From Carlos Manzo to El Pirata de Culiacán: A decade of murders by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel

Mexico is holding its breath after the death of Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, alias “El Mencho,” leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG). With the chaos and destruction unleashed by the cartel’s leaders across a significant portion of the country now under control, the Secretary of National Defense, Ricardo Trevilla Trejo, revealed that during the hours of roadblocks being set up and businesses burned, lieutenants of the criminal organization were offering 20,000 pesos (approximately $1,150) for each soldier killed. He stated, almost in tears, that at least 25 members of the security forces were killed in the day following what was the biggest blow — and the culmination — of the security strategy implemented by the government of Claudia Sheinbaum and her Secretary of Security, Omar García Harfuch. It was an incentive that fits with the criminal profile of this cartel, which has never hesitated to use all its force against politicians and law enforcement officers who were not under its control, and which has spread terror with over a decade of murders, massacres of dozens of officers, the deaths of politicians in the style of Carlos Manzo and Aristóteles Sandoval, and even a revenge attack against a YouTuber known as El Pirata de Culiacán.

Undoubtedly, the most-remembered attack is the attempted assassination of García Harfuch when he was head of the Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection in Mexico City in June 2020. An ambush by 28 hitmen in an upscale area of ​​the capital, using hundreds of.50 caliber bullets combined with grenades, failed to kill Harfuch, although two of his bodyguards and a woman who happened to be passing by were not so lucky. But less is said about the other cases in which the CJNG achieved its objective, leading the DEA to define it as one of the “most ruthless” criminal organizations in the world.

In March 2013, a couple of years after its emergence on the national stage, hitmen from the Jalisco New Generation Cartel killed its first high-ranking politician, José de Jesús Gallegos, who had only been serving as Secretary of Tourism for the State of Jalisco for a few days under the administration of PRI member Aristóteles Sandoval. Sandoval himself was assassinated in December 2020, while on vacation in Puerto Vallarta.

Amid all this, a trail of bodies of murdered politicians and law enforcement officers. Some examples: In 2014, Manuel Gómez Torres, a member of the National Action Party (PAN) and mayor of Ayutla; Congressman Gabriel Gómez Michel and his assistant, Heriberto Núñez Ramos. In 2015: An ambush by cartel members on a group of security personnel in April, following the death of a capo, left 15 officers dead; in an attempt to capture El Mencho in May 2015, his bodyguards shot down a military helicopter with a rocket launcher, killing a dozen uniformed personnel. 2019: Another ambush, this time in Michoacán, left 13 more police officers dead. 2020: the same CJNG hitman first murdered Francis Anel Bueno Sánchez, a congresswoman from Colima, and then a judge from the same state, Uriel Villegas Ortiz, along with his wife Verónica Barajas Guerra.

The cartel’s last major political assassination was in November 2025, when, during the Day of the Dead celebrations three hitmen, one of them a teenager, shot and killed the mayor of Uruapan, Carlos Manzo, in Michoacán. Manzo was trying to reclaim his territory from the control of organized crime.

The cartel’s vengeful side was also on display in 2025. Last May, Iván Morales Corrales was murdered in an ambush in Temixco, Morelos. The police officer was a survivor of the 2015 helicopter attack during the attempt to capture El Mencho. Another victim of retaliation was Juan Luis Lagunas Rosales, a YouTuber nicknamed El Pirata de Culiacán, who was murdered in 2017 at the age of 17 in a bar in Guadalajara, Jalisco. His crime? The assassination, involving 15 gunshots, occurred just days after he posted a video, visibly intoxicated, in which he shouted, “El Mencho can suck my dick.”

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