On Sunday, the Mexican military killed El Mencho — Ruben Oseguera Cervantes, the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, one of the most powerful and violent criminal organizations on earth. That’s the good news.
Everything that happened after is the bad news.
Within hours, Mexico erupted. Armed cartel groups set vehicles ablaze across the state of Jalisco. Clashes between cartel fighters and military forces broke out in multiple locations. The resort town of Puerto Vallarta locked down. The U.S. Embassy issued shelter-in-place advisories. Tourists were told to stay inside their hotels. Gunfire echoed through neighborhoods where families had been walking to dinner hours earlier.
And when Mexican forces raided the compound where El Mencho was killed, they seized rocket launchers capable of shooting down aircraft, armored vehicles, and heavy weapons “more commonly associated with armed conflict than routine law enforcement.”
Mexico doesn’t have a cartel problem anymore. Mexico has a war.
The Kill That Lit the Fuse
El Mencho built CJNG into one of the most feared criminal organizations in the Western Hemisphere. Under his leadership, the cartel expanded from a regional drug trafficking operation into a paramilitary force with influence across Mexico, Central America, and deep into the United States. His organization trafficked fentanyl, cocaine, and methamphetamine at industrial scale. It ran human smuggling operations. And it built a military wing capable of directly engaging the Mexican armed forces.
In 2015, CJNG gunmen used rocket-propelled grenades to shoot down a Mexican military helicopter. That was eleven years ago. Since then, the cartel has only grown stronger, better armed, and more deeply embedded in Mexico’s political and economic infrastructure.
The Sunday raid that killed El Mencho was conducted under pressure from President Trump to intensify Mexico’s cartel crackdown. It represents one of Mexico’s most significant blows against organized crime in years. But killing a cartel leader doesn’t kill a cartel. It destabilizes one — and destabilized cartels are often more dangerous than stable ones, because the power vacuum triggers internal wars, retaliatory strikes, and escalating violence as lieutenants compete for control.
That’s exactly what’s happening now.
Battlefield-Grade Weapons
The hardware seized during the raid should alarm everyone. Rocket launchers. Armored vehicles. Heavy weapons. This isn’t a street gang with handguns. This is a paramilitary force with the kind of equipment that armies use.
And the rocket launchers aren’t theoretical threats. CJNG has already used them — shooting down a military helicopter in 2015, establishing that it possesses both the weapons and the willingness to engage government aircraft. Surface-to-air capability changes everything about how a military operates. It means helicopters can’t fly freely. Transport aircraft become vulnerable. Aerial surveillance is contested.
If CJNG has rocket launchers and armored vehicles, the question isn’t what they have. It’s what else they have that hasn’t been seized yet. What’s hidden in the warehouses, the ranches, the tunnel networks that connect cartel territory? What hardware has been purchased from corrupt military officers, smuggled across international borders, or manufactured in cartel-run workshops?
The Mexican military is now fighting an enemy that is approaching peer-level capability in some areas. The cartels may not have an air force, but they have ground forces, heavy weapons, encrypted communications, drone technology, and an intelligence network built on decades of corruption that penetrates every level of Mexican government.
The Border Problem
Mexico’s collapse into open warfare doesn’t stay in Mexico. The cartels have maintained a presence along the U.S. southern border for years. They control smuggling routes. They operate on both sides of the line. And they’ve already demonstrated willingness to project force into American airspace — earlier this month, cartel drones breached U.S. airspace near El Paso, prompting the Department of War to shoot them down and close the airspace temporarily.
Cartel drones in American airspace. That’s where we are. And that was before the Mexican government killed El Mencho and set off a cartel war.
A destabilized Mexico means more violence at the border. More refugees fleeing the chaos. More smuggling operations running at higher volume as competing factions fight for control of routes. More cartel fighters operating near American territory with military-grade weapons. And a Mexican government that may be too overwhelmed by its own internal conflict to cooperate meaningfully on border security.
The United States now has a failed narco-state on its southern border. That’s not hyperbole. That’s a description of a country where criminal organizations possess battlefield weapons, can shoot down military helicopters, and are engaging the national army in open combat across entire regions.
The Trump Question
President Trump pressured Mexico to intensify its cartel operations. Mexico complied. El Mencho is dead. And the resulting chaos is now threatening American citizens, American airspace, and American border security.
The question that matters isn’t what Mexico does next — Mexico is clearly overwhelmed. The question is what Trump does.
The options range from diplomatic pressure to direct military involvement. Trump has already demonstrated willingness to use special forces in the region — the capture of Maduro in Venezuela proved that. He’s shown he’ll authorize strikes when American interests are threatened. And his administration has consistently framed the cartel crisis as a national security threat, not just a law enforcement issue.
If the cartels continue to escalate — if they field more military hardware, if they breach American airspace again, if the violence spills across the border in ways that threaten American lives — the pressure to act will become irresistible. And Trump has never been a president who resists that kind of pressure.
Mexico is burning. The cartels are fighting. The border is exposed. And the president who has built his entire political identity on protecting that border is watching it all unfold in real time.
This isn’t a developing story. It’s a developing crisis. And the next chapter depends on what happens in the next few days — not in Mexico City, but in Washington.