\/p>\n Flores is believed to have engineered the Jalisco cartel\u2019s recent alliance with a faction of the warring Sinaloa cartel, which is led by two sons of imprisoned drug lord Joaqu\u00edn \u201cEl Chapo\u201d Guzm\u00e1n. <\/p>\n And then there is 29-year-old Abraham Jes\u00fas Ambriz Cano, alias \u201cEl Yogurth.\u201d Ambriz has built a small army of foreign mercenaries<\/a>, mostly former soldiers from Colombia who have experience in bomb-making and counterinsurgency tactics. Some of those combatants say they were lured to Mexico under false pretenses and forced to fight. <\/p>\n Together the men help lead one of the most power and feared cartels in history \u2014 a criminal enterprise that traffics tons of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and fentanyl to the United States but which also profits from extortion<\/a>, fuel theft, illegal mining and logging and timeshare fraud inside Mexico.<\/p>\n The avocado fields in the Mexican state of Michoac\u00e1n, where the Jalisco New Generation cartel and other criminal groups tax producers and have their own crops. <\/p>\n (Gary Coronado\/Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n Security analysts say the group\u2019s horizontal, franchise-like structure allowed it to engineer a rapid response to Oseguera\u2019s killing \u2014 and will allow it to do business as usual in the coming months. <\/p>\n Many believe the remaining leaders of the cartel will try to work together \u2014 for now. <\/p>\n \u201cAt the moment they perceive a huge common enemy: the government of Mexico,\u201d said David Saucedo, who advises local and state governments on security policy. <\/p>\n But, Saucedo cautioned, \u201cit\u2019s possible that the cartel will fracture at some point as conflicts arise over control of profits, trafficking routes and contact with political officials.\u201d Personal conflicts and the encroachment of rival cartels could also provoke problems, he added. <\/p>\n The inner workings of cartels are intentionally opaque to the outside world. <\/p>\n To understand shifts inside the gangs, analysts and officials track social media communiques, changes to drug flows and outbreaks of violence. Many keep close watch on narco corridos<\/a>, or drug ballads, which chronicle cartel politics. <\/p>\n Saucedo noted that multiple songs recently have described Flores as Oseguera\u2019s successor. Another song venerates Valencia (\u201cHe was born in Orange County, where the sun burns differently,\u201d it begins.)<\/p>\n It\u2019s unclear if any of the current leaders would possess the gravitas of Oseguera, who wielded unquestioned authority even as his health deteriorated and he was forced to live on the run. That is in part because of his unflinching willingness to violently punish anyone who threatened or crossed him. <\/p>\n He was blamed for the 2020 assassination attempt of Omar Garc\u00eda Harfuch, then the police chief of Mexico City and now the top public security official<\/a> under President Claudia Sheinbaum. During a previous government effort to capture Oseguera, in 2015, cartel fighters used rocket-propelled grenades to shoot down an army helicopter, killing nine soldiers. <\/p>\n Last year, at a ranch near Guadalajara apparently used to train Jalisco recruits<\/a>, activists discovered the remains of hundreds of missing people.<\/p>\n Born to farmers in Michoac\u00e1n state, Oseguera immigrated illegally the United States in his teens. He was first arrested at age 19 in San Francisco for selling methamphetamine. His stature grew as he rose from small-time hoodlum to myth-shrouded kingpin of a seemingly invincible cartel that operates in most Mexican states and in countries across South America, Asia and Europe. <\/p>\n Recent Mexican history is riddled with the tales of once-powerful syndicates \u2014 gangs in Guadalajara, Tijuana and Ciudad Ju\u00e1rez, among them \u2014 that ruptured, were gobbled up by other mobs or petered out as the big guys were captured or killed. Colombia\u2019s storied Medellin cartel was another mob that withered after Pablo Escobar met his demise<\/a> in 1993.<\/p>\n Linthicum reported in New York, Hamilton in Guadalajara and McDonnell in Mexico City. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"GUADALAJARA\u00a0\u2014\u00a0The notorious drug kingpin was sick, his kidneys failing. To ensure smooth management of his multibillion-dollar cartel while…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":196837,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,18219,12033,4005,91698,88845,22184,91697,23151,1555,91696,2457,89310,91699,435,3306],"class_list":["post-196836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-cartel","tag-commander","tag-conflict","tag-david-saucedo","tag-el-mencho","tag-guadalajara","tag-jalisco-cartel","tag-leader","tag-man","tag-methamphetamine-factory","tag-mexico","tag-oseguera","tag-security-analyst","tag-united-states","tag-valencia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196836"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196836\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/196837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/1771870088_301_.jpeg\")
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