Mexico’s take down of a major cartel leader
the reality, perception, and wider implications
On Tuesday February 24, 2026, a friend in the U.S. wrote to me:
I saw all the violence with the cartels in Mexico, and wondered how people in your area are responding to it. It sounds so very extreme.
Around noon, the previous Sunday, the 22nd, I was downtown in the city of Guanajuato in the state of the same name where I live in Central Mexico. This was shortly after “El Mencho”1 one of the world’s most wanted organized crime leaders was taken down by members of various branches of law enforcement in the neighboring state of Jalisco. Stores, restaurants, banks, and cafes (including the one I was headed to where I write most days) were closing. I learned from an acquaintance on the street that the government had issued a recommended, but not mandatory, lock down due to expected violence in response to the cartel leader’s capture and subsequent death from injuries.
The next day, Monday, things were halfway back to normal. By Tuesday, the 24th, things were back to normal. (I never saw any violence – not to say it didn’t happen. I heard a convenience store on the edge of town was torched. No one hurt. But I came much closer to violence working nightly in downtown Seattle over many years. My last year in Seattle, in 2020, I lived through a minor revolution when part of the Capitol Hill neighborhood declared its independence from the U.S. and commandeered a police station a few blocks from where I lived.)
When I got home Sunday, I checked news reports and responded to one sensationalist video claiming that planes were on fire and a war had broken out in Mexico. “They INVADED the Airport - Mexico EXPLODES as Cartel Leader KILLED, EVERYTHING on Fire” I commented with an slightly earlier version of this:
I monitor the news closely in both languages. Most of this about a “destroyed airport” or “war” in Mexico is hype. Here are the bare facts: the law caught up with a major CJNG cartel leader with a 15 million dollar bounty on his head (wanted in Mexico, the U.S, and everywhere else: these cartels are global operations). He died after being wounded by Mexican authorities today in a planned operation to apprehend him. (As much was predictable: top cartel leaders play for keeps; they don’t typically surrender.) This has happened before and, predictably when it does, there is a backlash: some roads are blocked by burning vehicles, some convenience stores are set ablaze... as you saw on social media – mixed in with a lot of AI-generated slop. As of this writing, about 30 cartel members, 25 National Guard, and one civilian have been killed.2 There are no reports of tourists injured or killed. This is Mexico, don’t mistake the “authorities” here for the untrained ones roaming the streets in Minnesota, etc. The Mexican government so far has done an admirable job of containing the situation, despite the fact the cartels are well-heeled, well-connected, and well-armed thanks to drug addicts in the U.S. funding them to the tune of billions and U.S. weapons dealers happily supplying them with military grade weapons...
(Apparently, the comment was taken down a day later because it stirred too much controversy.)
There were videos circulating on social media of a plane at the Guadalajara airport and a cathedral in Puerto Vallarta on fire. These were AI-generated. No planes have been on fire. No cathedrals, either. Trucks, cars, and busses, some convenience stores, yes... more on this later.
The bottom line is that the event has been greatly exaggerated at least as far as its effect on people not involved in the drug trade or its regulation.
The CJNG cartel, some say the most powerful organized crime entity in the world, has connections, not just in many parts of Mexico, but all over the world including China, Russia, South America, Europe, and, of course, the U.S – where most of their money and weapons come from. So the leader’s successful removal is a big deal.3 Every time something like this happens (as it has many times before) there is a violent backlash in the wake of the power vacancy a cartel leader’s removal creates. When there is such a lucrative market for drugs, there will be a fight among those vying to take his place.4
Torching is symbolic
That said, there are two interesting, seldom reported, facts about Mexican cartel violence:
It is a little surprising how fast things settle down and things go back to normal after one of these take downs.
It is remarkable how little cartel violence involves civilians with no connections to the drug trade.
