Feds raid cartel fuelling nation’s drug crisis
Under the cover of darkness hundreds of United States federal agents equipped with battering rams, bolt cutters and heavy weaponry swooped on the biggest drug-dealing network in America.
The Jalisco New Generation cartel, a rapidly expanding Mexican group distinguished by the scale and ferocity of its violence, has grabbed control of perhaps twothirds of the illegal drug market in the US in recent years, including opioids, according to drug enforcement officials.
This week the US authorities struck back in intricately coordinated early-morning raids, primarily in California, Texas and New Jersey. Officers in tactical gear equipped with search warrants and backed by formidable firepower smashed down doors and arrested more than 250 mid to high-level associates of the gang, seizing almost 600 kilograms of drugs and impounding cash and assets of more than US$1.7 million (NZ$2m).
The roundup aimed to cripple as much as possible of the cartel’s US infrastructure and marked the end of the first phase of ‘‘Project Python’’, a previously secret sixmonth investigation into the gang’s activities.
Since September, more than 700 people associated with the gang have been arrested and more than 20,000kg of drugs and US$22m in cash and other assets has been seized, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), which led Project Python.
‘‘This operation is one of the largest, concentrated actions against a single criminal organisation in many years,’’ Uttam Dhillon, acting head of the agency, said.
The gang is a particularly prolific producer and distributor of methamphetamine but also pushes fentanyl, cocaine and heroin into the US, fuelling the opioid crisis that has devastated large areas of the country.
Officials believe that the cartel has distribution hubs in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Houston and Atlanta, in addition to a presence in 24 of Mexico’s 32 states.
Despite the apparent early success of Project Python, a long battle lies ahead. The cartel, known widely by its Spanish-language acronym CJNG, is the fastest-growing and most violent organisation of its kind in Mexico, where competition among rival drug gangs has fuelled an unrivalled surge of killings across the country in recent years. More than 35,000 people were murdered last year, the highest number since 1997 when Mexico began to keep a national tally of the homicide investigations being carried out.
CJNG was more effective than any other group at exploiting the power vacuum created by the fall of Joaquin ‘‘El Chapo’’ Guzman, whose Sinaloa cartel spread death and destruction around the world for more than two decades. Twice recaptured after spectacular jail breaks, El Chapo was sentenced to life in prison in New York last year for crimes including murder, drug offences and money laundering. He was ordered to pay US$12.6 billion to the US government – a conservative estimate of his earnings there – and dispatched to a jail known as ‘‘the Alcatraz of the Rockies’’ in Colorado. Investigators believe that Nemesio Ruben Oseguera
Cervantes, the leader of CJNG and the most wanted man in Mexico, is considerably more dangerous. A US$10m reward has been offered for his arrest.
Known as ‘‘El Mencho’’ and believed to move between mountain hideouts in western Mexico, he is less flamboyant than El Chapo, which is likely to make him much harder to capture. He and his commanders ‘‘have a little bit more discipline’’ than their predecessors in the Sinaloa cartel, Bill Bodner, the special agent in charge of the DEA’s field office in Los Angeles, said. ‘‘They’re not necessarily into the partying and living the good life, it’s just about the business of drug trafficking and control, and that’s what makes them scarier.’’
Then there is the gang’s appetite for brutality, often broadcast via social media to maximise its intimidatory impact. During and since its rise to prominence in Mexico, CJNG has strung corpses from underpasses, exhibited severed heads as warnings and left piles of its rivals’ bodies in the street.
Unlike other cartels, it is as willing to attack police and army patrols as other criminals: El Mencho’s bodyguards once used a rocket launcher to shoot down a Mexican military helicopter and prevent him being captured.
‘‘Their propensity to violence is a big part of it. They’re a very violent organisation, they’re a well-armed organisation, but really the gasoline that was thrown on the fire was synthetic drugs [such as methamphetamine and fentanyl],’’ Bodner said. Wendy Woolcok, the special agent in charge of the DEA’s special operations division, agreed. ‘‘El Mencho and his associates prey on the addicts, and they prey on small towns where they can act as bullies and infiltrate these small towns,’’ she said.
‘‘They promise hope and they deliver despair.’’
Some inroads had already been made against the gang before the Project Python raids carried out during the early hours of Thursday.
One of its most colourful leaders, Maria Guadalupe Lopez Esquivel, 21, who was known for her striking appearance and who once posed in sunglasses with a gold-plated automatic weapon on her busy social media pages, was killed in a gunfight with Mexican police and soldiers in January.
Last month, US prosecutors brought charges against El Mencho’s son and daughter. Jessica Johana Oseguera Cervantes was arrested when she tried to visit her brother, Ruben Oseguera-Gonzalez, known as ‘‘El Menchito’’, who was arrested by the Mexican army in 2015 and extradited to the US to face drug charges last month.