Illustration by Ed Gabel RollingStoneAus.com | Rolling Stone | 75
and-coming narco – but we had no ‘in’ to
investigate him.”
So the case was put on the back burner,
and for the next few years, CJNG became
an afterthought. “A few people at head-
quarters and in Mexico saw what was
going on,” Mori says. “But if you asked
most DEA agents [back then] if they knew
who Mencho was, they would say no.”
Yet, just a few years later, this former
small-timer would become one of the most
sought-after kingpins on the planet, with
an army of 5,000 troops – roughly the
same size as the DEA – and a personal
net approaching one billion. “How does
somebody go from being a nickel-and-
dime street dealer to being one of the most
prolific, most wanted traffickers in the
world?” Mori asks.
The answer is: He goes to America.
THE TOWN OF Naranjo de Chila is a dusty
mountain pueblo in southwestern Micho-
acán, a lifetime from the high-rises of Gua-
dalajara. It was here, on July 17th, 1966,
that Rubén Oseguera Cervantes was born- one of six brothers in a family of poor av-
ocado farmers. The town sits on the edge
of Mexico’s Tierra Caliente, or “Hot Land” - a harsh, impoverished region famous
for producing agricultural products both
legal and less so. To help earn money for his
struggling family, young Rubén dropped
out of school in the fi fth grade and started
working in the fi elds; by 14, he’d graduated
to guarding marijuana crops.
Mencho must have dreamed of more
than avocados, however, because within
a few years he had packed up and moved
north to California. By 1986, he was liv-
ing in the Bay Area, where he was arrested
by San Francisco police for possession
of stolen property and a loaded gun. A
booking photo from the incident shows a
19-year-old Mencho wearing a hoodie and
a blank expression, acne on his baby face.
Two months later, his fi rst child was born.
It’s unclear if Mencho served any time
for the incident, but according to Univi-
sion, he crossed the border several more
times throughout the late Eighties, smug-
gling drugs under a variety of aliases
(Rubén Ávila, Roberto Salgado). Accord-
ing to DEA and Mexican reports, it was
also during this time that he got his intro-
duction to the meth trade.
At the time, meth production was con-
centrated in California’s Central Valley, at30
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2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016PACIFICOCEANGulf(^) o
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ali
fornia
Gulf of
Mexico
GUATEMALA
BELIZE
HONDURAS
EL
SALVADOR
NICARAGUA
UNITED
STATES
More Than 200,000 Civilians
Murdered in Mexico Since 2007
Drug Production Zones
The battlefields of Mexico’s Drug war
In the past decade, the drug war in Mexico has spilled into every corner of the country, leaving
more than 200,000 civilians dead. The maps below show the territory of each major cartel, the
locations of lucrative drug production and where ongoing turf wars continue to fuel violence.