Beyond the Kingpin: The Economic Spine of Cartels
The violent death of Nemesio "El Mencho" Oseguera Cervantes, leader of the Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), on February 22nd, 2026, was immediately portrayed as the dramatic fall of a narco kingpin. Media coverage focused on gun battles, torched vehicles, and retaliatory violence, with commentators predicting power vacuums and fragmentation within one of Mexico's most powerful criminal organizations.
This narrative centered on the removal of a singular, hyper-violent male figure at the apex of a criminal empire. However, this framing reveals more about societal perceptions of organized crime than about its actual operational realities. The obsession with kingpins relies on a dramatic understanding of cartel power: a gun in one hand, territory in the other, with masculinity performed through extreme brutality. El Mencho perfectly embodied that stereotypical image.
The Hidden Architecture of Criminal Enterprises
Yet cartels are not sustained by violent spectacle alone. They endure because sophisticated systems move money, launder profits, manage assets, cultivate legitimate business fronts, and bind networks of loyalty through family connections. In the case of CJNG, that critical figure was not only El Mencho but also, allegedly, his wife Rosalinda González Valencia.
González has frequently been described as "La Jefa" - the Spanish feminine form of "the boss." This label acknowledges authority while still situating her in relation to her husband. However, she was far more than just a drug lord's spouse. She originated from the influential Valencia family, historically linked to Los Cuinis, a network deeply embedded in CJNG's financial operations.
Authorities have alleged that González oversaw dozens of businesses, property holdings, and shell companies connected to the cartel's money laundering apparatus. Arrested multiple times and jailed for five years for money laundering in 2021 (released last year for good behavior), she operated in the grey zone where criminal capital bleeds into the legitimate economy.
Gendered Power Structures in Organized Crime
If El Mencho represented the cartel's violent public face, González represented its economic spine. This distinction highlights how gender matters significantly in organized crime. Criminal enterprises are routinely portrayed as arenas of exaggerated masculinity, with women appearing in narratives as victims, girlfriends, trafficked bodies, or glamorous accessories.
Even when women face prosecution, they are often framed as appendages: "the wife of," "the daughter of," "the partner of." Such language, while sometimes unavoidable, obscures the structural reality that many cartels operate through kinship capitalism, where family relationships serve strategic rather than sentimental purposes.
Within these systems, wives are not incidental figures. They help safeguard business secrets in environments where betrayal carries fatal consequences. In patriarchal criminal orders, loyalty is policed through blood ties and marital bonds. A spouse managing financial accounts represents not a deviation from power but an extension of it. Gender does not exclude women from authority but rather reshapes how that authority is exercised and perceived by both insiders and outsiders.
Finance Governs Where Violence Conquers
The uncomfortable truth is this: violence may conquer territory, but finance governs it. As the International Crisis Group detailed in a 2023 report, financial operations within many cartels are deeply gendered. This observation does not romanticize women's roles within organized crime nor suggest emancipation through criminality.
The power reportedly exercised by figures like González typically exists within male-dominated hierarchies and violent systems that also perpetuate extreme violence against women, including femicide and sexual exploitation. The same structures that allow elite women to wield financial authority simultaneously reproduce brutal patriarchal control elsewhere. This contradiction is not accidental but fundamental to how these organizations function.
Decapitation Strategies and Their Limitations
El Mencho's death exposes this contradiction vividly. When state authorities remove a male leader, the assumption follows that the organization will collapse or descend into chaos. However, cartels represent hybrid enterprises combining coercion, corporate structures, and family governance. Removing the public face does not automatically dismantle the private architecture.
The critical question becomes not simply who will pick up the gun, but who keeps the financial books. Who maintains corporate fronts? Who sustains cross-border financial channels? Who negotiates the transformation of illicit profits into legitimate capital? These are not secondary concerns but primary determinants of whether an organization fragments or adapts to a leader's death or imprisonment.
By focusing exclusively on El Mencho, media narratives perpetuate blindness toward women's roles in cartels. They equate power with violence and masculinity with control, leaving the economic and relational dimensions of authority under-analyzed. Yet organized crime studies increasingly demonstrate that durability lies in governance rather than gunfire.
Comparative Perspectives on Criminal Governance
Governance depends on management, financial oversight, logistical coordination, and embedded social networks. These functions are often feminized - not because women are naturally suited to them, but because patriarchal systems allocate them in ways that render these activities less conspicuous and therefore less targeted by law enforcement.
There is something profoundly unsettling about recognizing the strategic authority of cartel wives. It complicates comfortable binaries of victim and perpetrator. It challenges the notion that women in violent systems are either coerced or merely marginal figures. In Italy, for example, Rafaella D'Alterio reportedly maintained the operational and financial coherence of her Camorra clan following her husband's death. She achieved this not through spectacular violence but through administrative control, alliance-building, and family networks.
Her case, like many others, underscores that durability often lies in governance rather than gunfire. Decapitation strategies - killing a cartel's leader - are politically dramatic and symbolically powerful. However, they rest on the flawed assumption that criminal organizations are vertically dependent on a single male figure. If financial governance and kinship networks remain intact, the system possesses remarkable regenerative capacity.
A Rupture and a Revelation
El Mencho's death represents both a rupture and a revelation. It marks a rupture in the sense that the figurehead of one of the world's most powerful cartels has fallen. Simultaneously, it reveals how narrow our understanding of organized crime remains. Society fixates on the spectacle of masculine violence while overlooking the quieter, gendered infrastructures that sustain criminal enterprises.
To understand cartels solely through their kingpins is to fundamentally misunderstand them. Power in organized crime does not reside exclusively in the man with the gun, but also in the women who, whether publicly acknowledged or not, often stand at the center of that architecture, managing the economic systems that allow violence to translate into enduring criminal enterprise.
