‘Narco queen’: wife of cartel leader ‘El Mencho’ arrested in Mexico
Mexico’s military have arrested the wife of the Mexican drug lord “El Mencho”, leader of the ultra-violent Jalisco New Generation cartel (CJNG).
Rosalinda González Valencia was detained in the municipality of Zapopan in the western Jalisco state in a “a significant blow to the financial structure of organized crime in the state”, the defense ministry said in a statement on Tuesday.
González was detained for various crimes, with the evidence pointing to her involvement in “the illicit financial operation of an organized crime group”, the ministry added.
Her husband, whose real name is Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, is a former policeman who became the head of one of the two most powerful criminal groups in Mexico.
Oseguera, who had a $10m bounty placed on his head by US authorities in 2018, has masterminded the CJNG’s emergence as a criminal empire spanning five continents and is one of few long-term cartel leaders to have evaded capture.
The Jalisco cartel is arguably Mexico’s most powerful and violent.
It made its reputation with brazen attacks on the country’s security forces, including an assassination attempt last year on Mexico City’s police chief that wounded him and left three people dead. In 2015, cartel gunmen shot down a Mexican military helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade.
The CJNG has been blamed for smuggling vast quantities of drugs, including the synthetic opioid fentanyl, into the United States, where overdose deaths mostly linked to fentanyl rose to more than 93,000 in 2020, US data shows.
The organization is locked in a fierce fight for territory and smuggling routes with the Sinaloa cartel, formerly led by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, and gunmen from the two rival groups frequently clash in hotspots across the country.
González was previously arrested in May 2018 but was released on bail a few months later.
Mike Vigil, former international operations chief for the US Drug Enforcement Administration, called González Valencia a “narco queen”, whose family has long been tied to drug trafficking.
“She has all of the keys, all of the confidence of El Mencho, all of the information and was responsible for laundering the cartel’s money,” Vigil said.
He noted that her arrest came while two of their children are jailed in the United States. Jessica Johanna Oseguera González, a dual US and Mexican citizen, was sentenced in June to two and a half years in prison for involvement in businesses laundering money for the cartel.
Her brother, Rubén, known as “El Menchito”, has pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking charges, but remains jailed awaiting trial.
Taking that into account, Vigil suspects their mother could be interested “in negotiating some deal to help her children”.