The Mexican government has dealt a severe blow to one of the most powerful cartels in the country, that of Jalisco Nueva Generación.
Rosalinda González Valencia, the wife of its leader, Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, alias The Mencho, was captured Monday in an operation against the group in the cartel’s stronghold, Zapopan, on the outskirts of the state capital, Guadalajara.
The drug dealer most wanted by the United States Anti-Drug Agency (DEA) for whom the institution offers a 10 million dollar reward remains unaccounted for, while the Mexican and US authorities corner his closest collaborators in recent days. The capture of González Valencia represents a new hook for the criminal organization that, together with its main rival, the Sinaloa cartel, control drug trafficking to the north and have strewn the national territory with corpses.
González Valencia has been detained just days after her brother, José González Valencia, was extradited to the United States from Brazil. The alleged member of Los Cuinis, an organization identified by the Mexican authorities as the financial arm of the Jalisco cartel, is accused of drug trafficking and testified before the US Justice last Friday. Another of the brothers, Abigael González Valencia, leader of Los Cuinis was arrested in 2015 in Puerto Vallarta and has remained in a federal prison since then and has become a collaborating witness for the Prosecutor’s Office in the case of the 43 missing Ayotzinapa students. The family has engaged in money laundering for one of the most powerful cartels in the country, according to information from the DEA.
Rosalinda González was arrested in May 2018 also in Zapopan, shortly before President Andrés Manuel López Obrador won the elections and within the framework of the war of the previous Government of Enrique Peña Nieto against the Jalisco cartel. In September, she was released after paying a bail of 1.5 million pesos (about $ 72,000). And in June of this year, a federal judge charged her again for being related to a network of 73 companies that laundered $1,1 billion pesos for the cartel between 2015 and 2016. The hearing was of little use, as the magistrate concluded that there wasn’t sufficient evidence and she was released again.
The history of one of the bloodiest cartels in Mexico dates back to 2010. El Mencho founded it in Jalisco and made it the armed wing of the Sinaloa cartel, then at war for control of the Gulf of Mexico with Los Zetas, the group led by elite ex-military men and whose terrifying mutilations went around the world. In September 2011, the emerging cartel left in an exclusive area of Boca del Río (Veracruz), in the heart of the Zeta territory, its letter of introduction: 35 bodies on the asphalt of Avenida de Ruiz Cortines. The massacre earned them the nickname of matazetas. And in 2015, after a failed operation to stop Mencho, they shot down a military helicopter with a rocket launcher.
The Mencho organization has grown in the shadow of others better known such as Sinaloa, Los Zetas or Los Caballeros Templarios. While the security forces focused on breaking the backs of the big mafias during Felipe Calderón’s war (2006-2012) against drug trafficking and which Enrique Peña Nieto continued until 2018, the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel, relatively young, was taking over, like a reptile from the niches left by its enemies.
Today the cartel has extended its tentacles to practically the entire Mexican territory, except Sinaloa. That state in the north of the country is the last bastion of the cartel that bears the state name and that was inherited by the children of Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán associated with the historical founder, Ismael May Zambada, the only capo of the old guard, with more than 40 years of experience, who has never been arrested. There is not a corner in the country, except Sinaloa, in which some criminal cell has not allied itself with those of the Mencho and they presume in their executions to be of CJGN, The Four Letters, as they are also known. And this major expansion has made his group the most powerful. And to him, in the most wanted boss, for which the DEA increased the reward for his capture in March to 10 million dollars (8.4 million euros).
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