International tourists, including Nigerians, have been trapped in Mexico’s Guadalajara and several other states as the deadly Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) rampages across the country following the assassination of its notorious leader Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes known as El Mencho.
This has thrown Mexico’s $281 billion tourism sector that sustains nearly eight million jobs into its deepest crisis in decades.
El Mencho was reportedly shot when Mexican special forces cornered him and attempted to arrest him, leading to a shootout in which he was killed.
Reports say the military operation was carried out with assistance from US forces.
Mexican authorities had earlier placed a $10 million bounty on El Mencho, but his death has triggered serious gun battles between the Mexican government and the cartel across the country.
Mexican states of Tamaulipas, Michoacán, Guerrero, and Nuevo Leó have seen an outbreak of bombings, street-to-street gun battles, and the torching of public facilities.
Viral videos show tourists and travelers scampering for safety in Guadalajara International Airport as gun shots and smoke rent the air.
Armed men were seen inside the terminal.
Armed CJNG gunmen set up roadblocks and torched the cars of random civilians.
Puerto Vallarta, one of Mexico’s top tourist destinations, welcoming a record-breaking 6.3 million visitors last year became a war zone.
The US State Department issued a travel advisory. describing the unfolding Mexican chaos as fluid.
“Due to ongoing security operations and related road blockages and criminal activity, U.S. citizens in the following locations should shelter in place until further notice: Jalisco State (including Puerto Vallarta, Chapala, and Guadalajara), Tamaulipas State (including Reynosa and other municipalities), areas of Michoacan State, Guerrero State, and Nuevo Leon State.”
Background
Mexico’s decades-long struggle with powerful drug cartels, principally the Sinaloa Cartel and the CJNG, has made it one of the world’s most violent countries, with over 30,000 homicides recorded annually in recent years, the vast majority cartel-related.
The so-called “War on Drugs,” formally launched by President Felipe Calderón in 2006 with military deployment against trafficking organizations, has been widely assessed as a strategic failure, producing escalating violence, cartel fragmentation into smaller and more brutal factions, and a death toll estimated at over 450,000 people killed between 2006 and 2024.
Despite successive government strategies ranging from Calderón’s militarized confrontation to President López Obrador’s controversial “abrazos no balazos” (hugs not bullets) policy of reduced direct engagement, and now President Claudia Sheinbaum’s security reforms, the cartels continue to control vast territories, dominate global fentanyl and cocaine trafficking routes, and exercise a level of institutional penetration through corruption of police, military, and judicial officials that has made the Mexican state’s authority deeply contested in significant parts of its own territory.
