Inside the Operation to Take Down Mexico’s Biggest Drug Lord

What It Covers

NYT reporters Maria Abi and Jack Nikas break down the Mexican military's killing of El Mencho, leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel — the world's largest drug organization — examining how Trump's pressure campaign on President Claudia Sheinbaum created the political conditions that made the operation possible.

Key Questions Answered

• •Cartel succession risk: When a cartel leader is killed without a clear successor, fragmentation is the most likely outcome. El Mencho had 4–5 potential commanders beneath him but no obvious family heir. Historical patterns show internal power struggles fracture organizations into competing factions, triggering multi-front territorial wars across Mexico lasting years, not months.
• •Trump pressure as political cover: President Sheinbaum faced deep institutional resistance to confronting cartels due to corruption embedded at federal, state, and local levels. Trump's explicit threat of unilateral US military strikes gave her a credible external justification to override that resistance — allowing her to tell her own party she had no political alternative but to act.
• •Operational security failures expose leaders: El Mencho evaded capture for two decades by using only human messengers and avoiding all electronic communication. His eventual location was confirmed after Mexican forces tracked a close associate of one of his romantic partners to his safehouse — demonstrating that personal relationships, not technology, ultimately broke his operational discipline.
• •Cartel self-moderation under US threat: Following El Mencho's death, cartel violence across 20 states subsided within days — faster than any comparable prior incident. Narco leaders interviewed in Sinaloa cited the US military's removal of Venezuela's Maduro as evidence that Hellfire missile strikes on Mexican soil are now a credible threat, directly influencing how cartels calculate public displays of force.
• •Corruption dismantlement is the missing variable: Killing cartel leaders without prosecuting complicit officials produces no structural change. US officials specifically identify prosecution of corrupt Mexican politicians as the benchmark for real progress — citing a sitting senator and the former navy chief as already publicly linked to cartel networks, neither of whom has faced accountability under Sheinbaum's government.