I don’t think we’re going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war.
I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country.
>> Well, developing tonight, chaos in Mexico after one of the most wanted cartel leaders in the country was killed in a military operation.
>> The Mexican army killed the most powerful cartel leader in the country >> >> and one of the United States most wanted fugitives on Sunday, notching a major victory.
Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, better known as El Mencho, had ties to organized crime that spanned back at least three decades.
He was killed during an attempt to capture him as his followers attempted to fight off Mexican troops.
>> February 22nd, 2026.
A woman drives up a mountain road and walks into a cabin to meet her boyfriend.
Six hours later, Mexican special forces drop out of helicopters and kill the most wanted man on Earth.
His name was El Mencho.
>> >> His bounty was $15 million and the United States and the United States just rewrote the rules of war.
This is the story of how in just 18 months America stopped treating Mexican cartels like criminals and started hunting them like terrorists.
It is also the story of how that strategy is delivering numbers nobody in Washington thought were possible.
Fentanyl seizures down by half, overdose deaths dropping by tens of thousands, and the biggest kingpin since Pablo Escobar in a body bag.
Yet, this is only just beginning.
>> This is actually an executive order designating the cartels and other organizations to be foreign terrorist organizations.
>> That’s a big one.
>> Yes, sir.
>> January 20th, 2025.
>> >> Donald Trump walks into the Oval Office on day one of his second term, sits down at the Resolute Desk, and signs Executive Order 13157.
Most people did not notice.
>> >> They were watching the inauguration.
They were arguing about immigration.
They were not paying attention to a piece of paper that would, in less than a year, get the most powerful drug lord on the planet killed in a cabin in the mountains.
That executive order did one simple thing.
It directed the State Department to designate the Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.
Same legal category as ISIS.
Same legal category as Al-Qaeda.
Same legal category as the Taliban.
It sounds technical, but the consequences were anything but.
>> Donald J.
Trump was elected the President of the United States and he promised that if [clears throat] elected he would go after drug cartels and that’s what he’s doing.
He’s He is He is He is keeping a promise he made to the American people.
>> 31 days later, on February 20th, 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio made it official.
Eight criminal organizations were added to the list.
The Sinaloa Cartel, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, the Gulf Cartel, the Northeast Cartel, formerly known as Los Zetas, the New Michoacán Family, the United Cartels, MS-13, and Tren de Aragua.
Within 24 hours, the legal landscape under every cartel boss in Mexico had changed completely.
Now, here is why this matters.
Before this, if the DEA caught a cartel member moving fentanyl, that was a drug crime.
The penalty was prison, maybe extradition.
The cartel made billions, lost a few foot soldiers, and kept going.
It was a business expense.
After this, a cartel member moving fentanyl was a terrorist.
The penalty was life and in some cases death.
American companies doing business with anyone connected to the cartels, banks, real estate firms, freight companies, even law firms, faced criminal prosecution under terrorism statutes.
Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memo authorizing the use of narcoterrorism charges which carry mandatory minimum sentences a regular drug case never would.
And most importantly, the United States military was now legally allowed to do things it could never do before.
Things like, for example, blowing boats out of the water.
>> New video posted by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appears to show a speedboat half loaded with large black bundles slicing through the waves.
A flash of bright light followed by an explosion, then the vessel engulfed in flames.
>> September 2025, a small fishing boat is moving through the Caribbean Sea somewhere between Venezuela and the Dominican Republic.
Three men are aboard.
From above, a US Navy P-3 Orion surveillance plane has been watching them for hours.
Feeding live video back to a command post hundreds of miles away.
Then, a missile hits the boat.
There is no Coast Guard interdiction.
There is no boarding.
There is no arrest.
There is no Miranda warning.
There is nothing left of the boat except debris and a slick of fuel on the water.
This was the first publicly known strike of an operation that would, over the next 9 months, kill at least 189 people.
They called it Operation Southern Spear.
Led by Marine Corps General Francis Donovan out of US Southern Command, the operation pulled in resources from across the entire US military.
F-35 stealth fighters were deployed to Puerto Rico.
The Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group sailed into the Caribbean.
Marines from the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit were positioned offshore.
The targets were boats.
Specifically, boats that US intelligence had identified as belonging to designated terrorist organizations.
The method was simple.
Find the boat, confirm the boat, destroy the boat.
By February 2026, the strikes had become so routine that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth admitted something remarkable.
They had gone weeks without finding a single boat to sink.
Not because the strikes had stopped, but because the cartels had stopped sending boats.
Operation Southern Spear had created what military planners call deterrence.
