Before “El Mencho”: A Local Drug Lord Spared His Life and Created an International Nightmare

In October 2013, Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes was 47 years old, and his dreams of becoming a major drug lord seemed to have come to an abrupt end. He had been in a safe house in the community of El Aguaje in Aguililla, Michoacán, for more than 24 hours, waiting for a hitman to deliver the coup de grâce. He believed he would be killed and that only a miracle could save him.

The day before, El Mencho, nicknamed as such because as a child he pronounced his name “Ne-mencho,” had traveled with his bodyguards to his hometown, despite warnings from his associates, Los Torcidos. According to the testimony of Ramiro Pozos González, alias El Molca or El 07, Oseguera wanted to eat at the family home and see his childhood friends before continuing his mission to become the new king of local drug trafficking. It was a reckless pause; he had been warned that Aguililla was under siege by his mortal enemies, especially by a troop that answered to the orders of a drug lord who believed himself to be divinely ordained.

The risk was high for Mencho, but he cared little. These were times of war in the Mexican Pacific, and any move was risky, continues the official statement of El Molca, which—in DOMINGA’s possession—reconstructs this story.

The reason Mencho was being held captive in a cramped room dated back several decades, to when the glue that had bound the drug traffickers of Michoacán and Jalisco together for years lost its stickiness: a veteran drug trafficker named Armando Valencia Cornelio, El Maradona, founder of the Milenio Cartel, was arrested on August 15, 2003. And when that man with the afro, sporting the same hairstyle as the Argentine soccer idol, fell in a military operation, all the pieces of the criminal chessboard began to wobble.

The vacant position was filled by Óscar Orlando Nava Valencia, alias El Lobo, who maintained the cohesion of the Milenio Cartel until his arrest in 2009. The position passed to his brother Juan Carlos, El Tigre, but a year later, he too fell into the hands of the Army. The Valencia dynasty, the old lords and masters of the border between Michoacán and Jalisco, suddenly appeared vulnerable and easy prey for the federal government. His subordinates demanded new, younger, and more astute leadership.

The veteran group nominated Elpidio Mojarro Ramírez, El Pilo, a skilled financial operator, as their leader. They believed that nominating someone without the Valencia surname for the first time would help appease the cartel members’ demands. Meanwhile, another group, the rebels, led by Érick Valencia Salazar, El 85, wanted fundamental change and put forward a rising criminal: a man known as Mencho, who had proven himself ruthless, reckless, and had connections in the United States after serving time in a California prison.

A rift within the Milenio Cartel was visible. Two factions were on opposing sides. The old guard against the newcomers. Pilo against Mencho. Both factions knew they had to reach an agreement quickly to prevent the rift from becoming irreparable, so Pilo called a luncheon somewhere in Jalisco. There would be food, drinks, drugs, and a table to sit comfortably for a long, leisurely conversation that should end with an agreement that would suit everyone. Or at least, that was the initial offer.

Hours before the meeting, El 85 and Mencho received information that the luncheon was a trap; he would kill them before they could even take a bite. This would clear his path to the top of the Milenio Cartel. The rebel duo skipped the banquet, the official statement continues, and days after the snub, they sent a message: as a sign of goodwill to reach an agreement, they wanted the head of a hitman boss nicknamed Tecato, with whom Mencho had a long-standing feud.

The response was a resounding no. Tecato, furious at the slight, traveled to Colima and in Tecomán murdered three of Mencho’s closest friends. He kidnapped them, patiently tortured them, and brutally murdered them. The country didn’t know it yet, but that triple homicide would change history forever: the rift turned into war.

The war between La Familia Michoacana and Los Zetas

The Milenio Cartel split in two: Pilo and his people, like El 07, whose testimony forms the basis of this text, founded La Resistencia, while Mencho and El 85 created Los Torcidos, that is, those who had strayed from the original path.

La Resistencia soon realized that their enemies had a great capacity for mobilization and firepower. And instead of underestimating Los Torcidos, they sought alliances to wipe them out. Pilo looked north and south to locate potential allies. And he finally decided to go to Michoacán, where he found support from La Familia Michoacana, a cartel based on pseudo-religious principles under the control of two charismatic leaders: José de Jesús Méndez Vargas, El Chango, and Nazario Moreno González, El Chayo or also El Más Loco, as reported by Insight Crime.

Both men had created their criminal group under the idea that the people of Michoacán were engaged in a holy war against outsiders, Los Zetas from Tamaulipas, who had tried to seize control of the state. They convinced new recruits of La Familia Michoacana that they were crusaders, almost saints; that their war was for the purity of the people; that killing an outlaw was seen as good by God; and that their calling to keep Michoacán’s drug trade in the hands of Michoacanos was a divine mandate. El Chango and El Chayo even created religious figures, sacred scriptures, and initiation rituals similar to baptisms.

And they divided Michoacán into two slivers: the first kept the municipalities of Aguililla, Buenavista, La Ruana, Peribán, Los Reyes, Cotija, and Zamora; while the second seized Lázaro Cárdenas, Uruapan, Morelia, Zitácuaro, Huetamo de Núñez, and more.

Each created codes for their recruits: El Chango boasted that in his territory, no one in his organization used the drugs they sold, they didn’t kidnap, they didn’t murder innocents, they didn’t swear in public, and they dressed impeccably. And—most importantly—none of them killed a brother, meaning they never turned their weapons against another Michoacán native. Of course, all of that was a half-truth.

