GUADALAJARA, Mexico – Sometimes the decapitated bodies hang from bridges. Other times, the mutilated torso is just thrown away on the street. The carnage often comes with a calling card: ‘CJNG’ in scratched letters.
The Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación is happy to send a message.
For those who have been watching the resurgence of the Mexican drug war over the past few years, the rise of the cartel is particularly worrying – it is as stupid as it is ruthless. The Drug Enforcement Administration now believes the CJNG is responsible for tons of meth and fentanyl flowing into the United States every month.
“CJNG is currently our number one priority,” said Bill Bodner, the special agent in charge of the DEA’s field division in Los Angeles, who oversees a group of agents specifically tasked with the leadership of to detect the cartel.
That man – Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho” – has so far successfully evaded US federal authorities.
Several U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials told NBC News that the head of CJNG filled the void after the infamous “El Chapo” Guzmán, who led the rival Sinaloa cartel, was caught in 2016. The sources say that the CJNG has entered and is now considered the deadliest cartel in Mexico.
“The Zetas were very scared,” Bodner said. “But they met their match.”
Hunt a ‘ghost’
The DEA awarded a reward of $ 10 million for information that led to the arrest of El Mencho. But so far, authorities have come up empty-handed.
The CJNG only existed for about a decade, but it came to power much faster than the rival Sinaloa cartel. Its influence now spans six continents and 28 of 32 countries in Mexico. Major U.S. cities – including Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta and New York – are all affected by CJNG drugs, DEA officials said.
El Mencho has been charged in the U.S. Federal Court with drug trafficking, corruption and murder.
But it was difficult to follow in his footsteps. At one point, the DEA believed he might be hiding in the mountains, but it was hard to pin him down.
In many ways he was a ‘ghost’, one source said.
The cartel leader was born in 1966 in the small Mexican town of Naranjo de Chila and lived in California for a time; he was arrested in the USA in the 1980s for selling drugs. Eventually, he returned to Guadalajara and began working for the Milenio cartel, a subsidiary of the Sinaloa cartel. He rose through the ranks before splitting into his group around 2010. The resulting group, the CJNG, would quickly unleash a new wave of violence against its opponents. After 2016, when El Chapo was captured, the bloodshed increased.
El Mencho’s shady history does not reveal much – except perhaps why it was so difficult to find him.
“El Mencho seems to be a lot more disciplined than Chapo was,” Bodner said. ‘El Chapo liked to live the flashy lifestyle – cars, women, nice restaurants, drinks. El Mencho is content to stay away from things, to exercise, to eat right, to stay off the radar. ”
One of his little-known vices: his reported love of cockfighting, which earned him another nickname – ‘The Lord of the Roosters’.
Family ties
El Mencho, American-born son Ruben Oseguera González, was arrested in 2015 and is now being held in a maximum security prison in Mexico as U.S. authorities ask for his extradition on drug and weapons charges.
According to the Mexican newspaper El Universal, González’s lawyers are accusing a DEA agent in 2019 of bribing a local magistrate to intervene and expedite the process – an allegation that the agency strongly denies.
‘They are trying to slow down [the agent] on this matter, ”Bodner said. “This is a tactic of a lawyer trying to delay an investigation into a cartel that is trying to set up roadblocks to stop us from extraditing a person who is a U.S. citizen.”
The battle between the DEA and cartels in Guadalajara has been raging for decades. It was recently featured in the Netflix series Narcos: Mexico, which tells the story of agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, who was abducted and killed in 1985.
‘We’re at war’
With his face darkened in the dark, the man clearly remembered the last time he spoke to his son.
That was more than a year ago. Nearly 400 days of pain followed: the excruciating pain of a parent who knows their child has been killed – but cannot find the body.
“I did not believe people could do that,” he said in an interview. “We’re at war.”
For security reasons, he asked that his face not be displayed and that his name not be used. This is a common request in Mexico, where the government has just announced that more than 61,000 people have disappeared amid the ongoing drug war – and where 31,000 murders peak in 2019, the deadliest year in memory.
He is wearing a ball cap, a mustache and a tired smile. He worked as a chiropractor, but his family owned a farm in rural Mexico that has been passed down through the generations. Until, according to him, dozens of cartel members seized meth.
“The government can not handle it,” he said.
Across all social media, the CJNG posted gruesome displays of beheadings and executions. Other posts are propaganda videos intended to recruit new members. One former Mexican intelligence official said the cartel cared for potential recruits from a very young age – in their early teens – with easy access to drugs, promises of money and jobs. CJNG business cards with popular logos such as Louis Vuitton are handed out openly. In some neighborhoods, cartel members use Robin Hood tactics, which distribute food and other supplies to poor communities. The young men who are lured to join are immediately tortured and forced to become sicarios or assassins for the cartel. As they get older, they are willing to torture and decapitate their own victims.
The ruthlessness of the attacks drew comparisons with the militant group Islamic State.
“As for violence, yes,” said Bodner, the DEA agent. “They may not have a religious ideology, but the violence is the same.”
‘Stain of blood’
The DEA has barely given NBC News access to one of its secret laboratories analyzing drug attacks in an unknown location. The agency sees more methamphetamine crossing the border – and much of it is attributed to the CJNG. Unlike marijuana or heroin, meth does not require large parts of the country or good weather. The laboratories can be built in isolated areas – and the synthetic means can be much more profitable.
At the DEA’s laboratory, technicians combed through the chemical composition of the method.
“It’s much more pure (than before),” said Bodner, the DEA agent.
In Mexico, Guanajuato’s security commissioner said in an interview that Americans’ drug addiction is fueling demand – which in turn is fueling the cartels and their violence.
“Unfortunately, with every dose consumed, the stain bleeds,” Sophia Huett said. “And that’s something we can not deny.”