These two things are related. The cartels do want to scare people, cause panic, disrupt daily life, and embarrass the government. It impresses people with how powerful they are, and they are indeed powerful, thanks to their vast resources. But, unlike typical terrorists in Europe, the U.S., or most parts of the world, they do not deliberately target civilians. They engage in ostentatious property damage: blocking major streets with burning vehicles, setting fire to convenience stores, especially those belonging to a certain national chain.5 All this visible mayhem is supposed to suggest that the world is crashing down. The real fires in the videos, augmented with AI-generated ones, have this effect and that’s the point from the cartels’ perspective.6
What is interesting is that, unlike typical terrorists, young cartel recruits, mostly from poor backgrounds, who actually set the fires, are often from the same communities they attempt to terrorize. The cartels have survived for decades because they are businesses. They can’t make money if they anger too much the communities that harbor them. For then, these communities would turn on them and rat them out to law enforcement.7 The cartels persist because they:
have pockets sufficiently deep to bribe law enforcement and politicians,
can extort local small businesses with threats of violence – though seldom carrying through with those threats, since fear is effective enough most of the time and actual harm to innocents would involve serious blow-back,8
can enhance their fearsome factor by buying state-of-the-art military grade weapons sold to them by dealers in the U.S., and
are, again, especially careful not to estrange too much the people immediately around them. Sometimes they even get involved in community projects and charities to endear themselves locally.9 But their agenda is to make money and survive indefinitely. And, as with any competent corporate power, deft community public relations is important for long term survival.
The art of successful extortion is to know how much to extort from others before they lose patience and do something that affects your bottom line.10
So, believe it or not, cartels have a code of ethics or at least “best practices.”11 They do not target totally innocent people. That would consolidate their enemies, and not make good business sense. They go after rivals and law enforcement.12 Yes, sometimes innocent people get hurt in the cross fire, but that is not part of the plan.
Notice that in the car, truck, and bus burnings or convenience store fires, there are few reports of killed or even injured civilians. Cartel etiquette demands asking people to get out of cars and busses, then the vehicles are burned in the middle of the street. It makes for surgical messaging: we are powerful but we aren’t stupid. Property damage creates the effect they want without the alienation indiscriminate civilian bloodshed would generate. Imagine 9/11 terrorists warning people in advance to get out of the twin towers before they get destroyed. That would be “civilized terrorism.” When the plan is to survive in the community after the show of protest that burning property expresses, civilized terrorism more or less works.
Or has in the past… Perhaps things are changing slowly.
Sheinbaum
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador,13 Mexico’s former president and close friend of its current one, Claudia Sheinbaum, warned the country before she got elected that Claudia would be tough, more assertive and fearless than he was known to be. At one point, AMLO tried to compromise with cartels to avoid the violence that confronting them directly he knew would bring. His slogan was “abrazos y no balazos” which rhymes in Spanish and means something like “hugs, not bullets.”14 Sheinbaum seems to be living up to AMLO’s warning. Yes, there will be innocents killed when the cartels go after each other or the government, but Sheinbaum is riding higher than ever in the public’s estimation in Mexico. The successful latest take down has only strengthened her popularity.15 It’s seldom reported in the English-speaking press that she has been successfully going after billionaire former corrupt political leaders who were in cahoots with the cartels, some of whom have fled to the U.S. and Spain.16 With the kind of money they have, they can engineer, or aid and abet, crises from abroad. It’s not just Mexican politicians that cartels have bought and sold in the past and presently, U.S. officials in high places have found their interests aligned often enough with the cartels. It’s not just the drug trade that is lucrative, the weapons one is, too. And most of those benefiting from weapons sales are in the U.S.
It is probably because the Morena Party, which AMLO and Sheinbaum have led, is such a contrast to the decades, if not centuries, of corruption that preceded her and AMLO’s presidential terms – especially their heroic, and so far successful, attempts to improve social and economic conditions in Mexico17 – that Mexicans who were not even supporters of their party (cynicism runs centuries deep) are now giving the party the benefit of the doubt. Sheinbaum, especially, has been so successful it’s a little scary. I worry someone may try to assassinate her. That’s happened several times in Mexican (and U.S.) history. She has made powerful enemies between the cartels and wealthy corrupt former leaders, including prominent people in the US government. So far, she has shown herself to be a pragmatic negotiator, and not easily intimidated, still…
Sheinbaum and Trump have a strange rapport. She is much admired around the world for her cool head in public, but savvy negotiations skills in private.18 Her strategy seems to be to talk to Trump frequently on the phone and stress how much they have in common, both are outsiders to traditional political parties, both are populists (without rubbing it in too hard that she is a phenomenally successful one and he is not). They seem to have an agreement to be cordial on the phone19 but not hold back publicly. She plays her cards astutely. When asked at her routine morning press conferences20 what she makes of Trump’s regular public threats to invade Mexico’s sovereignty, she smiles and downplays Trump’s seriousness, quietly hinting she is intimate with his stratagems and what he is really capable of doing, while affirming in no uncertain terms that Mexico would not tolerate U.S. incursion on Mexican soil.21 Cooperation in cartel interdiction, yes, but not incursion. Even as she and everyone knows that, if push came to shove, the U.S. would win any kind of military confrontation with Mexico if the U.S. had the stomach for an extended guerrilla war inside or near its own borders.22 She hints, almost graciously, that the U.S. would pay dearly if it invaded. Mexico is not Vietnam, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq... or Iran, halfway around the world. It shares the longest land border between any two countries on earth with the U.S., not to mention having the experience of having fought and lost to the U.S. at least twice in the past, and not forgotten that the southwestern U.S. – from Texas to California and everything between – was once Mexico. There are also 30 million U.S. citizens of Mexican descent...23 As the U.S. is backsliding in economic development and global prestige, Mexico is surging forward.
