El Mencho’s hideout was a tourist cabin flagged by the US Treasury

Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, alias “El Mencho,” had spent the last few decades hiding in the shadows. Investigators knew that Mexico’s most powerful drug lord was hiding somewhere in the mountains of Jalisco, protected and escorted by a tight security circle of men he trusted completely, all heavily armed. The kingpin was so elusive that there weren’t even recent photos of him; the few that existed still showed him clean‑shaven and youthful.

On Sunday, El Mencho — who was nearly 60 — was killed in an operation carried out by the Mexican Army, in a location in plain sight of visitors and popular for ecotourism. The cabins in Tapalpa — which became the setting of the final battle of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) leader — sit in a wooded area at the foot of the mountains, near dozens of small hotels, with a golf course and a reservoir just minutes away. That same place had been flagged a decade earlier by the U.S. Treasury Department, which linked it to money‑laundering schemes tied to the CJNG and Los Cuinis.

On Monday, Mexico’s Defense Secretary Ricardo Trevilla described how intelligence teams located one of the world’s most wanted men. They tracked down a contact of El Mencho’s partner, who was responsible for transporting her to meet the drug trafficker. The couple arrived at the meeting point on February 20: a set of cabins inside a complex with tourist accommodation.

Nemesio Oseguera — the trafficker who had evaded the law since the 1990s — was not hiding in the shadows of some remote, inaccessible corner of Jalisco’s mountain system. He was in an ecotourism resort in a pueblo mágico, next to a golf club, in a forested area with hiking trails and surrounded by hotels, just a two‑hour drive from Guadalajara.

El Mencho’s partner left the location the following day. Authorities had only a few hours to plan the operation. The CJNG leader was accompanied by just a dozen bodyguards — an opportunity to capture him without causing major casualties. During the attack, El Mencho tried to take cover behind the few trees surrounding the property and hid in the underbrush. That’s where agents found him, gravely wounded, along with the two bodyguards who fled with him. Nemesio Oseguera died during his air transfer to a hospital.

The mayor of Tapalpa, Antonio Morales, said in an interview with the Grupo Fórmula radio network that he had no knowledge that Oseguera was living in or visiting the municipality. “We started hearing the helicopters flying overhead and the detonations at 8 a.m,” he recounted.

However, a decade earlier, the U.S. Treasury Department had flagged this town of barely 20,000 inhabitants as a place where the CJNG and its partners, Los Cuinis, laundered money through a cabin‑rental business. In the U.S. Government’s document, the site is described as alternating between the names Cabañas La Loma and Cabañas Flores, located at kilometer 5 of the road connecting Tapalpa with San Gabriel.

At that spot, there are cabins that match the night‑vision images captured by Mexican Army helicopters during the operation. The largest house, according to satellite imagery, was still under construction in 2023. The site is located within a development of cabins and country homes near a forest where tourists go camping, barbecuing outdoors, and enjoying nature and the mountains.

EL PAÍS contacted Mayor Morales, but has not yet received a response. The half‑dozen hotels advertised just a few plots away from the site claim they heard nothing, were not in town, or have been closed for months. Tension still hangs over the area, where fear of retaliation from the armed group that controls the region prevails, as locals wait to see how the CJNG will reorganize and who will succeed El Mencho as the head of the criminal organization.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition