The Franchise

On the evening of February 22, Mexican special forces killed Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes — El Mencho — in a raid on a gated community in Tapalpa, Jalisco. He was wounded in the firefight and died while being airlifted to Mexico City. The operation was planned with intelligence support from the United States’ Joint Interagency Task Force-Counter Cartel. Six of his bodyguards died with him.

Within hours, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel answered. Approximately 250 roadblocks materialized across twenty states — hijacked cargo trucks, buses, and private vehicles set ablaze on highways in Jalisco, Colima, Michoacán, Nayarit, Guanajuato, Tamaulipas, and beyond. Guadalajara became a ghost town. Puerto Vallarta filled with smoke. Twenty-five National Guard members and three civilians were killed. The US Embassy issued a Code Red shelter-in-place order for American citizens across western Mexico.

Hugo César Macías Ureña — El Tuli — El Mencho’s right-hand man and financial chief, orchestrated the roadblocks and offered 20,000 pesos for each soldier killed. He was killed the same day attempting to flee in El Grullo, about a hundred kilometers south. Authorities seized nearly a million dollars in US currency from his vehicle.

Leader and lieutenant. Both gone in a single day.

And then — four days later — the roadblocks cleared. By February 24, the state government of Jalisco lifted the Code Red. Schools reopened. Public transit resumed. By February 26, the US Embassy lifted its shelter-in-place order. The situation, in the State Department’s careful language, had “stabilized.”

The violence started on a signal. It ended on a signal. What happened in between was not chaos.

The Wilson Center described the February 22 retaliation as “brief retaliatory violence” suggesting “capacity to disrupt and intimidate, but limited ability to sustain prolonged violent confrontation with the state.” I read it differently.

A cartel that built its reputation on spectacular violence — drone attacks on military convoys, rocket-propelled grenades in broad daylight — deliberately restraining its response after the assassination of its founder is not displaying incapacity. It is displaying institutional discipline. The 250 roadblocks were a statement: we are still here, we are coordinated, we operate in twenty states simultaneously. The four-day de-escalation was also a statement: we chose to stop. That sequence — nationwide force followed by controlled withdrawal — requires more organizational sophistication than sustained warfare does.

El Mencho had built the infrastructure for this moment. As security analyst David Saucedo explained to RTE: “El Mencho had been suffering from kidney disease and needed to rest regularly after the dialysis treatments — so he had created a council of commanders to delegate many of the cartel’s important leadership functions to.” Four commanders, four regions, four semi-autonomous operations: Ricardo Ruiz Velasco (El Doble R), Audias Flores (El Jardinero), Hugo Mendoza Gaytán (El Sapo), and El Mencho’s stepson Juan Carlos Valencia González (El 03). A franchise model — local operations use the CJNG brand, share revenue upward, maintain territorial autonomy.

Franchises survive the death of their founder. That is their design purpose.

But there is a difference between tactical discipline and governance succession, and every analyst making reassuring noises about the council of commanders is confusing the first for the second.

The franchise model answers one question: what does each territory do? Each commander knows his operations, his routes, his local alliances, his revenue streams. The roadblocks proved they can coordinate at scale. The de-escalation proved they can stand down at scale.

The franchise model does not answer the harder question: what happens when two commanders disagree?

El Mencho was the arbitration mechanism. When El Jardinero’s Michoacán operations conflicted with El Sapo’s priorities, El Mencho resolved it. When a revenue-sharing dispute needed adjudication, El Mencho adjudicated. When the organization’s strategic direction — which plazas to contest, which territorial concessions to make, which alliances to maintain — required a decision, El Mencho decided.

The council unified for retaliation. Retaliation has a clear purpose and a shared enemy. Succession does not. Succession distributes power among holders who need a mechanism to resolve disputes between them, and the mechanism was the man they just buried.

El Mencho’s biological son, Rubén Oseguera González — El Menchito — is serving a life sentence plus thirty years in a US federal prison. His wife was arrested on money-laundering charges in 2021. His brothers are imprisoned in Mexico. The bloodline is severed. His stepson, El 03, is a potential successor, but analysts describe him as “too young” and lacking “the knowledge or the experience” to hold the whole organization together.

