Trump Demanded El Mencho's Head. Mexicans Are Paying the Price. - The Intercept

On Sunday, in the wake of a military operation to kill one of the country’s most infamous drug traffickers, clashes broke out across the Mexico, leaving dozens dead and producing shocking images of roadblocks, armed men in the streets, and panicked civilians ducking for cover.

Within hours of the operation in which troops killed cartel boss Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho,” in a rural hideout outside Guadalajara, gunmen loyal to his Jalisco New Generation Cartel group poured into the streets of several cities, burning buses and firing automatic weapons.

“The city was completely emptied,” said David Mora, an International Crisis Group analyst who happened to be in Guadalajara on Sunday, of the aftermath of the violence. “I mean it was a ghost town — there was no one on the streets yesterday.”

The fighting left at least 70 people dead, including 25 members of Mexico’s National Guard, which carried out the mission guided by intelligence from counterparts in U.S. military and law enforcement, according to President Claudia Sheinbaum.

“The country is at peace,” Sheinbaum said at her daily press conference Monday. “It’s calm.”

The spasm of violence came amid a heavy-handed pressure campaign by the Trump administration, which for the past year has explicitly blamed Sheinbaum’s government for allowing traffickers to flood the U.S. with fentanyl and other drugs. President Donald Trump has previously insinuated that the government of Mexico is captured by trafficking networks, and threatened unilateral military action to stop the flow of drugs.

“Going after a big fish like this was kind of an indication of the new framing of this government’s security strategy,” said Mora. “But it also has to do with the elephant in the room, which is the pressure that Donald Trump is putting on Mexico to deliver this.”

Despite an almost unprecedented willingness on the part of Sheinbaum to hand over high-profile narcos to stand trial in the U.S. — and Trump’s willingness to pardon convicted drug traffickers — Trump has given little indication of relenting. Even as top U.S. officials took a victory lap and the deadly cost of the operation was just beginning to become clear, Trump hardly seemed satisfied.

“Mexico must step up their effort on Cartels and Drugs!” he wrote Monday on his social media platform.

“Now the question now is: What are you going to do to reduce demand and consumption?”

In Mexico, however, the death toll, which is likely higher than what has so far been reported, and the chaos that was unleashed were a stark reminder of the heavy cost paid by Mexicans in a war on organized crime that is dictated in large part by pressure from Washington — even as the paramilitary groups in question are armed with guns and ammunition from the U.S. and fueled with money from drugs consumed by people north of the border.

“This is a breakthrough,” said Jesús Esquivel, a journalist with La Jornada and a longtime chronicler of the war on drugs. “But now the question now is: What are you going to do to reduce demand and consumption? What are you going to do to stop arms trafficking?”

Grim Repetition

In many ways, the violence that played out on Sunday was a familiar scene. On multiple occasions over the past decade, confrontations with high-profile drug traffickers have sparked bloody battles with heavily armed paramilitary groups, leaving numerous people dead and cities paralyzed.

Perhaps the most controversial incident of this scale came in 2019, when Mexican troops seized Ovidio Guzmán López, the son of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, only to release him following a siege of the city of Culiacán by gunmen loyal to Ovidio and his brothers.

In previous operations, Mexican troops and Marines have frequently operated in conjunction with “advisors” from the Drug Enforcement Administration and occasionally with the help of special operations forces and the CIA. Details are still emerging about how exactly the operation played out on Sunday, but it appears to have been carried out entirely by Mexican security forces.

“For the first time, I feel proud of the Mexican Army,” said Esquivel. “It’s a message to the U.S. government, and especially to Trump, that we may need your information, but we don’t need you to intervene unilaterally in our territory. We can take care of these guys.”

For others, the scenes that unfolded on Sunday had a grim sense of repetition. It has been almost 20 years since President Felipe Calderón declared war on the cartels, a heavily militarized, U.S.-backed mission that has — despite endless arrests of high-level narcos — has done virtually nothing to stem the flow of drugs into the U.S. Instead, Mexico has faced decades of horrific violence, a widespread paramilitarization of drug gangs, and a fractured criminal landscape that has turned many areas of the country into low-intensity war zones fueled by weapons from the United States.

As the smoke clears in Jalisco, there are fears that a familiar pattern will repeat itself. In other areas in which a top trafficker was arrested or killed, it has become common for criminal groups to atomize into warring factions, according to Ieva Jusionyte, an anthropologist who studies organized crime in Mexico.

“This is a continuation of this militarized approach to organized crime,” said Jusionyte. “With the fracturing of these organized crime groups, there is more violence, but the structure remains intact — the drug demand in the U.S. and the gun supply from the U.S. remains, and in Mexico the impunity and the weakness of the justice system remain.”

IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT.

What we’re seeing right now from Donald Trump is a full-on authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government.

This is not hyperbole.

Court orders are being ignored. MAGA loyalists have been put in charge of the military and federal law enforcement agencies. The Department of Government Efficiency has stripped Congress of its power of the purse. News outlets that challenge Trump have been banished or put under investigation.

Yet far too many are still covering Trump’s assault on democracy like politics as usual, with flattering headlines describing Trump as “unconventional,” “testing the boundaries,” and “aggressively flexing power.”

The Intercept has long covered authoritarian governments, billionaire oligarchs, and backsliding democracies around the world. We understand the challenge we face in Trump and the vital importance of press freedom in defending democracy.

We’re independent of corporate interests. Will you help us?

** IT’S BEEN A DEVASTATING** year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.

We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.

In this most perilous moment for democracy, The Intercept is fighting back. But to do so effectively, we need to grow.

That’s where you come in. Will you help us expand our reporting capacity in time to hit the ground running in 2026?

We’re independent of corporate interests. Will you help us?

** I’M BEN MUESSIG,** The Intercept’s editor-in-chief. It’s been a devastating year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.

We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.

In this most perilous moment for democracy, The Intercept is fighting back. But to do so effectively, we need to grow.

That’s where you come in. Will you help us expand our reporting capacity in time to hit the ground running in 2026?

We’re independent of corporate interests. Will you help us?

Latest Stories

Nonprofit Coalition Asks Courts to Prevent Coercive Federal Investigation Tactics

Seventeen organizations filed an amicus brief calling out pretextual federal investigations and arguing for judicial oversight.

The War on Immigrants

Kristi Noem Repeatedly Claimed ICE Deported a Cannibal. It Was “Completely Made Up.”

Law enforcement sources told The Intercept that Noem’s tale about a cannibal was a fabrication.

The Intercept Briefing

What Does Trump Want With Cuba?

The Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign is pushing Cuba into a deeper humanitarian crisis.

Join The Conversation