And what cartels call going out of business.
The legal questions, though, did not go away.
Critics inside Congress and the International Crisis Group argued these were extrajudicial killings.
The US never released evidence the boats actually carried drugs.
People who could have been arrested were instead vaporized.
The administration’s response was a shrug.
These were terrorists now, and terrorists, legally speaking, do not get arrested.
They get hunted.
>> Our job here at the Pentagon, when you think about it, is to prepare for the threats of the future and build a force to match them and defeat them.
And that’s why today I’m directing the Secretary of the Army to formally establish the Joint Interagency Task Force 401, or JIATF 401.
>> While the boats burned, something quieter was happening.
In late 2025, a new task force was created.
Most Americans have never heard of it.
It does not hold press conferences.
It does not have a public website.
It is called the Joint Interagency Task Force 401.
Its job is simple.
Map the cartels.
Every member, every cousin, every safe house, every shell company, every romantic partner, every banker, every corrupt cop, every mayor on the payroll.
CIA drones were already flying over Mexico, approved by President Sheinbaum’s government.
Now their feeds were being cross-referenced with phone intercepts, financial records, and informant testimony from both sides of the border.
The cartels had spent decades treating American intelligence like a hostile foreign army.
They had layered their organizations like onions with cell structures designed to survive arrests, deaths, and betrayals.
And now an American task force was peeling those onions one layer at a time.
The man on top of the highest priority list was Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, otherwise known as El Mencho.
>> For the first time, cartel kingpin El Mencho tonight is a $15 million man.
That is the US government reward just increased and placed on the head of Ruben Oseguera Cervantes, alias El Mencho.
>> To understand why El Mencho’s death changed the landscape of every cartel in Mexico, you have to understand who he was.
El Mencho started his career as a police officer in Mexico in the 1990s.
He worked in the state of Jalisco.
He was fired for corruption, and at some point he crossed the line nobody comes back from.
He drifted into the Millenio Cartel, a mid-tier organization with ties to the Sinaloa Federation.
When that one collapsed in the late 2000s, he helped found a new outfit, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, CJNG.
At first, nobody paid attention.
CJNG was small, regional, a bunch of guys in pickup trucks selling meth in the hills outside Guadalajara.
Then El Chapo was arrested in 2014.
The Sinaloa Cartel started cracking.
El Mencho saw the opportunity, and he took it.
Within 5 years, CJNG had expanded to every corner of Mexico, into Australia, China, Southeast Asia, and dozens of American cities.
>> >> They trafficked fentanyl, methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin at a scale that made the old kingpins look small-time.
By 2018, CJNG was running more than 100 methamphetamine superlabs across Mexico.
Annual revenue estimates ran into the tens of billions of dollars, and he was ruthless.
CJNG was the cartel that shot down a Mexican military helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade, killing nine soldiers on board.
CJNG was the cartel that ambushed and tried to assassinate the police chief of Mexico City in broad daylight, killing two of his bodyguards.
CJNG was the cartel that left dismembered bodies hanging from highway overpasses with handwritten notes, warnings to anyone thinking about cooperating with the authorities.
By 2025, the US Department of State was offering $15 million for information leading to his arrest.
The highest bounty ever placed on a Mexican drug lord, higher than the bounty on El Chapo, higher than the bounty on Pablo Escobar in his prime.
And for 15 years, >> >> nobody could find him.
He moved constantly.
He never used a phone.
He communicated only through trusted couriers using paper notes that were burned after reading.
He met only with a tiny inner circle of childhood friends and blood relatives.
He lived in remote mountain compounds with armed guards, kept watch by surveillance, and ringed with anti-aircraft weapons.
He had survived four assassination attempts, two presidential administrations on both sides of the border, and a dozen American intelligence agencies.
And then, he made one mistake.
He fell in love.
>> In an assessment of Sunday’s military operation to capture Nemesio Oseguera.
Mexican authorities on Monday said a visit from a romantic partner was ultimately what led to his apprehension.
>> February 20th, 2026.
Mexican military intelligence, using information shared by the new American task force, identified a man in a small town in Jalisco.
He was not a cartel boss.
>> >> He was not even a sicario.
He was a driver.
Specifically, he was the driver of one of El Mencho’s romantic partners, a woman who that very afternoon was being taken on a long careful route up into the mountains around the town of Tapalpa, 2 hours southwest of Guadalajara.
Her destination was a luxurious cabin in the forest >> >> hidden among the cedar trees.
Inside the cabin, El Mencho was waiting.
