The demise of Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, the chief of the Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), on February 22 used to be straight away framed as the autumn of a narco kingpin. Pictures of gun battles, torched automobiles and retaliatory violence ruled headlines. Commentators spoke of an influence vacuum, of fragmentation, of the imaginable weakening of one among Mexico’s greatest cartels.
It used to be introduced because the elimination of a novel, hyper-violent male determine on the apex of a felony empire. However this framing tells us extra about how we believe organised crime than about the way it in reality works.
The obsession with kingpins rests on a dramatic figuring out of cartel energy: a gun in a single hand, territory within the different, masculinity carried out via brutality. El Mencho embodied that symbol.
But cartels don’t seem to be sustained by way of spectacle on my own. They undergo as a result of any individual strikes the cash, launders the earnings, manages the property, cultivates reputable fronts and binds networks of loyalty via circle of relatives. In terms of CJNG, that determine used to be no longer simplest El Mencho. It used to be additionally, allegedly, his spouse Rosalinda González Valencia.
González has incessantly been described as “La Jefa” (the Spanish female type of “the boss”). It’s a label that gestures towards authority whilst nonetheless situating her on the subject of her husband. However she used to be no longer merely the partner of a drug lord. She got here from the Valencia circle of relatives, traditionally connected to Los Cuinis, a community deeply embedded in CJNG’s monetary operations.
Government have alleged that she oversaw dozens of companies, belongings holdings and shell firms tied to the cartel’s laundering equipment. Arrested a couple of occasions and jailed for 5 12 months for cash laundering in 2021 (she used to be launched remaining yearfor just right behaviour), she occupied the gray zone the place felony capital bleeds into the criminal financial system. If El Mencho represented the cartel’s violent face, González represented its financial backbone.
That is the place gender issues. Organised crime is mechanically portrayed as an area of exaggerated masculinity. Girls seem in those tales as sufferers, girlfriends, trafficked our bodies or glamorous equipment.
Even if they’re prosecuted, they’re incessantly framed as appendages: “the wife of”, “the daughter of”, “the partner of”. Such language, whilst incessantly tough to steer clear of, obscures the structural truth that many cartels function via kinship capitalism, the place circle of relatives isn’t sentimental however strategic.
Inside those programs, other halves don’t seem to be incidental. They assist stay the industry secrets and techniques in environments the place betrayal is deadly. In patriarchal felony orders, loyalty is policed via blood ties.
A partner managing accounts isn’t a deviation from energy however an extension of it. Gender does no longer exclude girls from authority, however fairly reshapes how that authority is exercised and perceived.
The sensational reality is that this: violence might triumph over territory, however finance governs it. And, because the Global Disaster Crew – a western non-government organisation which goals to stop battle – spelled out in a 2023 document, finance in lots of cartels is deeply gendered.
This doesn’t imply romanticising girls’s roles inside organised crime. Nor does it recommend emancipation via illegal activity.
The facility reportedly exercised by way of figures like González has a tendency to be located inside male-dominated hierarchies and violent programs which are additionally accountable for excessive varieties of violence in opposition to girls, together with femicide and sexual exploitation. The similar constructions that permit elite girls to wield monetary authority concurrently reproduce brutal patriarchal keep watch over in different places. That contradiction isn’t unintentional – it’s the approach issues paintings.
El Mencho’s demise exposes that contradiction. When the state eliminates a male chief, the idea is that the organisation will cave in or descend into chaos. However cartels don’t seem to be simply constructed round a unmarried dominant determine. They’re hybrid enterprises combining coercion, company constructions and circle of relatives governance. The elimination of the general public face does no longer mechanically dismantle the personal structure.
Hidden energy construction
The query, then, isn’t merely who will pick out up the gun, however who helps to keep the books. Who maintains the company fronts? Who sustains cross-border monetary channels? Who negotiates the transformation of illicit earnings into reputable capital? Those don’t seem to be secondary issues. They resolve whether or not an organisation fragments or adapts to a pace-setter’s demise or imprisonment.
Via centring El Mencho on my own, media narratives are perpetuating a blindness to the function of girls in cartels. They equate energy with violence and masculinity with keep watch over, leaving the commercial and relational dimensions of authority under-analysed.
But organised crime research increasingly more exhibit that sturdiness lies in governance, no longer gunfire. Governance relies on control, monetary oversight, logistical coordination, and embedded social networks. Those purposes are incessantly feminised – no longer as a result of girls are naturally suited for them, however as a result of patriarchal programs allocate them in ways in which render them much less conspicuous and subsequently much less centered.
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Okay.C. Alfred/San Diego Union-Tribune/TNS)
There’s something unsettling about recognising the strategic authority of cartel other halves. It complicates at ease binaries of sufferer and offender. It demanding situations the concept girls in violent programs are both coerced or simply marginal figures.
However in Italy, Rafaella D’Alterio reportedly maintained the operational and monetary coherence of her Camorra extended family following her husband’s demise. She did this – no longer via impressive violence – however via administrative keep watch over, alliance-building, and circle of relatives networks. Her case, as many others, underscores that sturdiness incessantly lies in governance fairly than gunfire.
Decapitation methods – killing a cartel’s chief – are politically dramatic and symbolically tough. However they leisure at the assumption that felony organisations are vertically depending on a unmarried male. If monetary governance and kinship networks stay intact, the device might regenerate.
El Mencho’s demise is subsequently each a rupture and a revelation. This is a rupture within the sense that the figurehead of some of the global’s maximum tough cartels has fallen. However it is usually a revelation of ways slender our figuring out of organised crime stays.
We fixate at the spectacle of masculine violence whilst overlooking the quieter, gendered infrastructures that maintain it. To know cartels only via their kingpins is to misconceive them. Energy in organised crime does no longer are living simplest within the guy with the gun, but additionally within the girls who, whether or not publicly said or no longer, incessantly stand on the centre of that structure.