La Resistencia asked Méndez Vargas for support, and he readily agreed in exchange for new drug routes and more material and human resources. In contrast, El Chayo, the other half of La Familia Michoacana, chose to side with Los Torcidos and supported El Mencho. This decision would later generate another fracture, leading to the creation of Los Caballeros Templarios. But that will come later.

By early 2013, the criminal underworld in Mexico had already undergone significant changes. And while national attention was focused on the infamous Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and the renowned Sinaloa Cartel, La Resistencia and a faction of La Familia Michoacana had decided that, if they wanted to prosper, Mencho had to die. The Jalisco New Generation Cartel, as a criminal organization, hadn’t yet been established.

The contradictions in the official account of El 07

Mencho relied on his low profile. He moved discreetly through Michoacán and Jalisco, especially in areas where he knew his enemies had the upper hand. Sometimes he traveled with an armed guard in modest vehicles; other times, he traveled alone, disguised as an undocumented migrant.

In October 2013, he traveled to his hometown with just three bodyguards. They all carried handguns concealed under their clothing, tucked between their belt and the waistband of their pants.

This was before the era of explosive drones and .50 caliber Barrett rifles. Mencho was supposed to make a quick visit to Aguililla to attend a relative’s birthday, greet some friends, and then head to Atotonilco el Alto, his hideout, to continue planning the annihilation of La Resistencia.

However, someone spotted him as he entered Tierra Caliente. Chango’s hitmen followed him to a plateau and, from higher ground, opened fire on his bodyguards, who fell instantly. Soon Mencho was surrounded, disarmed, and taken prisoner in that high-intensity war on the Mexican Pacific coast.

The account of El 7 contradicts some popular versions of what followed. A mixture of historical anecdotes and fantasies: according to the drug lord’s official statement, Mencho was taken to a safe house and held for only 48 hours, while El Chango traveled to Aguililla along rural roads to meet his enemy in person; in Tierra Caliente, they say that Nemesio Oseguera was brutally tortured, so badly beaten that he survived thanks to adrenaline injections from a doctor who kept him conscious until the leader of La Familia Michoacana arrived at the safe house.

Tortured or not, Mencho came face to face with Chango after almost 48 hours of captivity. His executioner, he believed with certainty. That was the end of his life. The dream of leading a cartel, shattered.

With a composure unusual for a born killer, Méndez Vargas paused the execution and relied on the sacred scriptures he himself had written with El Chayo, the co-founder of La Familia Michoacana. He found himself facing a dilemma: although killing was fully justified in the holy war of drug cartels, it was forbidden for one Michoacán native to kill another. And Méndez Vargas, born in El Aguaje, Aguililla, couldn’t murder someone like Mencho, a native of El Naranjo de Chila, Aguililla, Michoacán, in cold blood. Which rule would carry more weight?

“El Chango had him in his hands, right there, but he made a decision I still don’t understand,” El 07 told the federal police officers who interrogated him.

The leader of the Resistance left the safe house. Behind him, Mencho, saved by an incredible interpretation of a bible of Mexican organized crime. The miracle had occurred for the future kingpin of kingpins. Nemesio was still alive. Inexplicably alive.

The protected witness for the U.S. authorities.

Mencho didn’t forget that episode. He intensified his attacks against Pilo, 07, and others in La Resistencia, but showed respect and gratitude to Méndez Vargas, whom he removed from his list of enemies. And it certainly wasn’t Nemesio who finished him off, but the Federal Police who arrested him at a checkpoint in Aguascalientes in June 2011. Today, Chango sleeps in the United States as one of the 92 drug lords that Mexico handed over to its northern neighbor to be tried in foreign courts.

Pilo, unable to match Mencho’s firepower, devised a cold revenge. He surrendered to authorities in the United States to become a protected witness and tell the DEA everything he knew about his enemies. His star performance was the trial of Nemesio’s son—Rubén Oseguera González, El Menchito—against whom he testified, providing a detailed account of his criminal career.

His testimony was vital in securing a life sentence for the son. That was his revenge.

What would have happened if Chango had killed Mencho that fall of 2013? Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes would never have transformed Los Torcidos into the fearsome Jalisco New Generation Cartel, whose very name embodied the mission of being a transnational criminal enterprise adapted to the 21st century: synthetic drugs, international markets, continental alliances, dirty business supported by new technologies. The globalized and revolutionized version of the world’s worst mafias.

The country would have been spared the national mourning of May 1, 2015, when Mencho and Menchito ordered the use of Russian-made rocket launchers to shoot down a military helicopter that was after them in Villa Purificación, Jalisco, killing 11 soldiers and two federal police officers and marking the first time in Mexican history that a cartel had downed an aircraft belonging to the Armed Forces.

And Mencho, as the most powerful criminal in the world, would never have existed. He would never have amassed a billion-dollar fortune, established a presence in 60 countries, or planted representatives in every state of the United States and Mexico. There would have been only Nemesio, plain and simple, a footnote in the criminal encyclopedia of Mexico.

But the decision of a religious leader changed everything. It granted Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes an extra 148 months of life, enough time for him to go from local kingpin to international nightmare. A grace period that ended this Sunday morning, February 22, with the military operation in Tapalpa, Jalisco.

A pardon of incalculable magnitude to this day.

Source: Milenio