Mexican special forces moved quickly.
To avoid tipping them off, they deployed their cordons in neighboring states, not Jalisco.
They knew his lookouts were everywhere in Jalisco.
Instead, troops were positioned in Colima, in Michoacán, in Zacatecas, a perimeter that did not look like a perimeter.
The Air Force scrambled six helicopters.
The Brigada de Fusileros Paracaidistas, the paratrooper special forces, got the call.
Through Saturday night, the woman stayed with El Mencho in the cabin.
Then, in the early hours of Sunday morning, she left.
He stayed.
That was the window.
Just before dawn on February 22nd, the helicopters came in low over the mountains.
Soldiers established a perimeter around the cabin and started closing in.
And then everything went sideways.
El Mencho’s security detail opened fire first, not with pistols, with rocket-propelled grenade launchers, with .
50 caliber machine guns, with anti-aircraft weapons that should not be in the hands of any criminal organization in the world.
Mexican soldiers later told reporters they had never seen a cartel firefight like it.
>> >> The cabin was not just a cabin, it was a fortress.
One of the Mexican helicopters took heavy fire from the ground and was forced into an emergency landing in a clearing nearby.
Three Mexican soldiers went down in the opening exchange.
Bullets shredded the trees around the perimeter and the soldiers were taking fire from multiple positions on the property.
Inside the cabin, El Mencho was screaming orders.
Eight of his most trusted bodyguards, sicarios who had been with him since the early days, held the front while he tried to run.
He bolted out the back door with two of his closest men.
The plan was to disappear into the dense forest behind the cabin.
The same kind of terrain that had saved him a dozen times before.
He knew these mountains.
He had grown up in country like this.
The trees were thick, the undergrowth was thick.
He just needed a few minutes and a few hundred meters of cover.
Mexican special forces followed.
They found him hiding in the underbrush.
The final firefight was short.
El Mencho took multiple rounds to the chest and abdomen.
Both of his bodyguards were killed beside him.
He was loaded into one of the helicopters, bleeding badly, and flown toward a military hospital in Mexico City.
He never made it.
At a press conference the following morning, Defense Secretary Ricardo Treviño Trejo confirmed the death.
He stood next to President Claudia Sheinbaum and announced that the operation had been a triumph for Mexican sovereignty, carried out by Mexican forces on Mexican soil with intelligence assistance from the United States.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed the American role within hours.
US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau called El Mencho one of the bloodiest and most ruthless drug kingpins the hemisphere had ever produced.
He added one more line that would echo through every cartel boardroom that night.
“The good guys,” he said, “are stronger than the bad guys.
” And then the cartel answered.
>> Well, tonight tourists and Americans living in Mexico are being warned to stay off the streets and stay inside.
At least 73 people are dead in Mexico’s attempt to capture notorious cartel kingpin El Mencho in the violent aftermath of his death.
>> Within hours of El Mencho’s death, CJNG sicarios were mobilizing across western and central Mexico.
The order came down from El Mencho’s right-hand man, a sicario commander named Hugo César Macías Ureña.
He went by the nickname El Tuli.
He put a bounty on every Mexican soldier in Jalisco, cash for confirmed kills.
The retaliation was unlike anything Mexico had ever seen.
Across 20 states, gunmen set fire to buses, semis, and convenience stores.
Burning vehicles were dragged across highways to create roadblocks.
Tire spike strips appeared on major roads.
>> >> Gas stations in Guadalajara were torched.
Schools shut down across half the country.
The US Embassy issued shelter-in-place orders for American citizens in Jalisco, Tamaulipas, Michoacán, Guerrero, and Nuevo León.
Airlines canceled flights into Puerto Vallarta.
25 Mexican National Guard officers were killed in coordinated ambushes.
A jail guard was murdered.
A state prosecutor’s agent was shot dead.
By the end of Monday, more than 252 cartel roadblocks were burning across the country.
Guadalajara, a city of 5 million people and a host venue for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, was turned into a ghost town overnight.
Streets emptied, tourists hid in hotel rooms, locals stayed inside and watched the smoke.
And then, just as suddenly as the violence had started, it stopped.
By Tuesday afternoon, Mexican special forces had killed El Tule during another raid.
With him dead, the chain of command broke.
10,000 additional Mexican troops were flooding into Jalisco.
The roadblocks were cleared, the fires were put out.
The CJNG had just made a strategic catastrophe by showing the world how much disruptive power it still had.
The cartel guaranteed that the world would not look away.
Trump took to Truth Social with a single line that read, “Mexico must step up their effort on cartels and drugs.