Mexico is the U.S.’s biggest trading partner, surpassing Canada a few years ago. On the subject of Canada, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney just returned from Mexico with a delegation of 370 Canadian corporate leaders to strengthen economic ties with Mexico in the wake of Trump’s political and tariff threats to Canada. It would not be auspicious for the U.S. to be sandwiched between the ill-will of its top two trading partners. The two nations are planning shipping bypasses around the U.S. Both Mexico and Canada are partners in reaching out to Asia, Europe, and the rest of the world in the wake of Trump’s tariff threats. The Mexican peso is presently trouncing the U.S. dollar.24 The damage to U.S. regard abroad won’t be easily reversed, since a significant part of it predates Trump. He has just confirmed to the world that the U.S. is no bulwark of stability or beacon of democracy as, for a long time, it was reputed to be.
Is Mexico safe?
A question heard a lot, especially these days. I assume the people asking are not Mexican, so here are short answers:
If you are
a tourist, yes;
involved in the illegal drug trade, no;
a school-age child, emphatically, yes.
Explanation:
Beginning with the last category: in the nine year period between 2009 and 2018, according to CNN, there were 8 school shootings in Mexico and 288 school shootings in the U.S. Certainly, children are not as safe as could be in a Mexican school, but they are 36 times safer than in a U.S. school.25 If you want the state of the art in school safety consider these countries: China, Russia, Turkey, Germany, Kenya, Azerbaijan, Greece, Hungary, or Estonia – each with only one school shooting in the same period.
And the situation for U.S. school children is getting worse. A few years ago I looked up the stats and at that time school-age children were only 8 times safer in Mexico than in the U.S.26
As for tourists and those in the drug trade, nothing much has changed. Enough said by me above about that. But here’s an AI-generated answer as it relates to tourists:
Statistically, American tourists are generally safer in Mexico than Americans are at home, particularly when visiting major tourist destinations.
Murder rates for tourists: The U.S. State Department reported that 2.1 Americans per 100,000 visitors were murdered in Mexico in recent years—less than half the U.S. national murder rate of 4.8 per 100,000 (FBI, 2010).
Comparison to U.S. cities: Popular Mexican tourist areas like Cancun (1.83 murders per 100,000) and Puerto Vallarta (5.9) have significantly lower murder rates than many U.S. cities. For example, Orlando (7.5) and Houston (6.8) exceed Mexico’s overall tourist murder rate.
How the rest of the world regards Mexico
The OECD,27 an organization based in Paris that has tracked political and socioeconomic conditions internationally since 1961 reports how high Mexico is riding now in terms of public trust in government, unemployment and global investment. The top three nations tracked when it comes to trust in government are Switzerland, Luxembourg, (two small wealthy countries), and Mexico (not small and not wealthy, yet, but moving in that direction).
1. Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes.
2. The death numbers change daily, but the proportions (which mean more, as I will demonstrate shortly) are pretty stable between cartel members, enforcement authorities, and civilians. The latest counts reported, as of Wednesday 25 February 2026, three days later, are 73 dead total, most cartel, a smaller number of military, and three civilians.
3. Not because it puts much of a permanent dent in the illicit drug trade, but because the operation hobbled the prominence of the cartel, momentarily. There is no solution to the cartel problem that does not involve addressing the U.S.’s drug and gun addiction problems.
4. The cartels are multinational corporations. Think of them as corporate concentrations of power on the scale of Google, Facebook, Microsoft or Apple, only somewhat more immoral/illegal… But when billions of dollars are at stake, moral/legal or not, it doesn’t much matter. Any authority attempting to bring such a concentration of power to heel will either compromise or pay steeply.
