From El Mencho To R2: Mexico’s Offensive Against The Jalisco New Generation Cartel

Rafael “R2″ Álvarez Ayala, one of the top leaders of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), was arrested on Sunday in Zapopan, part of the metropolitan area surrounding the Mexican city of Guadalajara, the capital of Jalisco. Alongside him, 19 other people were detained following a shootout outside a restaurant, in which both the cartel leader and a member of the Mexican Navy were wounded. R2 remained hospitalized on Monday after the operation, which forms part of a broader campaign targeting senior figures within the CJNG, including the death of its founder and leader, Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, in February 2026.

Security analysts consulted by EL PAÍS argue that, for a Mexican government facing mounting pressure from the United States, the criminal organization has become the country’s top target.

Sources involved in the operation told EL PAÍS that R2 and his associates had been partying for hours inside a restaurant that had been closed to the public for their private event, with a live banda band performing. Authorities accuse R2 of serving as the CJNG’s chief in the area. He underwent surgery for gunshot wounds at a hospital in Guadalajara, while members of the Navy and the National Guard guarded the surrounding area.

“Mexican and U.S. agencies are completely focused on the Jalisco New Generation Cartel because it is the largest criminal organization in Mexico and poses the greatest risks,” says Eduardo Guerrero, a security analyst and director of the consultancy Lantia Intelligence.

After Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration spent its first year “trying to contain and stabilize the violence in Sinaloa,” he says, its second year saw priorities shift decisively toward the cartel. According to Lantia’s data, the organization has “around 122 subordinate or allied groups that answer to the cartel’s leadership.”

Although authorities had been targeting the CJNG for months, the February 2026 capture of El Mencho was the first major breakthrough of the security strategy pursued by Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and Security Minister Omar García Harfuch.

After a six-year administration defined by former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s “hugs, not bullets” approach, the arrest of a drug lord who had eluded justice for decades during an operation in the mountains of Jalisco, carried out by Mexican authorities with U.S. intelligence support, was a stark and widely applauded contrast.

The arrests continued. In April, authorities captured Audias Flores Silva, known as “El Jardinero,” one of El Mencho’s trusted lieutenants. In July, they detained Ramón Álvarez Ayala, alias “R1,” the alleged mastermind behind the killing of politician Carlos Manzo. September brought the arrest of Manuel Alejandro Rendón Aguilar, known as “El Señor de la T,” the cartel’s alleged regional coordinator in Michoacán.

A month later, authorities captured Iván Cazarín Molina, alias “El Tanque,” who allegedly oversaw the group’s operations in the states of Veracruz, Oaxaca, Tabasco and Puebla, as well as dismantling the entire network of Iván Sánchez Santiago, known as “El Cromo,” in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

The Jalisco New Generation Cartel is widely regarded as Mexico’s most powerful criminal organization, particularly since the internal war within the Sinaloa Cartel weakened its longtime rival. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) describes the CJNG as one of the world’s “most powerful, influential and ruthless” criminal organizations. According to Mexican authorities, intelligence provided by the DEA played a key role in locating R2.

According to Manuel Balcázar, a security consultant and associate researcher at the Center for Studies on Security, Intelligence and Governance at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico (ITAM), “These arrests are the result of binational cooperation, since in every case there has been a continuous exchange of information and intelligence with U.S. agencies, a joint effort that responds to the cartel’s active expansion of operations beyond the American continent.”

Balcázar points to recent operations in Spain, Ecuador, Nigeria and South Africa as evidence of what he calls “Crime 4.0”: “By that I mean that crime no longer operates as a transnational criminal group but as a company, a global criminal holding that allows it to keep functioning like a franchise even when leaders fall.”

According to the 2024 National Drug Threat Assessment published by the DEA, “The franchise model permits each semi-independent group to customize its operations according to specific areas of expertise (for example, running clandestine methamphetamine labs) or market demands, provided they comply with naming, branding, and organizational structure requirements, and follow the general direction handed down by Jalisco Cartel leadership.” The report adds that the cartel “does not pay the operating costs of its franchises but does collect a percentage of overall profits.”

R2 inherited leadership of the CJNG’s “Los R’s” cell after his brother, Ramón Ángel Álvarez Ayala, was arrested for allegedly masterminding the murder of Carlos Manzo, the mayor of Uruapan. The brothers had previously been arrested in Guadalajara in 2012, when authorities identified them as senior figures within the criminal organization. Both reportedly received orders directly from El Mencho and oversaw the group’s operations in Michoacán and parts of Jalisco.

Guerrero argues that Michoacán has become a top priority for the United States because of its importance to U.S. food supply chains, particularly for products such as avocados, limes and berries, and that it has turned into a testing ground for new security strategies.

According to Guerrero, “In this state, Mexican and U.S. authorities are testing a comprehensive strategy aimed at systematically weakening criminal organizations on multiple fronts — financial, logistical and human — in an effort to prevent them from regenerating so quickly. The goal is no longer temporary disruption, but the permanent dismantling of a cell or an organization.” Whether that strategy will ultimately succeed, he cautions, remains uncertain.

That uncertainty is, in the end, the central question. For Balcázar, significantly weakening the CJNG, given its quasi-corporate structure, requires action on three fronts. The first is to sustain the current operational pressure over time: “to continue for another two years before we can truly say its capabilities have been affected.” The second is to target the cartel’s finances by “working in parallel through financial intelligence, because behind all this criminal activity there are undoubtedly bank accounts, investments and tax havens.” The third is to go after its political connections.

On this last point, Guerrero agrees. “Without links between the criminal world and the political world, it is very difficult for organized crime to be as successful as it is in Mexico,” he explains. “The United States has pressured Mexico heavily, and Mexico has responded well to that pressure, except when it comes to politicians linked to [the governing party] Morena who are also connected to some criminal organization. And there is a group of politicians in the inner circle of the former president [Andrés Manuel López Obrador] who are untouchable.”

Guerrero notes that when lower-level officials, such as mayors, are involved, authorities will sometimes allow investigations to proceed. But when the figures are more influential, “such as sitting governors or politicians seeking governor’s offices,” he says, that is where the line is drawn.

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