On Sunday, Mexican security forces killed 59-year-old Nemesio Ruben Oseguera Cervantes, alias “El Mencho”, the leader of the notorious Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), based in western Mexico’s Jalisco state.
The Mexican defence ministry acknowledged that the lethal operation had been conducted with “complementary information” from the United States, whose “peacemaker” president, Donald Trump, has repeatedly threatened to attack Mexico to combat the drug cartels.
Mind you, these are organisations that owe their very existence to US policy and drug consumption in the first place.
US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau greeted the news of El Mencho’s death with glee, taking to X to proclaim: “This is a great development for Mexico, the US, Latin America, and the world.”
And yet things aren’t looking quite so “great” thus far.
As anyone who has ever paid remote attention to global affairs might have predicted, violence has broken out across several Mexican states in the aftermath of the killing – which is generally what happens when you take out a cartel kingpin.
Gunmen have torched vehicles and blocked highways in various locales while various US media have reported sensationally on the plight of American tourists “stranded” in Mexican resort cities on account of the upheaval.
Shortly after his initial enthusiastic post, Landau returned to X with a “PS, I’m watching the scenes of violence from Mexico with great sadness and concern.” But no matter: “We must never lose our nerve.”
The deputy secretary of state ended his “PS” with some words of encouragement in Spanish for the Mexican nation: “¡Animo Mexico!” (Cheer up, Mexico!)
But again, there is hardly room for cheer given that there is not a single example in pretty much the entire history of the world in which the killing of one cartel boss has resolved the narcotrafficking problem – or anything else, for that matter.
Recall the case of Pablo Escobar of the Medellin Cartel, killed in 1993 by Colombian police with a whole lot of help from the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).
Despite Escobar’s absence, the international drug trade proceeded apace, and ensuing decades played host to spectacular levels of violence in Colombia – much of it coincidentally perpetrated by heavily US-backed state security forces.
In one particularly memorable episode, members of the Colombian army slaughtered an estimated 10,000 civilians and passed the cadavers off as left-wing “terrorists”.
To this day, Colombia remains the world’s top producer of cocaine.
In other words, to hail El Mencho’s demise as a “great development” for Mexico or anyone else is at best preposterously delusional.
On Sunday I phoned a Mexican friend in the southern state of Oaxaca, a supporter of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, for our requisite argument over the day’s events. In his view, Mexico’s government had simply been “doing its job” in the “war on drugs” by eliminating El Mencho, and the US had nothing substantial to do with it.
Indeed, much like her predecessor and mentor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Sheinbaum has perfected the art of doing the gringos’ dirty work while purporting to act in a “sovereign” fashion – and even to defy the imperial overlords to the north.
Granted, she does not have a whole lot of room to manoeuvre given the recent kidnapping by the US of Venezuelan head of state Nicolas Maduro – and the fact that Trump has made it known that he is beholden to no law, whether domestic or international.
But while Sheinbaum may have seen no choice but to temporarily placate the Americans and satisfy Trump’s need for blood, Mexicans will pay a heavy price.
A brief review of contemporary Mexican history confirms as much. No sooner did then-Mexican President Felipe Calderon launch his “drug war” under US guidance in 2006 than homicides and enforced disappearances skyrocketed in the country.
Well over half a million people have since been killed and disappeared, many of them victims of militarised agents of the state who often operate in cahoots with organised crime.
Nary a dent has been put in the northward flow of drugs while the southward flow of US-manufactured weapons continues unabated.
The state of Jalisco itself happens to have the highest number of enforced disappearances in all of Mexico and made headlines last year with the discovery of a clandestine crematorium on a ranch outside Guadalajara, one of the host cities of the upcoming World Cup.
The ranch was reportedly used by the CJNG as a recruitment and training centre as well as an extermination site.
And the removal of El Mencho from the equation will do precisely nothing in terms of pacifying the landscape – just as the respective extraditions to the US of Sinaloa cartel leaders Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada merely set off an ongoing violent battle for power.
Contrary to lofty soundbites from US officials, the empire is not at all interested in getting rid of either drug trafficking or violence south of the border as both phenomena provide a perennial excuse for US interference in Mexico and beyond.
Were the gringos actually serious about ridding “Mexico, the US, Latin America, and the world” of the whole cartel problem, a decriminalisation of drugs would do much to nip the business in the bud by rendering the movement of drugs far less fantastically lucrative.
A moratorium on the US’s obsessive manufacture of weapons would also help.
Obviously, nothing so much as resembling those potential solutions is even on the horizon. If it were, that would be one hell of a “great development” indeed.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.