The Hidden Architecture of Cartel Power
The violent death of Nemesio "El Mencho" Oseguera Cervantes, leader of the Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), on February 22, 2026, created immediate headlines about fallen kingpins and power vacuums. Media coverage focused on gun battles, torched vehicles, and retaliatory violence, presenting this as the removal of a singular, hyper-violent male figure from the apex of Mexico's criminal underworld. Yet this dramatic framing reveals more about societal perceptions of organized crime than about its actual operational realities.
Beyond the Kingpin Narrative
The obsession with cartel kingpins rests on a theatrical understanding of criminal power: masculinity performed through brutality, territory controlled through violence, and leadership embodied in a single charismatic figure. El Mencho perfectly embodied this archetype. However, cartels do not endure through spectacle alone. Their longevity depends on sophisticated financial operations, money laundering networks, legitimate business fronts, and intricate loyalty systems often maintained through family connections.
In the case of CJNG, this crucial infrastructure was allegedly managed not only by El Mencho but also by his wife, Rosalinda González Valencia, frequently described as "La Jefa"—the Spanish feminine form of "the boss." This label acknowledges her authority while still situating her in relation to her husband, yet she was far more than merely a drug lord's spouse.
The Financial Spine of Criminal Enterprise
González came from the Valencia family, historically linked to Los Cuinis, a network deeply embedded in CJNG's financial operations. Authorities have alleged she oversaw dozens of businesses, property holdings, and shell companies tied 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 transforms into legitimate economic activity.
If El Mencho represented the cartel's violent public face, González represented its economic spine—the hidden architecture that sustains criminal enterprises through financial management and business networks.
Gender and Criminal Governance
Organized crime is routinely portrayed as an arena of exaggerated masculinity, with women appearing primarily as victims, girlfriends, trafficked individuals, or glamorous accessories. Even when prosecuted, women are often framed as appendages: "the wife of," "the daughter of," "the partner of." This 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. They help safeguard business secrets in environments where betrayal carries fatal consequences. In patriarchal criminal organizations, 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.
The Gendered Infrastructure of Crime
The sensational 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 exists within male-dominated hierarchies and violent systems that simultaneously 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—a contradiction that is not accidental but fundamental to how these organizations function.
Durability Through Governance, Not Gunfire
El Mencho's death exposes this contradiction. When authorities remove a male leader, the assumption is that the organization will collapse into chaos. Yet cartels are hybrid enterprises combining coercion, corporate structures, and family governance. The removal of a public face does not automatically dismantle the private architecture that sustains criminal operations.
The critical question following such events is not simply who will pick up the gun, but who keeps the financial books, maintains corporate fronts, sustains cross-border financial channels, and negotiates the transformation of illicit profits into legitimate capital. These functions determine whether an organization fragments or adapts to a leader's death or imprisonment.
Blind Spots in Criminal Analysis
By centering exclusively on figures like El Mencho, media narratives perpetuate a blindness to women's roles in cartels. They equate power with violence and masculinity with control, leaving the economic and relational dimensions of authority under-analyzed. Organized crime studies increasingly demonstrate that durability lies in governance rather than gunfire. Governance depends on management, financial oversight, logistical coordination, and embedded social networks—functions often feminized not because women are naturally suited to them, but because patriarchal systems allocate these roles 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, challenging 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 through administrative control, alliance-building, and family networks—not through spectacular violence.
Revelation Through Rupture
El Mencho's death represents both rupture and revelation. It marks the fall of a figurehead from one of the world's most powerful criminal organizations, yet it also reveals how narrow our understanding of organized crime remains. We fixate on the spectacle of masculine violence while overlooking the quieter, gendered infrastructures that sustain criminal enterprises. 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 financial governance and kinship networks remain intact, the system may regenerate.
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 the architectural framework that enables criminal enterprises to persist and prosper despite law enforcement efforts and leadership changes.
