While the United States is on the precipice of another war in West Asia, only a few months after the abduction of Venezuela’s president and with the football World Cup only a few months away (and FIFA joining Donald Trump’s Board of Peace), Mexico’s most notorious drug lord and the FBI’s most wanted man, Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, better known as El Mencho, the leader of the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), was killed in Tapalpa, a town two hours southwest of Jalisco’s state capital, Guadalajara, Mexico’s third-largest city and one of the host venues for the upcoming World Cup. Mencho was taken down in an operation conducted by Mexican special forces “within the framework of bilateral cooperation, with US authorities providing complementary intelligence”; the CJNG was designated as a terrorist organization by the Trump regime last year and is widely regarded as Mexico’s most powerful criminal organization.

Rumors about El Mencho’s death have been circulating for years, either from kidney problems or some unspecified cause, but this time his death has been confirmed by the Mexican government; he was tracked down through a mistress, according to the authorities. The killing of El Mencho sparked an immediate reaction from CJNG forces in the form of narco blockades on what veteran journalist Ioan Grillo described as an “unprecedented scale” in at least fifteen different Mexican states, along with the torching of targets such as oil trucks, buses, pharmacies, and banks. As of writing, the death count includes several civilians, including a pregnant woman, twenty-five members of the state and federal security forces, and thirty “criminals.” Tourists and locals in affected areas were advised to shelter in place, while 2,500 additional troops are being deployed to Jalisco

As the political scientist Benjamin Lessing argues in a landmark paper on criminal insurgencies, “When cartels turn to fighting strategies, I argue, their aim is not to conquer the state but to constrain it — to change its behavior, which in the case of states means policy outcomes. In wars of constraint, the function of violence is generally coercive.” In this sense, criminal violence does not represent an attempt to destroy the state but forms a negotiation with it; the message in this case is that Mencho might be dead, but the power of the organization remains intact.