The Fall of a Kingpin and the Rise of Hidden Power
The violent death of Nemesio "El Mencho" Oseguera Cervantes, the notorious leader of the Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), on February 22, 2026, was immediately portrayed as the dramatic collapse of a narco empire. Media coverage fixated on images of gun battles, burning vehicles, and retaliatory attacks, with analysts predicting a power vacuum and the potential fragmentation of one of Mexico's most formidable criminal organizations.
This narrative centered on the removal of a singular, hyper-violent male figure at the pinnacle of a brutal enterprise. However, this framing reveals more about our collective imagination of organized crime than its actual operational realities. The obsession with kingpins relies on a theatrical conception of cartel power: a man with a gun in one hand and territory in the other, performing masculinity through sheer brutality. El Mencho perfectly embodied that archetype.
The Economic Spine of the Cartel
Yet cartels are not sustained by spectacle and violence alone. Their endurance depends on complex financial systems: moving vast sums of money, laundering enormous profits, managing diverse assets, cultivating legitimate business fronts, and binding networks of loyalty through familial ties. For the CJNG, this critical function was allegedly performed not only by El Mencho but also by his wife, Rosalinda González Valencia.
Often referred to as "La Jefa" (the feminine form of "the boss"), González is frequently described in relation to her husband. However, she was far more than just a drug lord's spouse. She hails from the influential Valencia family, historically connected to Los Cuinis, a network deeply embedded in the CJNG's financial operations. Authorities have alleged she oversaw dozens of businesses, property portfolios, and shell companies integral to the cartel's money-laundering apparatus.
Arrested multiple times and sentenced to five years in prison for money laundering in 2021 (released last year for good behavior), González operated in the shadowy zone where illicit capital infiltrates the legitimate economy. If El Mencho represented the cartel's violent public face, his wife represented its robust and vital economic spine.
Gender and the Structure of Organized Crime
This distinction is where gender becomes critically important. Organized crime is routinely depicted as a realm of exaggerated masculinity, where women appear primarily as victims, girlfriends, trafficked individuals, or glamorous accessories. Even when prosecuted, women are often framed as mere appendages: "the wife of," "the daughter of," "the partner of." While such language can be difficult to avoid, it obscures a fundamental structural reality.
Many cartels operate through a system of kinship capitalism, where family is not sentimental but profoundly strategic. Within these systems, wives are not incidental. They safeguard business secrets in environments where betrayal is fatal. In patriarchal criminal orders, loyalty is rigorously policed through blood ties. A spouse managing the accounts is not a deviation from power but a deliberate extension of it. Gender does not exclude women from authority; rather, it reshapes how that authority is exercised and perceived.
The sensational truth is this: violence may conquer territory, but finance governs it. As highlighted in a 2023 report by the International Crisis Group, a Western non-governmental organization focused on conflict prevention, finance within many cartels is deeply gendered. This is not to romanticize women's roles in organized crime or suggest emancipation through criminality.
The power reportedly wielded by figures like González exists within male-dominated, violent hierarchies also responsible for extreme violence against women, including femicide and sexual exploitation. The same structures that allow elite women to exercise financial authority simultaneously reproduce brutal patriarchal control elsewhere. This contradiction is not accidental; it is intrinsic to the system's operation.
Durability Lies in Governance, Not Gunfire
El Mencho's death exposes this contradiction starkly. When the state removes a male leader, the assumption is often that the organization will collapse into chaos. However, cartels are hybrid enterprises combining coercion, corporate structures, and family governance. Removing the public face does not automatically dismantle the private architecture.
The critical question is not merely who will pick up the gun, but who keeps the books. Who maintains the corporate fronts? Who sustains the cross-border financial channels? Who negotiates the transformation of illicit profits into legitimate capital? These are not secondary concerns; they determine whether an organization fragments or adapts to a leader's death or imprisonment.
By focusing solely on El Mencho, media narratives perpetuate a blindness to the significant roles women play in cartels. They equate power with violence and masculinity with control, leaving the economic and relational dimensions of authority severely under-analyzed. Organized crime studies increasingly demonstrate that durability lies in governance, not gunfire. 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 them 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 simplistic notion that women in violent systems are either coerced or merely marginal figures.
Historical parallels exist, such as in Italy, where 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 underscores that durability often lies in governance rather than gunfire.
Decapitation strategies—killing a cartel's leader—are politically dramatic and symbolically powerful. But they rest on the flawed assumption that criminal organizations are vertically dependent on a single male figure. If the underlying financial governance and kinship networks remain intact, the system possesses a remarkable capacity to regenerate.
A Rupture and a Revelation
El Mencho's death is therefore both a rupture and a revelation. It is a rupture in the sense that the figurehead of one of the world's most powerful cartels has fallen. But it is also a profound revelation of how narrow our understanding of organized crime remains. We fixate on the spectacle of masculine violence while overlooking the quieter, gendered infrastructures that sustain it.
To understand cartels solely through their kingpins is to fundamentally misunderstand them. Power in organized crime does not reside only in the man with the gun. It also resides in the women who, whether publicly acknowledged or not, often stand at the very center of that criminal architecture, managing the capital that makes the empire possible.
