El Panu: Los Chapitos’ security boss killed in Mexico City’s Zona Rosa

The Tale of Two Tables

I took my sunglasses off right before I shook his hand.

Not for drama. For discipline.

Eye contact is the difference between a journalist and a spectator on social media. It’s the difference between I’m here to listen and I’m here to play a role. And in the kind of room I’d walked into—outside, open air, no walls to hide behind—roles get people buried.

There were nine people around a massive round table. Four of them were bosses. The other five were not there to talk about tacos.

Behind us, around us, circling the perimeter like the world’s most polite firing squad, were forty sicarios—heavily armed, calm, bored, professional. The rifles weren’t pointed at us, but they didn’t have to be. You could feel the weight of them the way you feel humidity before a storm.

The interpreter introduced me like we were at a networking event. Names, handshakes, smiles that didn’t quite reach the eyes. And then there was him.

“El Panu.”

He sat to my right, close enough that for the next three hours I could pick up the details most people miss: the way he leaned back when he wanted to own the space, the way he watched everyone without looking like he was watching, the way his confidence didn’t need a weapon to prove itself.

Most of the men were armed. Panu wasn’t.

He wore a Christian Dior T‑shirt, designer jeans, Louis Vuitton shoes, and a Rolex so flooded with diamonds it looked like it was trying to impersonate a chandelier. If you’ve spent time profiling people, you know what loud luxury usually means: I want you to see I’m untouchable.

But Panu wasn’t performing. He was comfortable.

He handed me a canned beer—cold, sweating in his palm—and through the interpreter seated behind us he welcomed me, like I was a guest and not a potential liability. Over beer and tacos, I got personal with four of the nine. Panu was one of them.

He was charming. Funny. The kind of funny that works in rooms where laughter is both currency and camouflage.

He stood up several times and told jokes. Not just jokes—impressions, full-body acting, switching voices and faces like he’d spent a lifetime studying people. The bosses laughed. The sicarios laughed. And for a few seconds at a time, that table looked like something else entirely: a family party, a birthday, a normal afternoon that didn’t end in a police cordon.

Next to Panu sat a younger guy—his secretary—busy almost the entire time on a laptop. Five boxes of phones sat nearby, ten devices per box, the kind of inventory that says we live in a world where numbers don’t stay alive for long.

I noticed everything. I had to.

Because the truth is, if I made the wrong expression—if I said the wrong thing, if I laughed too late, if I looked away at the wrong moment—there was a good chance they would kill me. Not out of rage. Out of policy.

I was sitting with some of the most wanted men in Mexico and the United States, and nobody was pretending otherwise.

When I left, communication continued for months. It came in windows—mostly evenings, short bursts, as if the connection itself was something they didn’t trust to stay open too long. Then, six months in, communications changed. I heard from Panu and the secretary two more times.

And then—by Christmas week—he was dead.

Not on a ranch. Not in a firefight. Not in one of those cinematic ambushes people love to post like sports highlights.

He died in a restaurant.

In the Zona Rosa.

The kind of place where tourists come to eat, where couples come to drink, where Mexico City sells the illusion that the country’s wars can be kept at the state line.

On Sunday night, December 21, a man in dark clothing, a cap, and a face covering walked into Luaú, a Cantonese spot on Calle Niza in the colonia Juárez, and put bullets into the man the world was still calling “Óscar Ruiz Domínguez.”

Early reports pushed the cover identity: “Óscar Ruiz Domínguez, 41.” His partner told authorities that’s who he was. A hotel businessman from Mazatlán. A family trip. Holidays in the capital. The kind of story that sounds plausible if you’ve never met the kind of people who buy normal lives the way they buy watches.

The secretary—the kid with the laptop and the phone boxes—was named in early reporting too: Fabián Valenzuela Montoya, 22, wounded in the same attack.

The public version of the hit was blunt: one shooter approaches the table and fires. Casings are recovered—some outlets reporting a dozen 9mm casings, others describing a larger haul of ballistic evidence, including 9mm and .45, and a body that looked less like a man killed and more like a man erased.

