When fear becomes strategy, the State enters an examination.
Mexico City, February 2026. The death of Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, El Mencho, did not trigger a simple episode of criminal revenge. It opened a stress test for the Mexican State on three simultaneous fronts: territorial, psychological, and political. In the days following the federal operation in Jalisco, the CJNG’s response was not limited to conventional armed violence. It also took the form of blockades, arson attacks, disruptions of mobility, harm to civilians, and a deliberate expansion of fear as a mechanism of social control. Reuters, EL PAÍS, and AP have documented the scale of the backlash and its national impact, as well as the symbolic weight of the blow to the cartel’s leadership.
The first point that must be stated clearly is that part of Mexico’s political class continues to read this situation with categories too small for a problem this large. That is political dwarfism: reducing an operational mutation of organized crime to a matter of public order, government image, or short term electoral cost. When a criminal actor demonstrates the capacity to punish territories, alter civilian routines, strain logistics chains, and contaminate the information ecosystem with panic narratives, we are no longer dealing only with high impact crime. We are facing a form of hybrid coercion aimed at eroding the State’s perceived authority. Reuters reported precisely that, after El Mencho’s death, waves of disinformation and false content circulated to amplify fear and confusion, a dimension that confirms the battle is also being fought in the public mind.
In that sense, the debate is not only about how many vehicles were set on fire or how many blockades were established. The deeper debate is what strategic message the CJNG intended to send: we can keep striking even after losing our leader; we can multiply fear faster than official information; we can turn uncertainty into a weapon. This is the logic of irregular warfare applied by a criminal structure with accumulated operational learning, regional networks, and the capacity to combine armed action, community intimidation, and propaganda of terror. The chronology published by EL PAÍS reinforces that reading by showing how the impact of the operation quickly spread to different parts of the country and to the national and international public conversation.
In this context, public debate already includes a high impact hypothesis that cannot be dismissed lightly: possible foreign support to the CJNG in training and tactical capabilities. Raymundo Riva Palacio has raised this explicitly by pointing to backing from foreign mercenaries and advice from foreign profiles. In a responsible column, that point must be cited as an attributed claim and subjected to verification, not automatically assumed as a settled fact. But even in this preliminary form, the mere possibility reveals the scale of the problem: Mexico may be facing not only a criminal escalation, but a more sophisticated expression of irregular warfare with psychological, territorial, and political effects on the population and on the perception of State authority.
A methodological precision strengthens rather than weakens this thesis. The fact that a claim still requires full verification does not mean it is irrelevant. It means it must be handled rigorously. And rigor, in this case, requires observing previous trends: the tactical professionalization of certain criminal cells, the transnational circulation of violent know-how, and the hybridization of illicit economies, criminal intelligence, and influence operations. Denying that possibility out of ideological reflex would be as irresponsible as asserting it without evidence. The serious point is another one: Mexico is already facing organizations capable of thinking in terms of operational theater, psychological effects, and narrative control.
For that reason, the State’s response cannot remain trapped between triumphalism and denial. El Mencho’s fall may be a historic blow, but a historic blow does not automatically amount to strategic victory. The central question is whether the Mexican State, in its civil, police, military, judicial, and communicational dimensions, has the capacity to turn that blow into a sustained degradation of the criminal apparatus. If finances, local corruption networks, logistics nodes, lookout systems, recruitment pipelines, and propaganda structures are not dismantled, the command vacuum may translate into violent fragmentation and new escalations.
At this point, it is reasonable to call for an institutional vote of confidence in the Army and the Navy, not as a blank check, but as recognition of an uncomfortable reality: when the threat exceeds local capacities and police forces that are captured or intimidated, federal and armed forces become the State’s main operational dike. Reuters and other coverage have underscored the scale of the operation and the human cost of the confrontation, as well as international intelligence cooperation in locating the target. That reality compels an adult discussion: institutional backing, strict legal oversight, and a long term national strategy, all at the same time.
The real risk is not only the CJNG’s firepower. The real risk is that the political elite will continue reacting with press conference language while the country enters a phase of psychological contest over authority, trust, and normality. Political dwarfism reveals itself when prudence is confused with passivity, or when “moderation” becomes a disguise for the inability to name the gravity of the moment. A State that does not understand the emotional component of criminal warfare arrives late even when it arrives armed.
Mexico urgently needs a public doctrine for responding to a new generation of criminal violence: interagency intelligence, protection for vulnerable municipal police forces, shielding of critical infrastructure, anti-disinformation protocols for crisis periods, highly credible official communication, and a national narrative that neither trivializes citizens’ fear nor hands it over as loot to criminal propaganda. Sovereignty is not defended only on the ground. It is also defended in the collective mind, in institutional legitimacy, and in the capacity to preserve social cohesion under pressure.
What is at stake is not only the succession of a cartel. What is at stake is whether Mexico can correctly read the kind of war it has in front of it. If the public response remains dwarfed in the face of a threat that is already thinking at scale, the cost will not be only security. It will be Statehood.