72 | Rolling Stone | RollingStoneAus.com September, 2017
PREVIOUS PAGE: IMAGES IN ILLUSTRATION BY FELIX MARQUEZ/ARCHIVOLATINO/REDUX; NOTIMEX/XINHUA/EYEVINE/REDUXand the other men were then hustled out
to two waiting SUVs and driven off into
the night, while the women were left un-
harmed. The whole operation took less
than two minutes – the restaurant’s owner
would later describe it as “violent, but very
clean”. And thus, without a shot being fired,
the two youngest sons of notorious Sinaloa
Cartel boss Joaquín Guzmán – a.k.a. “El
Chapo” – had been kidnapped.
Chapo’s sons had made the mistake of
partying on the turf of Sinaloa’s newest
and most dangerous rival: an upstart car-
tel boss named Rubén Oseguera Cervantes
- alias “El Mencho”. A former Jalisco state
policeman who once served three years in
a U.S. prison for selling heroin, Mencho
heads what many experts call Mexico’s
fastest-growing, deadliest and, according
to some, richest drug cartel – the Cartel
Jalisco Nueva Generación, or CJNG. Al-
though he’s basically unknown in the U.S.,
Mencho has been indicted in a D.C. federal
court on charges of drug trafficking, cor-
ruption and murder, and currently has a
$5 million bounty on his head. Aside from
perhapsRafaelCaroQuintero–theaging
drug lord still wanted for the 1985 torture
andkillingofaDEAagent–heisprobably
America’stopcarteltarget.“ItwasChapo,”
saysaDEAsource.“Nowit’sMencho.”
CJNG have been around for only about
halfadecade,butwiththeirdizzyingly
swift rise, they have already achieved what
tookSinaloaageneration.Thecartelhas
established trafficking routes in dozens of
countries on six continents and controls
territoryspanninghalfofMexico,includ-
ingalongbothcoastsandbothborders.
“[CJNG]haveincreasedtheiroperations
likenoothercriminalorganisationtodate,”
said a classified Mexican intelligence report
obtained by the newspaperEl Universal.
This past May, Mexico’s attorney general,
Raúl Cervantes, declared them the most
ubiquitous cartel in the country.
CJNG specialise in methamphetamine,
which has higher profit margins than co-
caine or heroin. By focusing on lucrative
foreign markets in Europe and Asia, the
cartel has simultaneously maintained a low
profile in the U.S. and built up a massive
war chest, which some experts estimate is
worth $20 billion. “These guys have way
more money than Sinaloa,” says a former
DEA agent who spent years hunting the
cartel in Mexico (and who requested ano-
nymity for security reasons). According
to another U.S. investigator, “Mencho has
been very, very aggressive – and so far, un-
fortunately, it’s paid off.”
Though most might not realise it, Mex-
ico’s cartels have been almost uniformly
weakened. The notoriously fearsome Zetas- ex-special-forces commandos who ter-
arrest in January 2016, the country’s homi-
cide rate has increased more than 20 per
cent, with 20,000 murders last year alone- more than in Iraq or Afghanistan. In the
first five months of 2017, the homicide rate
leapt another 30 per cent. Thousands of
these killings can be chalked up to CJNG’s
push for territory. Vast burial sites have
been discovered in states where the cartel
has been most aggressive, like Veracruz,
which the state attorney general recently
described as a “giant grave”; in Colima,
where CJNG and Sinaloa spent last year
fighting for supremacy, the murder rate
more than tripled.
“We’ve seen it become very bloody, and
a lot of people attribute that to El Mencho
himself,” says Scott Stewart, a senior car-
tel analyst at Stratfor, a private intelligence
firm. “Wherever they try to muscle in, it
creates bodies.”
Mencho has also displayed a savagery
that’s extreme even by narco standards.
For the admittedly brutal Chapo, killing
was a necessary part of business. For Men-
cho, it seems more like sadism as public
spectacle. There have been mass killings,
such as the 35 bound and tortured bodies
dumped in the streets of Veracruz during
evening rush hour in 2011. Two years later,
CJNG operatives raped, killed and set fire
to a 10-year-old girl whom they (mistak-
enly) believed was a rival’s daughter. In
2015, CJNG assassins executed a man and
his elementary-school-age son by detonat-
ing sticks of dynamite duct-taped to their
bodies, laughing as they filmed the ghast-
ly scene with their phones. “This is ISIS
stuff,” says one DEA agent who has inves-
tigated the cartel. “The manner in which
they kill people, the sheer numbers – it’s
unparalleled even in Mexico.”
The ISIS comparison is instructive for
another reason. When Chapo was at the
height of his power, following Mexico’s
bloody cartel wars of a decade ago, the
country enjoyed a period of relative peace - what the novelist and drug-war chroni-
cler Don Winslow has dubbed the “Pax
Sinaloa”. But much like how the Islamic
State grew from the vacuum of post-Sad-
dam Iraq, one unintended consequence of
taking out Chapo may have been opening
the door for someone even worse.
Only a handful of photos of Mencho are
known to exist, and even the State Depart-
ment’s description of him is comically non-
descript: He’s five feet eight, 165 pounds,
brown eyes, brown hair. Narco balladeers
have celebrated his rumoured love of fast
motorbikes and $100,000 cockfights – one
of his nicknames is “El Señor de los Gallos”,
“The Lord of the Roosters” – but otherwise,
he’s a cipher. “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. “But with Mencho,
you don’t hear that. He’s kind of a ghost.”
rorised the country with mutilations and
beheadings – have been crippled by costly
turf wars and the arrest of their top lead-
ers. Other once-powerful groups like the
Knights Templar and Gulf Cartel have also
been marginalised. Even mighty Sinaloa
have descended into infighting following
ElChapo’srecentextraditiontoNewYork,
as multiple factions, including Chapo’s
sons,hisyoungerbrother,andhisformer
partnerIsmael“Mayo”Zambada,battle
for control.
This balkanisation has made Mexico a
breeding ground for violence. Since Chapo’sContributing editor Josh Eells wrote
about Bruno Mars in RS 782.
Above: Mencho with his two youngest
children, now fully grown. Right: Members
of CJNG, which experts estimate now
possesses a war chest worth $20 billion.
“Mencho has been very, very aggressive,”
says one U.S. investigator. “And so far,
unfortunately, it’s paid off.”El Mencho