Since Pablo Escobar’s apprehension at the height of the war on drugs, capturing and killing drug lords has been glorified as the gold standard for dismantling the drug trade. The Mexican government’s recent assassination of “El Mencho,” founder of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), is a continuation of this pattern. According to former Colombian Vice President Óscar Naranjo Trujillo, the killing of El Mencho is for Mexico what the killing of Pablo Escobar was for Colombia. But is cutting off the head of the snake successful in bringing down the whole organism?
On Feb. 22, the Mexican government successfully carried out a military operation, aided by U.S. intelligence, assassinating its most wanted drug lord: Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes. In the aftermath, violence broke out in 20 out of Mexico’s 32 states as suspected members of organized crime groups torched buses and businesses, causing 252 reported blockades.
This military operation is an example of the “kingpin strategy” developed by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which posits that neutralizing the head of a drug trafficking organization (DTO) will result in the breakdown of the group. Behind this strategy is the assumption that the heads of these groups are not easily replaced.
Pablo Escobar’s lasting influence
The kingpin strategy has been applied countless times throughout the 60-year-long war on drugs, with standout cases including Joaquín Guzmán Loera “El Chapo” from Mexico and José Adolfo “Fito” Macías Villamar from Ecuador. But no one was more critical to generating momentum for the kingpin strategy than Pablo Escobar.
Escobar became the archetype of the modern drug lord in the 1980s as the head of the Medellín Cartel. At the start, stories of his extravagant wealth, his “Robin Hood-like” persona, and his procurement of political power captivated people who did not know whether to love or fear him. The answer became apparent when his rise to the top was marked by extreme violence; his use of aerial bombs, targeted assassinations, and torture claimed an estimated 5,000 lives. These factors combined to create Escobar’s image as a larger-than-life drug lord.
Escobar’s long-awaited assassination by the Colombian National Police Search Bloc on Dec. 2, 1993, revealed a consequential implication for the future of the kingpin strategy — the debunking of the myth of the untouchable drug lord.
Herein lies the biggest misunderstanding of the kingpin strategy: Although drug lords proved vulnerable, cartels themselves did not. Even the relative success of the Escobar operation — the neutralization of the kingpin and the effective dismantling of the Medellín Cartel — fizzled out in the following years. Cartel kingpins learned from Escobar’s takedown that being a larger-than-life figure is much less profitable than keeping a low profile, a phenomenon that InSight Crime refers to as the “rise of the invisibles.” Following Escobar’s death, cocaine trafficking transitioned to the Cali Cartel and later to smaller, decentralized organizations with low-profile regional leaders.
The Hydra effect
Modern cartels continued to evolve and are increasingly difficult to understand. Because of the precarious nature of being a kingpin, cartels often have replacement leaders lined up; as a result, power vacuums left behind by a leader’s removal are rapidly filled. Even in the case of a lasting power vacuum — or the perception of one — the result is not the organization’s widespread weakening, but rather its fragmentation.
Succession contests between competing factions lead to betrayal and infighting, fueling violence where said factions operate. As groups fragment, new ones emerge to fill market demand — a phenomenon scholars refer to as the “Hydra effect”: Cut off one head, and two more grow back. Research by political scientist Brian J. Phillips finds that this causal relationship between leadership decapitation and increased violence — of up to 30 percent in the six months following a hit — is visible in the long-term as well.
Experts claim that the worsening of Mexico’s drug trafficking landscape is a direct result of the kingpin strategy. Analysis from the International Crisis Group shows that as kingpin leaders in Mexico are removed, the number of armed groups grows. This trend can be traced back to the most severe period of Mexico’s “War on Drugs” in 2006, when former President Felipe Calderón’s decision to deploy troops to Michoacán to exterminate DTOs was widely blamed for soaring homicide rates in the years following.
El Mencho’s assassination reflects the continued application of the kingpin strategy, despite substantial evidence of its ineffectiveness. The CJNG functions as an increasingly horizontal organization, with many regional leaders and a franchise model that facilitates its expansion via smaller, local cartels. Miguel Alfonso Meza, director of Defensorx (a civil organization dedicated to human rights), claims that killing El Mencho while the cartel is still at its peak has triggered a cycle of internal power struggles and retaliation. Chris Dalby, senior analyst at Dyami Security Intelligence, adds that “El Mencho’s removal is like saying that a company is going to fail because you take out the CEO.”
But if cutting the head of the snake doesn’t work, why does it still happen?
The kingpin strategy persists partly for a simple reason: The fall of drug kingpins makes headlines. Latin American politicians are on a time crunch to reduce the perception of insecurity during their term. This leads to impulsive decisions to appear proactive in the short term, even if those actions are inefficient — or harmful — in the long term.
In the case of Mexico, U.S. opinion plays a weighty role in the decision-making process. President Trump’s reignition of the war on drugs in Latin America meant El Mencho was also atop the U.S. most-wanted list. Cecilia Farfán-Méndez, Senior Fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue, explains, “it matters to show and provide an action that is very readable to the U.S. government against a person that, again, the U.S. also wanted to target.”
For Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, the operation served a dual purpose: signaling toughness to Washington while recovering domestic approval ratings that had slipped to 64 percent amid criticism of her security policies. Polling from El País shows that insecurity has consistently registered the highest disapproval at 26 percent. Following the El Mencho operation, her approval recovered to 71 percent.
Exterminating the body, not just the head
El Mencho’s killing will be yet another cautionary example of why cutting off the head of the snake fails to solve the cartel problem. The removal of drug lords from power — whether through arrest or assassination — is at best a symbolic victory that sends a message to the public and to criminal organizations. At worst, it can trigger violent retaliation from illicit groups that double down instead of retreating.
Recent reports speculate that El Mencho’s possible heir may be his stepson, a U.S.-born Californian from Orange County. If true, the United States will certainly be involved in future operations to debilitate CJNG. But it also complicates things: With constitutional protections shielding him, a kingpin decapitation presents even less reward and greater cost.
These circumstances demand more than symbolic operations. Real progress requires complementing top-down enforcement with decentralized, community-rooted approaches tailored to the specific needs of each region. The Mexican cities of Nezahualcóyotl and Morelia offer a model: their community policing programs — where neighborhood networks collaborate with local police to identify security threats — have demonstrably reduced homicide rates. The decentralized operation of cartels has to be met with a decentralized resistance.
A truly holistic approach must also confront the structural forces sustaining the drug trade: poverty, inequality, and crucially, demand. The U.S.-Mexico Bicentennial Framework for Security, Public Health, and Safe Communities gestures toward this, pledging to address the root causes of crime and drug addiction while generating better alternatives for young people in both countries. But as former Ambassador to Mexico Earl Anthony Wayne warned, “Until you significantly reduce the size of the market for these drugs — both supply and demand — we’re still going to have the same problems.” With North America and Europe standing as the world’s largest consumer markets for cocaine and synthetic drugs, curbing demand must become a critical focus rather than an afterthought in drug policy. Cutting off the head of the snake means nothing if the body is fed from the other end.
Featured Image Source: Axios