5. OXXO, a corporate chain of convenience stores found in just about every neighborhood in Mexico, sort of like 7/11, only more ubiquitous. They are expanding globally and symbolize corporate Mexico to the average Mexican, so setting fire to these stores is supposed to sow panic. They are also easy targets.
6. And, as we will explain shortly, of the billionaire interests inside and outside Mexico.
7. Some communities and activists do turn on them but these often pay a price.
8. I do not downplay the courage and idealism of the many journalists, activists, and a few politicians who have paid dearly for standing up to the cartels. But, again, from the view of the cartels, threats don’t work unless sometimes you carry through with them. The cartels have, heretofore, competently calibrated their violence.
9. Not too unlike some Black Panther tactics. The line between a protection scheme and genuine charity is not always clear. Community-based discontents, legal/moral or not, must operate differently.
10. Think Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, etc.
11. Like corporate concentrations of power: Google used to sport “don’t be evil” as their unofficial “code” of ethics, until they thought better of it. Now, it’s not even “unofficial.”
12. Sometimes placing bounties for dead government enforcement authorities in Mexico and allegedly in the U.S.: the difference being that many Mexican law enforcement officials and military personnel have actually been killed by the cartel. There are few documented claims that cartels have actually killed U.S. DEA, CPB, or ICE personnel (or none these elements would admit to).
13. Who, together with Sheinbaum, spearheaded the Fourth Transformation.
14. We might speculate AMLO’s strategy may have been calculated to unravel a century of rooted corruption in phases: first, break the mutual political and economic ties the cartels have with establishment politicians and wealthy entrepreneurs both foreign and domestic. This may have helped prepare the way for the feistier Sheinbaum to strike the cartels directly.
15. The U.S. shared high-tech satellite intelligence with Mexican forces to help pinpoint the location of the cartel leader, but no U.S. citizen’s blood was shed in this operation. All the dead are Mexican.
16. And some of these are based in the U.S., witness the spat with Elon musk.
17. “‘Historic’: how Mexico’s welfare policies helped 13.4 million people out of poverty,” The Guardian, 18 Aug 2025. The official U.S. poverty rate is either stagnate or increasing, depending on which compromised figures you believe, but the rate of child poverty in the U.S. is uncontroversially on the rise.
18. “Is This the Most Powerful Woman in the World?” Bloomberg, 5 Mar 2025. On a lighter note, The New York Times classed her among the 67 most stylish persons in the world – and the only politician in the group.
19. In contrast to, say, Trump’s stony relations with Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney.
20. Institutionalized by AMLO as mañaneras – morning talks with the Press.
21. Sovereignty is a cornerstone of Morena politics. It’s in large part why Sheinbaum received the electoral mandate she did.
22. The cartels don’t care much for borders. They already have established operations inside the U.S. God forbid the Mexican government is pressed into an alliance with the cartels. (Needless to say, the nuclear option isn’t practical when the target is so geographically intimate.)
23. A major portion of this population did not immigrate to the U.S. They stayed put and watched the soil under their feet change its name over the centuries.
24. Since I get most of my retirement income in dollars, living in Mexico, I can’t say I am totally happy with this.
25. Mexico does have the second highest rate of school shootings in the world. One can’t help wonder if that follows from its nearness to the U.S.
26. But I think I was then factoring in the difference in population. The U.S.’s is 2.5 times that of Mexico. Taking that into account, maybe the difference isn’t so extreme. Maybe only 14 times or so safer in Mexico, not 36.
27. “Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is a forum and knowledge hub for data, analysis and best practices in public policy. We work with over 100 countries across the world to build stronger, fairer and cleaner societies – helping to shape better policies for better lives.” from their site.
Resources
“BP: Mexico EXPLODES After Top Cartel Boss Killed With US Intel Assistance,” interview with José Luis Granados Ceja for a sober discussion of what happened and what is likely to happen now.
“Mexico Takes Down El Mencho: Fake News War Erupts Online,” Soberanía: The Mexican Politics Podcast.
“No, US special forces didn’t lead the Mexican operation against ‘El Mencho’” a view from Europe, France 24.
“2024 election postmortem: why Trump won,” my 2025 discussion of Trump II and the contrast with Mexico.
“You don’t get to lie about my home,” Charlotte Smith, Mexico News Daily, 27 February 2026
– Victor Muñoz
Guanajuato / Seattle
6 March 2026