The Death of Mencho and the Delusion

The killing of Jesús “Mencho”—born Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes—has once again pushed Mexico into the headlines. The violence of the Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) is extreme and systemic. Mexicans are murdered in staggering numbers. Thousands have been forcibly disappeared and buried in clandestine graves. Journalists are assassinated with chilling regularity. Local politicians who defy cartel authority—or who find themselves on the wrong side of inter-cartel conflict—are eliminated. Entire communities live under coercion.

None of this should be minimized. What deserves scrutiny is how this moment is framed.

The New York Times casts the episode largely as a test of whether Mexico will finally summon the “political will” to fulfill its responsibilities. Former U.S. diplomat John Feeley suggests that previous efforts lacked sufficient Mexican buy-in and that greater U.S. pressure can generate decisive action.

But this is not realism. It is delusion.

Mexico has already had its “moment of political will.” When Felipe Calderón militarized the drug war in 2006, he did so with full backing from George W. Bush. The Mérida Initiative funneled billions of dollars in security assistance, weaponry, and intelligence coordination to Mexican forces. Under Barack Obama, that support deepened and Mexico’s campaign was praised as “heroic.”

The results were devastating for Mexico without have much impact on U.S. drug consumption.

Homicide rates soared in Mexico. Human rights abuses multiplied. Cartels fragmented and reconstituted themselves. Meanwhile, in the United States, drug prices generally fell, purity increased, and availability expanded. The theory of interdiction holds that restricting supply raises prices and suppresses use. The empirical record shows that enforcement typically produces short-lived disruption followed by rapid adaptation.

With synthetic drugs, adaptation is even easier.

Fentanyl does not depend on agricultural cycles. It can be synthesized through multiple chemical pathways, using globally available precursor capacity. Crackdowns shift production techniques rather than eliminate supply. And beyond fentanyl, highly potent synthetic opioids such as nitazenes represent the next frontier of substitution. The chemical space is elastic.

To believe that sufficient “pressure” on Mexico can permanently suppress this market ignores more than half a century of evidence. Since Richard Nixon declared the War on Drugs in 1971, supply-side enforcement has failed to eliminate demand or durably constrict supply. What it has produced instead is displacement, fragmentation, escalating violence, and innovation. The geography shifts. The actors mutate. The market persists.

The U.S.-centric framing also externalizes the roots of the American drug crisis. Overdose deaths—documented in staggering numbers by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—are tragic. But the structural conditions for addiction are overwhelmingly domestic.

The opioid epidemic was incubated by overprescription and aggressive marketing by companies like Purdue Pharma. It was intensified by economic precarity, deindustrialization, untreated trauma, homelessness, and the collapse of family and community support structures. Demand did not originate in Mexico.

Drug addiction is, in large part, something Americans did to themselves.

The southbound flow of high-powered firearms, moreover, have allowed cartels to translate economic capital into military capacity. The North American Free Trade Agreement accelerated rural displacement and facilitated corporate extraction across Mexico. The militarized drug war unfolded within that landscape, often concentrating violence in territories undergoing intensified resource penetration and industrial expansion.

Today, under Claudia Sheinbaum and her Morena party, Mexico is pursuing a nationalist development strategy: expanding social programs, strengthening state energy capacity, and partially reversing neoliberal reforms. This agenda is not incidental. It is why Morena won landslide victories in Mexico’s two previous elections. It reflects a political mandate organized around Mexican priorities—not U.S. prohibition doctrine.

Yet Sheinbaum is also responding to coercive diplomacy from the Trump administration. She is capitulating to U.S. pressure to forestall even more punitive tariffs against Mexico and, more ominously, the prospect of the U.S. military launching direct strikes on cartel targets. In doing so, Sheinbaum is mediating between external pressure and her program of economic nationalism. Particularly notable here is the nationalist restructuring of Mexico’s energy industry marked by revival of national planning in the development of Mexico’s fossil fuel and renewable energy resources.

With regard to the harms inflicted by narco-trafficking, Americans might consider the log in their own eye before complaining about the splinter in the eye of their neighbors. Confronting the drug crisis requires getting rid of the delusion of interdiction as a decisive solution. Responsibility runs north as well as south. Until American political culture confronts that reality, every new crisis will be framed as Mexico’s failure—and every repetition of failure will be treated as surprise.

This first appeared on FPIF.

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