In a matter of hours, gunmen paralyzed the city of Guadalajara, a major economic hub of some 5 million people, on February 22. Highways connecting to the city were blocked by burning cars and tractor trailers, and businesses were set alight. The local government ordered an immediate halt to all public transportation, and locals sheltered in place.
The violence was a coordinated offensive from the Jalisco Cartel New Generation (Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación – CJNG) in Guadalajara. It came after the Mexican military’s killing of the group’s leader, Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, alias “El Mencho,” and several other important members in a targeted operation in the pine-covered town of Tapalpa, located about three hours west of the city in the western state of Jalisco.
Two days after the chaos, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum assured the public that her government had regained control and that the city could return to normal. Meanwhile, Jalisco Governor Pablo Lemus said the violent outburst was “out of the ordinary.”
After two decades of Mexico’s war on organized crime, Sheinbaum and Lemus are not the first officials to confront this kind of criminal violence, and certainly not in this city. Guadalajara’s criminal history did not start with the CJNG. Since at least the 1980s, the city has lived a double life.
Today, the violence is the result of the rapid growth of the CJNG, which emerged in 2010 after the fragmentation of the Sinaloa and Milenio cartels. Since then, the group has spent years developing a system of criminal control in Guadalajara, its urban epicenter.
The scenes that played out that day were particularly spectacular. Gunmen and security forces battled each other around the city, including near a National Guard base to the north. Smoke filled the sky, and a steady stream of gunfire echoed across the city. Residents’ cell phones were inundated with messages and videos stoking panic and fear.
“The last I heard of my parents was that they had to take shelter at a local store because they started to hear gunshots. It really scared me because the line cut out, and I didn’t hear anything else,” said one marketing professional working in Guadalajara who spoke to InSight Crime on the condition of anonymity for security reasons.
Burned out vehicles on the highway close to Guadalajara following the violent pushback by CJNG henchmen to El Mencho’s killing on February 22, 2026. Credit: InSight Crime
Although the roadblocks and other disturbances extended into rural parts of Jalisco and across 20 other states, most of it was concentrated in Guadalajara, the soon-to-be host of the upcoming World Cup. Of the 25 National Guard members killed during the outbreak of violence, at least 10 lost their lives in the city, according to local media monitoring.
Several residents InSight Crime spoke to described a city marked by fear and uncertainty, even during the days after authorities claimed to have regained control.
“Even though we can go out on the street now, many of us prefer to stay at home because things are still very tense,” said one university student in Guadalajara who also did not want to be named for security reasons.
An ‘Invisible’ Model of Control Emerges from the Shadows in Guadalajara
A vibrant urban center and capital city, Guadalajara has seen rapid economic growth in the past three decades and has come to be considered a hub for technological innovation as the so-called “Silicon Valley of Mexico.” It is also the seat of political power in Jalisco, with a large concentration of government agencies, security forces, courts, universities, and public services.
Guadalajara has also long served as the home base for the rank-and-file of the CJNG. The city offers ideal conditions: a dynamic formal economy that allows illicit profits to be laundered into legal markets, and a strategic location near a network of highways that connects drug production zones to the US border and major Pacific ports. For decades, members of organized crime groups have lived here with their families, mingling with local elites while overseeing criminal operations that span the globe.
They also invest large sums of money into legal businesses to disguise their illicit profits from the drug business, fuel theft, extortion, and other criminal markets. The US Treasury Department has sanctioned dozens of businesses in Guadalajara over the last two decades for links to organized crime, including restaurants, housing complexes, local shops, front companies, and gas stations, among others.
Signs of missing people in Guadalajara’s city center. Credit: Parker Asmann, January 2026
While other criminal actors also call the city home – from street gangs to local drug trafficking cells, extortion rings, and independent brokers – all of them effectively operate under the umbrella of the CJNG.
“There’s no other criminal enterprise here. All the groups that don’t formally belong to the CJNG must have some kind of agreement with them. … But it’s all the same brand,” Rogelio Barba, a criminology professor at the University of Guadalajara, told InSight Crime.