And then he was gone.

Not disappeared. Not extracted. Gone as in: walked out.

Security cameras and later reporting describe a shooter leaving without sprinting, talking on the phone, stripping off pieces of his disguise as he moved through crowded streets. He crosses Reforma like a man heading to meet someone for coffee, and slips into the Reforma 222 mall—bathrooms, escalators, the kind of ordinary infrastructure that makes Mexico City perfect for hiding in plain sight.

That detail matters, because it tells you something about confidence.

A professional hitter doesn’t always run. Sometimes he walks because panic is loud, and Mexico City punishes loud people.

Carlos Jiménez—C4, @c4jimenez—posted the trail publicly, the kind of reporting that turns a city’s security footage into a map.

But what struck me was not the footage. It was the setting.

Luaú sits in one of the most transited areas of the capital. According to El País, the hit happened just blocks from the federal prosecutor’s offices—one of those details that makes the government’s silence feel less like strategy and more like embarrassment.

They didn’t confirm who he was immediately.

They waited four days.

On Christmas Day, the Fiscalía in Mexico City finally said what everyone already knew: fingerprints confirmed the victim was Óscar Noé Medina González—“El Panu”—and they opened a homicide investigation. U.S. authorities had been offering up to four million dollars for information leading to his capture.

By then, the story had already split in two: the official label and the reality behind it.

The official label is clean. Convenient. It fits in a headline: “security chief,” “jefe de sicarios,” “principal lugarteniente.” The U.S. government line, echoed by major outlets, paints him as the daily commander of Los Chapitos’ security apparatus—supervising regional commanders, managing muscle, keeping the machine intact.

And yes—multiple reports say he stepped into that security role after the death of Jorge Humberto Figueroa Benítez, “El 27 / La Perris.” Zeta Magazine was among the outlets circulating that framing.

But here’s where my memory refuses to cooperate with the media narrative:

When I met Panu, he wasn’t playing the part of a security chief.

He wasn’t the guy scanning exits. He wasn’t the guy checking holsters. He wasn’t the guy who looked like his job was paranoia.

He was the guy who could make forty armed men laugh.

That’s not a small thing. In these organizations, charm isn’t personality—it’s leverage. Humor is leadership without paperwork. People underestimate that because it doesn’t look like power. But power is often the ability to relax in a room where everyone else is paid to be tense.

Panu told me, through the interpreter, that in another world—different circumstances—we would be friends. Panu said that. Not the secretary. Panu.

We talked history. WWII, of all things. The absurdity of discussing the fall of Berlin with a man tied to a war still burning in Sinaloa didn’t escape me. But that’s what narco life does to people: it stretches the definition of “normal” until you don’t recognize it anymore.

When I met him in February, he was a man on the run. Armored Suburban, white—2025, the kind of vehicle that looks like it was built to survive a country that has stopped pretending it’s at peace.

But the man who died in Zona Rosa wasn’t moving like someone on the run.

He was moving like someone on holiday.

Reporting says he arrived in the capital the day before—December 20—and stayed in a rented house in Naucalpan, communicating with his partner through Telegram, the kind of detail that always reads innocent until you’ve spent enough time in this world to understand what it really means: distance, compartmentalization, disposable identity.

La Crónica adds another detail that cuts against the cartel-myth stereotype: the day of the killing, he and his mother went to church. Then dinner.

Not a safehouse. Not a convoy. Church and Chinese food.

That’s the thing about war: it’s impossible to keep living your old routine without eventually turning yourself into a target. A man can’t live as a fugitive forever. Even the most disciplined people eventually want to sit down and eat without looking over their shoulder every five seconds.

And that’s where the hit starts to feel less like a battlefield move and more like something uglier.

Because if he wasn’t being tailed—if, as Telediario reported, his vehicle wasn’t watched from the outside—then the shooter didn’t find him the hard way.

He arrived, walked in, fired, left.

No scouting scene in public view. No long surveillance line you’d expect if an enemy crew had been tracking him through CDMX traffic.

That pushes you toward one uncomfortable conclusion: somebody close made him findable.