InSight Crime, the most detailed English-language tracker of organized crime in Latin America, is direct: with no apparent heir or succession plan, CJNG is “highly likely to fragment violently.” The reason is structural. The commanders “each control highly capable, geographically separated factions that do not rely heavily on one another and oversee different trafficking corridors to the US border.” Four capable, disciplined, independent organizations wearing one brand.

The precedent everyone reaches for is Sinaloa. They should.

The Sinaloa Cartel had the strongest institutional structures of any Mexican trafficking organization — two families, the Guzmáns and the Zambadas, running parallel operations for decades. When Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán was extradited to the US in 2017, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada maintained continuity. The institutional model worked — for seven years.

Then in September 2024, Joaquín Guzmán López reportedly lured El Mayo to a meeting that was actually a setup for his capture by US authorities. The betrayal cracked the organization in half. Los Chapitos versus La Mayiza. Open war across Sinaloa state. In one year: nearly 2,000 dead and over 2,000 disappeared. Homicides rose 400 percent. The institutional structures that held for years dissolved on contact with a succession dispute.

CJNG’s franchise design is different from Sinaloa’s hierarchy. Decentralized operations are more resilient than personality-cult leadership — that is the genuine insight of the franchise model. But decentralization also means more fault lines. Sinaloa had one fracture point (two families). CJNG has four (four commanders, plus a potential family heir). More redundancy and more potential for divergence.

Small Wars Journal’s analysis identifies three scenarios: managed succession, fragmentation, or competitive absorption. The authors note that fragmentation is the “modal outcome” historically, citing the Beltrán Leyva Organization after 2009, Los Zetas after 2012, and the Medellín Cartel after Escobar. But they also observe that CJNG has “standardized recruitment and training practices” and “international supply chain networks requiring bureaucratic continuity” — features suggesting potential resilience.

I think the fragmentation will come. But I think CJNG’s franchise model changes its character. The Sinaloa collapse was spectacular — open street warfare, mass disappearances, 400 percent spike in homicides. The CJNG fracture, if it follows the franchise pattern, will be quieter: four territories gradually ceasing to coordinate, making incompatible alliances, operating under the same brand while serving different interests. Not one cartel splitting into two warring factions. One brand dissolving into four regional operations that stop returning each other’s calls.

Ninety-five days.

On June 11, the first FIFA World Cup match comes to Guadalajara. South Korea versus a European qualifier at Estadio Akron. Mexico plays South Korea there on June 18. Colombia on June 23. Uruguay versus Spain on June 26. The world’s cameras on Jalisco for three weeks.

President Claudia Sheinbaum visited Zapopan on March 6 — a suburb of Guadalajara, in the state where El Mencho died two weeks earlier — and announced Plan Kukulkán: 100,000 security personnel, 20,000 soldiers and National Guard, 55,000 police, 2,500 military vehicles, 24 aircraft, a drone defense system. FIFA President Gianni Infantino called to say he was reassured about Mexico’s preparations.

Here is what I think will actually keep Guadalajara quiet through June: not Plan Kukulkán, but the cartel’s own calculation.

Every CJNG commander with territory in Jalisco has a shared interest in stability during the tournament. The 100,000 security personnel communicate the state’s willingness to act. But the state has had that willingness before — it killed El Mencho. What matters now is the commanders’ willingness to not fight each other in international spotlight. Visible violence in Guadalajara during the World Cup would produce the one thing that is worse for all of them than a managed transition: sustained, concentrated military pressure on their primary operating territory with the world watching and demanding results.

The World Cup is not a test of whether CJNG is stable. It is a temporary convergence of interests that masks whether the succession question has been resolved. Four commanders who might disagree about who runs the organization can still agree that the next three months are not the time to find out. The convergence is real. Its duration is the tournament.

After July, the cameras leave. The 100,000 security personnel redeploy. The convergence of interests expires. And the question that February 22 opened — who governs the franchise — reasserts itself in the silence.

The franchise model proved it can operate. It has not yet proved it can decide.

Sources