” Three days later, the Trump administration began drafting plans for the next phase.
American special operations forces on Mexican soil.
While one empire burned, another aided itself.
And here is the wild part.
While the CJNG was tearing itself apart over El Mencho’s empty throne, its biggest rival was already 3 years into its own civil war.
>> Tonight, after decades of evading authorities, two alleged leaders of Mexico’s most brutal and powerful drug cartel are in US custody.
>> Rewind to July 25th, 2024.
A small private plane lands at an airport outside El Paso, Texas.
American agents swarm the runway.
They are not there to arrest a passenger.
They are there to receive one.
Inside the plane is Ismael Zambada, El Mayo, the man who had run the Sinaloa Cartel alongside El Chapo for 40 years.
The legend, >> >> the strategist, the man who had outlasted every Mexican president, every DEA administrator, every rival kingpin since the 1980s.
The man who had never, in five decades of leading one of the most powerful criminal organizations in human history, spent a single day in jail.
And the man sitting G next to him is Joaquin Guzman Lopez, one of El Chapo’s own sons, the Chapitos, the faction that had inherited the empire after their father went to prison.
According to El Mayo’s own account, he had been tricked.
The Chapitos had told him there was a meeting with a politician in Mexico in the state of Sinaloa about a local dispute that needed to be settled.
He boarded a private plane.
Instead of taking him to the meeting, they flew him directly to Texas and handed him over to the Americans.
They had betrayed the founding father of the cartel.
Why? Probably because the Chapitos knew sooner or later somebody was going to be extradited.
Better El Mayo than them.
And when news of the betrayal hit the Sinaloa Highlands, the cartel split in half.
September 9th, 2024.
Open warfare erupted in Culiacan, the spiritual capital of the Sinaloa cartel.
On one side, Los Chapitos, the sons of El Chapo.
On the other, La Mayiza, the loyalists of El Mayo, led by his own son, Mayito Flaco.
What followed was the bloodiest internal war in Mexican cartel history.
Over the next 18 months, more than 4,000 people died or disappeared.
Gang on gang clashes quadrupled.
Whole villages were emptied.
Bodies were left hanging from bridges with handwritten signs identifying which side they had been on.
By mid 2025, Mexican officials were reporting that the Sinaloa cartel had lost control of 30 of its 42 major distribution routes.
11,000 Mexican army and national guard personnel were stationed in Sinaloa state.
1,500 cartel-affiliated arrests were made between October 2024 and July 2025 alone.
By the end of 2025, only two senior Chapitos commanders were still at large.
Then, on April 29th, 2026, the US Department of Justice indicted the sitting governor of Sinaloa, Ruben Rocha Moya, for alleged ties to the cartel.
This was unprecedented.
A sitting Mexican governor, a member of President Sheinbaum’s own ruling party, charged by American prosecutors as a cartel asset.
The political earthquake was immediate.
Sheinbaum was forced to defend her government, defend her party, and defend the integrity of an entire state simultaneously.
And the Trump administration just kept escalating.
Here is what 18 months of unrelenting pressure has actually produced.
>> >> Pay attention to these numbers because they are what changes everything.
Fentanyl seizures at the US-Mexico border dropped 53% in the first 6 months of 2025 compared to 2024.
12,000 lb of fentanyl seized that year, less than half the amount seized in 2023.
Customs and Border Protection seized over 100 million doses of fentanyl in just 7 months between October 2025 and April 2026.
To put that in perspective, 100 million doses is roughly enough fentanyl to kill the entire population of Mexico three times over.
Methamphetamine seizures in the first quarter of fiscal year 2026 alone exceeded all of fiscal year 2025 combined.
28,000 lb of cocaine seized in the same quarter, 6,000 lb more than the previous year.
In November 2025, the US Coast Guard Cutter Stone offloaded a single seizure of more than 21,000 kg of cocaine, the largest narcotic seizure by a single cutter on a single patrol in American history.
The DEA administrator personally flew out to meet the ship at the dock.
And the most important number of all, American overdose deaths from fentanyl dropped from nearly 80,000 in 2023 to just over 50,000 in 2024.
The trend continued into 2025 and 2026.
That is tens of thousands of Americans who are alive today who would have died under the old strategy.
Tens of thousands of families that did not have to bury a son or a daughter or a brother or a wife.
In August 2025, the Mexican government extradited 26 top cartel leaders to the United States in a single deal, one of the largest mass extraditions in modern history.
They were flown out together on a chartered American jet, hands and feet shackled, hoods over their heads.
