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The dying of Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, the chief of the Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), on February 22, was instantly framed as the autumn of a narco kingpin.
Photographs of gun battles, torched autos and retaliatory violence dominated headlines. Commentators spoke of an influence vacuum, of fragmentation, of the doable weakening of one among Mexico’s largest cartels.
It was introduced because the removing of a singular, hyper-violent male determine on the apex of a legal empire. However this framing tells us extra about how we think about organised crime than about the way it truly works.
The obsession with kingpins rests on a dramatic understanding of cartel energy: a gun in a single hand, territory within the different, masculinity carried out by way of brutality. El Mencho embodied that picture.
But cartels should not sustained by spectacle alone. They endure as a result of somebody strikes the cash, launders the income, manages the property, cultivates official fronts and binds networks of loyalty by way of household. Within the case of CJNG, that determine was not solely El Mencho. It was additionally, allegedly, his spouse, Rosalinda González Valencia.
González has usually been described as “La Jefa” (the Spanish female type of “the boss”). It’s a label that gestures towards authority whereas nonetheless situating her in relation to her husband. However she was not merely the partner of a drug lord. She got here from the Valencia household, traditionally linked to Los Cuinis, a community deeply embedded in CJNG’s monetary operations.
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Authorities have alleged that she oversaw dozens of companies, property holdings and shell corporations tied to the cartel’s laundering equipment. Arrested a number of occasions and jailed for 5 yr for cash laundering in 2021 (she was launched final yearfor good behaviour), she occupied the gray zone the place legal capital bleeds into the authorized economic system.
If El Mencho represented the cartel’s violent face, González represented its financial backbone.
That is the place gender issues. Organised crime is routinely portrayed as an enviornment of exaggerated masculinity. Girls seem in these tales as victims, girlfriends, trafficked our bodies or glamorous equipment.
Even when they’re prosecuted, they’re usually framed as appendages: “the spouse of”, “the daughter of”, “the accomplice of”. Such language, whereas usually troublesome to keep away from, obscures the structural actuality that many cartels function by way of kinship capitalism, the place household shouldn’t be sentimental however strategic.
Inside these programs, wives should not incidental. They assist maintain the enterprise secrets and techniques in environments the place betrayal is deadly. In patriarchal legal orders, loyalty is policed by way of blood ties.
A partner managing accounts shouldn’t be a deviation from energy however an extension of it. Gender doesn’t exclude ladies from authority, however quite reshapes how that authority is exercised and perceived.
The sensational reality is that this: violence might conquer territory, however finance governs it. And, because the Worldwide Disaster Group – a western non-government organisation which goals to stop battle – spelled out in a 2023 report, finance in lots of cartels is deeply gendered.
This doesn’t imply romanticising ladies’s roles inside organised crime. Nor does it counsel emancipation by way of criminality.
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The facility reportedly exercised by figures like González tends to be located inside male-dominated hierarchies and violent programs which might be additionally chargeable for excessive types of violence in opposition to ladies, together with femicide and sexual exploitation. The identical buildings that enable elite ladies to wield monetary authority concurrently reproduce brutal patriarchal management elsewhere. That contradiction shouldn’t be unintended – it’s the manner issues work.
El Mencho’s dying exposes that contradiction. When the state removes a male chief, the belief is that the organisation will collapse or descend into chaos. However cartels should not merely constructed round a single dominant determine. They’re hybrid enterprises combining coercion, company buildings and household governance. The removing of the general public face doesn’t robotically dismantle the non-public structure.
Hidden energy construction
The query, then, shouldn’t be merely who will choose up the gun, however who retains the books. Who maintains the company fronts? Who sustains cross-border monetary channels? Who negotiates the transformation of illicit income into official capital? These should not secondary considerations. They decide whether or not an organisation fragments or adapts to a pacesetter’s dying or imprisonment.
By centring El Mencho alone, media narratives are perpetuating a blindness to the function of ladies in cartels. They equate energy with violence and masculinity with management, leaving the financial and relational dimensions of authority under-analysed.
But organised crime research more and more display that sturdiness lies in governance, not gunfire. Governance will depend on administration, monetary oversight, logistical coordination, and embedded social networks. These features are sometimes feminised – not as a result of ladies are naturally suited to them, however as a result of patriarchal programs allocate them in ways in which render them much less conspicuous and due to this fact much less focused.
There’s something unsettling about recognising the strategic authority of cartel wives. It complicates snug binaries of sufferer and perpetrator. It challenges the concept ladies in violent programs are both coerced or simply marginal figures.
In regards to the writer
Adriana Marin is a Lecturer in Worldwide Relations at Coventry College.
This text is republished from The Dialog underneath a Artistic Commons license. Learn the unique article.
However in Italy, Rafaella D’Alterio reportedly maintained the operational and monetary coherence of her Camorra clan following her husband’s dying. She did this – not by way of spectacular violence – however by way of administrative management, alliance-building, and household networks. Her case, as many others, underscores that sturdiness usually lies in governance quite than gunfire.
Decapitation methods – killing a cartel’s chief – are politically dramatic and symbolically highly effective. However they relaxation on the belief that legal organisations are vertically depending on a single male. If monetary governance and kinship networks stay intact, the system might regenerate.
El Mencho’s dying is due to this fact each a rupture and a revelation. It’s a rupture within the sense that the figurehead of one of many world’s strongest cartels has fallen. However it is usually a revelation of how slim our understanding of organised crime stays.
We fixate on the spectacle of masculine violence whereas overlooking the quieter, gendered infrastructures that maintain it. To grasp cartels solely by way of their kingpins is to misconceive them. Energy in organised crime doesn’t reside solely within the man with the gun, but additionally within the ladies who, whether or not publicly acknowledged or not, usually stand on the centre of that structure.
