The New Yorker:

How the death of the notorious drug kingpin unleashed a wave of cartel violence across Mexico.

By Ioan Grillo

Tapalpa, Jalisco, is classified in Mexico as “a magical pueblo,” or special tourist town, with a Spanish church and cobblestoned streets, nestled between hills of bright-green agave, the spiky plant harvested for tequila. Early on February 22nd, residents woke up to the whirl of Army helicopters buzzing low over their houses, while those on the western edge of town heard gunshots and explosions. “We saw from social networks that there was a shoot-out, but we didn’t know if it was an operation or who it was going after,” Pedro Gómez, the owner of a local wine-and-liquor store, told me. By eleven that morning, news broke that the operation was targeting Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, better known as El Mencho, the fifty-nine-year-old head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or C.J.N.G., and the most powerful drug lord in Mexico. Two hours later, the Mexican Army confirmed reports that Mencho had been killed. “We thought there would be revenge on the whole town,” Gómez said. “You get scared, because of the person he is, that they are going to come with everything, and there is going to be a war.”

But the C.J.N.G didn’t just exact its revenge in Tapalpa; it unleashed it across Mexico. The day of Mencho’s death, cartel thugs launched more than two hundred and fifty attacks in twenty of Mexico’s thirty-two states, burning trucks, cars, buses, shops, and banks. They targeted National Guard forces, killing at least twenty-five troops, and left bullet-riddled corpses on roads. Foreign embassies issued shelter-in-place alerts, international airlines cancelled flights into parts of the country, and millions cowered in their homes. In the airport of Guadalajara, the capital of Jalisco state, travellers ran in panic amid a false alarm that gunmen were storming the facility.

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