In a single morning, Mexico handed America almost an entire generation of cartel leadership.
Now, here is the thing nobody in the White House wants to talk about loudly.
Cartels are adapting.
>> Because they’re killing Americans, right? >> What is the difference between fentanyl and carfentanil? >> It’s basically the potency potency of the drug.
>> >> One’s an animal tranquilizer, has no human consumption >> So, there’s no human use for carfentanil at all.
>> As Chinese fentanyl precursors got harder to obtain due to a Beijing crackdown, the cartel switched to something worse, carfentanil, a synthetic opioid 100 times stronger than fentanyl, and 10,000 times stronger than morphine.
The amount that fits on the head of a pin can kill an adult.
It is so potent it was originally developed to tranquilize elephants.
Carfentanil seizures across the United States have surged dramatically in 2026.
The same families who lost loved ones to fentanyl are now burying loved ones to a drug 10,000 times deadlier.
The overall overdose numbers are dropping, but the lethality per dose is climbing.
Some toxicologists worry that the next wave of overdose, says when it comes, will hit harder and faster than anything America has seen before.
And the cartels have started laundering money through of all things exotic animal trafficking, selling jellyfish to buyers in China, smuggling rare birds, trafficking endangered reptiles.
Sarah Carter, Trump’s drug czar, confirmed this in a Washington Times interview.
The cartels are looking for new choke points to exploit, new markets to corrupt, new ways to keep the money moving while their old infrastructure burns.
Because here is what the body counts and the seizure numbers actually mean.
The cartels are not dying.
They are mutating.
The Sinaloa cartel is fractured, but the pieces are still there.
CJNG lost its founder, but his lieutenants, including a California-born stepson, are still moving fentanyl into American suburbs.
The Chapitos and CJNG may now be in talks for an alliance, a possibility that six months ago would have seemed impossible.
Smaller cartels like the Cartel Unidos and the Gulf Cartel are circling the weakened giants, looking to fill the vacuum and claim the trafficking routes nobody else can defend right now.
And the question that nobody, not Trump, not Shinbon, not the Pentagon, not the DEA, can answer honestly yet is this.
Will the next generation of cartel leaders be weaker and more cautious because of what happened to El Mencho? Or will they be smaller, more violent, more decentralized, and harder to find than ever? History has answered that question
before.
When Pablo Escobar was killed in 1993, his Medellín Cartel did not disappear.
It splintered and the Cali Cartel that replaced it became the largest cocaine trafficking organization in human history.
But would that have happened if American President Donald Trump was in office? Today, El Mencho is dead.
Think about how impossible this would have sounded 5 to 7 years ago.
An American intelligence task force working out of a building in the United States tracking a Mexican cartel boss through his girlfriend’s driver.
>> >> Mexican special forces deploying paratroopers based on that intelligence.
A White House press secretary confirming the assist within hours.
A Mexican president defending the operation as a triumph for her own sovereignty.
5 years ago, any one of those things would have started a diplomatic crisis.
Now they happen in the same afternoon and barely make the front page.
This was not the old war on drugs.
The old war on drugs was DEA agents in suits making arrests in warehouses.
The old war on drugs was treaties, summits, and press conferences.
The old war on drugs was a hundred billion dollars and 40 years of failure.
This is something new.
The cartels are terrorists now, legally and operationally.
They are hunted with military assets.
They are killed with missile strikes.
Their leaders are picked off by intelligence networks that did not exist 18 months ago.
Their financial pipelines are being strangled by sanctions powerful enough to bankrupt a small country.
Their precursor chemical supply chains are being broken by international pressure on Beijing.
And the men who used to think they were untouchable are quietly moving their families to Europe, to Dubai, to places where the missiles cannot reach yet.
Whether this works long-term, whether it actually breaks the cartels or just splinters them into something worse, nobody knows yet.
>> >> The body count is real.
The seizure numbers are real.
The dead kingpins are real.
American overdose deaths are dropping for the first time in a generation.
And the questions are still open.
But the fact is the rules have changed.
The cartels can no longer count on being too profitable to attack, too connected to be touched, or too violent to be confronted.
The same legal framework that took down Bin Laden in Abbottabad is now being used to take down Mexican kingpins in cabins in the mountains.
And every cartel boss left alive in Mexico tonight knows it.
Somewhere a quiet American task force is mapping his girlfriend’s routine.
Somewhere a P-3 Orion is watching a boat.
Somewhere a missile is being prepared.
And the question is no longer whether the cartels can be touched.
The question is who is next.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