Through local leadership structures at the neighborhood level known as “plazas,” the CJNG has divided up the city, established norms and rules for local criminal rackets, and granted permission for certain actors to operate, provided that they respect the group’s authority. In practice, this regulation extends to controlling petty crime in certain areas, fixing retail drug prices, defining who can sell and where, determining which neighborhoods are off-limits for extortion, and resolving disputes between independent operators.
This model of criminal governance is carefully balanced. While the CJNG has opted for a much more violent and aggressive approach in other parts of the country, in Guadalajara it has cultivated a more discreet profile. In large part, this has meant corrupting local officials, co-opting state institutions, and targeted violence instead of daily outbursts.
Forced disappearances are one feature of this model. Since about 2013, cases of missing people here have risen exponentially – even outpacing homicides – making Jalisco one of the epicenters of this tragic trend that has been on the rise in Mexico for decades. Other, less obvious forms of violence like threats, extortion, and selective assassinations are also part of the CJNG’s modus operandi.
But that unseen form of control can rupture in an instant and become visible with extreme violence, as we saw earlier this week. In addition to the attacks that followed the killing of El Mencho, the CJNG has brought Guadalajara to a standstill on several other occasions in response to security operations targeting the group, including in 2011, 2012, and 2015.
There have also been vicious gun battles in broad daylight when the CJNG deems it necessary. At the end of 2025, for example, a businessman was gunned down by dozens of hitmen in a popular residential area of Guadalajara. Authorities recovered more than 2,000 shell casings at the scene, according to local prosecutors. The brazen killing was reportedly a retaliatory attack by the CJNG against the presumed leader of an extortion racket that had not secured the required permission to operate, several security analysts told InSight Crime.
“This extreme violence also helps the group maintain order when they need to. It’s their way of saying, ‘look, this is what happens to those who aren’t with us,’” Barba told InSight Crime.
Rupturing the Social Fabric in Guadalajara
About a month before El Mencho was killed, hundreds of students gathered at a secondary school in Guadalajara for a special workshop organized by the local government about the threat posed by organized crime and the CJNG’s recruitment push.
Guadalajara’s city center. Credit: Victoria Dittmar, April 2024
“Organized crime is looking to recruit young people just like you all,” said a state police officer standing in the center of the room. “Don’t let them, there are people waiting for you at home.”
The students listened closely, and then filed into different classrooms to share what they knew about organized crime in the city. In one session InSight Crime attended, the presenter asked the students if they could describe organized crime, and several of the kids raised their hands. None of them used the word “narcos,” but they said they knew “that was who controlled the neighborhoods.”
The program was an official response to the state’s disappearance crisis, amplified by the discovery of the Izaguirre Ranch in 2025. The rural site located an hour west of Guadalajara acted as a training ground and possibly also an extermination camp for the CJNG, where recruits were taught how to fight. Those who resisted were likely killed there, according to search collectives InSight Crime spoke with.
Raul Servín, who is part of a collective of people searching for their missing loved ones in Jalisco, was among those who found the ranch. His son was abducted by gunmen in Guadalajara in 2018, and now he accompanies more than 500 families facing the same harsh reality.
For Servín, the social impact of the CJNG’s presence and control in his and other communities in Guadalajara is clear, even when it flies under the radar. The violence is made worse, he says, by the fact that local authorities have been implicated in colluding with the CJNG to carry out forced disappearances.
“We feel completely alone because we can’t trust the government,” he told InSight Crime.
Raul Servín, who is part of a collective of people searching for their missing loved ones in Jalisco. Credit: Parker Asmann, January 2026.
Many of the human remains that Servín and his fellow searchers have found were buried in residential areas on the outskirts of the city. In mid-February, his group found the body of a child buried under a terrace in the back yard of a home. A month earlier, they found two other bodies buried in a house they got access to thanks to an armed National Guard escort.
The CJNG’s ability to bury scores of victims inside residential homes in Guadalajara speaks to their social control, says Jorge Ramírez, a sociology professor at the University of Guadalajara.
“These neighborhoods are at the mercy of organized crime,” he said.