Telediario explicitly floated that angle: “traición,” betrayal, from someone in his circle.

And this is where the story turns personal again, because I can’t stop thinking about how he lived.

His partner—publicly described as a model with political ties—initially identified him under the alias “Óscar Ruiz Domínguez,” the story that bought him a few days of mystery in the headlines. El País reported her as María José Rojo Sambrano, connected to a Sinaloa official.

Whether that was panic, protection, habit, or something else, I’m not going to pretend I know.

But I will say this: visibility is its own kind of leak.

If you live a luxury life in public, you don’t need to “tell” anyone where you are. The lifestyle tells for you. A nice dinner. A recognizable face. A routine. A call made in the wrong place. A photo sent to the wrong person. A cousin who can’t keep his mouth shut. A driver who knows somebody who knows somebody.

Betrayal doesn’t always look like Judas taking money.

Sometimes it looks like family trying to pretend they’re not living inside a war.

And the shooter?

This is where my read diverges from the cleaner narratives.

If this was a Mayiza execution—if this was the kind of message you’d expect from a major rival faction in a war as bitter as Sinaloa’s—then I’d expect humiliation. Theater. A signature. Something to make sure everyone understood who did it and why.

This wasn’t that.

This was fast.

Almost crude.

A man walks in, dumps rounds, walks out, hides in a mall bathroom like a teenager ditching school.

That doesn’t scream “long-planned humiliation.” It feels like short notice. Local logistics. A shooter who knew the address, not the mythology.

And yes—his calm exit could be read as professional. But calm doesn’t equal elite. Mexico City teaches people to walk through chaos like it’s weather.

What I keep coming back to is this:

If the government wanted a clean arrest, the shooter gave them opportunity. Cameras. A predictable escape route. A public mall. A trail. Mexico City is one of the most surveilled places in the country.

And yet, as of the latest official line repeated in multiple outlets, there are still no publicly confirmed arrests tied to the killing.

Which raises the darker question—one Mexico has been living with for decades:

Not whether they can find him.

Whether they want to.

Meanwhile, the week kept moving, because the narco calendar doesn’t pause for grief.

In the days around Panu’s death, federal forces reportedly hit financial operators tied to the Los Chapitos orbit—identified in some reporting as Iván Archivaldo’s alleged suegro and cuñado—seizing weapons, vehicles, phones, and electronics. Later reporting says a judge ordered prisión preventiva.

You can read it as coincidence. Or pressure. Or fallout. Or recovered electronics.

But the pattern is hard to ignore: one of their most visible operators gets dropped in the heart of the capital, and within the same stretch of days, the money side gets clipped too.

It’s not proof of linkage.

It’s just how these weeks look when a structure starts taking hits from multiple directions at once.

Mexico City likes to think of itself as separate from the rest of the country’s violence—an island of politics and nightlife and government press conferences. But it’s been a hiding place for cartel figures for years, and it has a history of cartel-linked killings that pop up like reminders. Infobae, for example, framed CDMX as a kind of “guarida” for Sinaloa figures and referenced other cases in 2025.

So here’s my honest takeaway, written the only way I know how:

Panu died because he tried to be normal in a world that won’t let him.

He was on the run when I met him—controlled, deliberate, operating like a man who understood the price of being found.

And then, in December, he moved like a man who wanted a holiday.

No security dining out. A dinner table instead of a convoy. Family instead of rifles.

A life borrowed from another universe.

The last thing he ever said to me—the line that keeps coming back when I see the Luaú photos, the police lights, the tape—was that in another world we would be friends.

I believe him.

I also believe this world was never going to allow it.

And I’m sitting on more from that February table than I’m writing today. Not because I’m trying to be mysterious. Because in this business, timing is part of survival—and because some truths deserve to be delivered like a hammer, not spilled like gossip.

For now, the only thing that feels certain is the oldest rule of cartel war:

You can be the man with the Rolex.

You can be the man who makes the room laugh.

But the minute you let your guard down—when you try to eat dinner like you’re not at war—the war remembers your name.

And the war continues.