One of the men who could replace ‘El Mencho’ is from Southern California

GUADALAJARA — The notorious drug kingpin was sick, his kidneys failing.

To ensure smooth management of his multibillion-dollar cartel while he underwent dialysis, Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho,” delegated day-to-day control to several top lieutenants.

Each managed a separate region, had his own group of hit men and developed his own fearsome reputation.

Mexican soldiers killed Oseguera on Sunday in a raid on his remote mountain hideout. Immediately, his appointed commanders ordered a nationwide campaign of terror: cartel fighters carried out arson attacks and blocked roads across more than a dozen states and ambushed security officers, killing 25 members of the National Guard.

A bus burned by cartel operatives after the killing of the kingpin known as “El Mencho.”

(Armando Solis / Associated Press)

The fires are now out, but key questions remain.

What will happen to the Jalisco New Generation cartel and its fragile coalition of ruthless leaders?

Will they agree to share power? Or elevate a single man as head honcho?

Many Mexicans fear a troubling third scenario: a bloody power struggle that fragments the cartel, opening new fronts of conflict in an already volatile criminal landscape.

A photograph of Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, center, known as “El Mencho,” provided by federal prosecutors.

(U.S. District Court)

“What comes next will not resemble a clean succession,” Ghaleb Krame Hilal, a former security advisor in the state of Tamaulipas, wrote in the online magazine Small Wars Journal. “It will be a struggle over who holds the center of gravity inside the organization, and that result is not preordained.”

The scenario is complicated because Oseguera’s only son, Rubén Oseguera González, known as “El Menchito,” is serving a life sentence on drug charges in the United States.

Juan Carlos Valencia González, seen in a wanted photo released by the U.S. Department of State in 2021. He is one of the possible successors to “El Mencho” as the leader of the Jalisco New Generation cartel.

(U.S. Department of State)

That leaves Oseguera’s cadre of regional commanders as the most likely inheritors of his drug empire.

Perhaps the most powerful among them is Oseguera’s stepson, Juan Carlos Valencia González, known as 03. Other monikers include El Pelon, El JP and Tricky Tres.

Valencia, 41, is the commander of the paramilitary Grupo Elite and belongs to a clan that runs the cartel’s money-laundering operation.

His mother, Rosalinda González Valencia, was arrested in Guadalajara in November 2021 and accused by Mexican authorities of being a “financial operator” for the Jalisco cartel. His biological father was the co-founder of the now-defunct Milenio cartel, where Oseguera got his start.

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’s father went to prison, Oseguera married his mother.

The U.S. State Department is offering up to a $5-million reward for information leading to Valencia’s arrest.

A group of Jalisco New Generation cartel fighters.

(Juan José Estrada Serafín / For The Times)

Here are the other contenders:

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. “We are Mencho’s men!” they shout while firing automatic weapons into the sky.

Authorities blamed Ruiz for the death of Valeria Márquez, a 23-year-old model and beauty influencer shot to death last year while broadcasting live on TikTok.

Audias Flores Silva, a leader widely known as “El Jardinero,” 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.

Flores is believed to have engineered the Jalisco cartel’s recent alliance with a faction of the warring Sinaloa cartel, which is led by two sons of imprisoned drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

And then there is 29-year-old Abraham Jesús Ambriz Cano, alias “El Yogurth.” Ambriz has built a small army of foreign mercenaries, 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.

Together the men help lead one of the most power and feared cartels in history — a criminal enterprise that traffics tons of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and fentanyl to the United States but which also profits from extortion, fuel theft, illegal mining and logging and timeshare fraud inside Mexico.

The avocado fields in the Mexican state of Michoacán, where the Jalisco New Generation cartel and other criminal groups tax producers and have their own crops.

(Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times)

Security analysts say the group’s horizontal, franchise-like structure allowed it to engineer a rapid response to Oseguera’s killing — and will allow it to do business as usual in the coming months.

Many believe the remaining leaders of the cartel will try to work together — for now.

“At the moment they perceive a huge common enemy: the government of Mexico,” said David Saucedo, who advises local and state governments on security policy.

But, Saucedo cautioned, “it’s possible that the cartel will fracture at some point as conflicts arise over control of profits, trafficking routes and contact with political officials.” Personal conflicts and the encroachment of rival cartels could also provoke problems, he added.

The inner workings of cartels are intentionally opaque to the outside world.

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, or drug ballads, which chronicle cartel politics.

Saucedo noted that multiple songs recently have described Flores as Oseguera’s successor. Another song venerates Valencia (“He was born in Orange County, where the sun burns differently,” it begins.)

It’s 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.

He was blamed for the 2020 assassination attempt of Omar García Harfuch, then the police chief of Mexico City and now the top public security official 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.

Last year, at a ranch near Guadalajara apparently used to train Jalisco recruits, activists discovered the remains of hundreds of missing people.

Born to farmers in Michoacán 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.

Recent Mexican history is riddled with the tales of once-powerful syndicates — gangs in Guadalajara, Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez, among them — that ruptured, were gobbled up by other mobs or petered out as the big guys were captured or killed. Colombia’s storied Medellin cartel was another mob that withered after Pablo Escobar met his demise in 1993.

Linthicum reported in New York, Hamilton in Guadalajara and McDonnell in Mexico City.