As the once relatively quiet Mexican state of Jalisco becomes battleground of brazen attacks between cartel gunmen and police, it seems that a major news outlet, the Washington Post, may have jumped the gun in claiming that Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion is becoming the most powerful crime syndicate in Mexico.
The young cartel made international headlines last month when, as Breitbart Texas previously reported, they ambushed a convoy of Mexican Federales. Five officers were killed. Just days later they led a carried out a second ambush where they slaughtered 15 state police officers.
The two attacks are brazen in nature and are rare for the bigger metropolitan areas of Mexico. Along the U.S.-Mexico border fierce gun battles between gunmen from other cartels such as Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel, and Mexican troops are regular occurrences that are rarely covered by silenced Mexican news outlets and largely ignored by major U.S. news outlets.
In a recent article by the Washington Post, titled “Is the New Generation Becoming The Most Powerful Cartel In Mexico,” the publication cites the brazen defiance of Mexican authorities and the short but intense history of the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion Jalisco in order to qualify the group as one of the most powerful cartels in Mexico. The Post’s article comes just one day after Vice published an article titled “Jalisco’s New Generation is Becoming One of Mexico’s Most Powerful and Dangerous Cartels” where they describe in detail the group’s origins and their violent nature.
ORIGIN
The major cartels in Mexico that have been around in one form or another since the 1940’ and 1950’s, such as the Gulf Cartel and years later the Guadalajara cartel which led to the creation of the Sinaloa Federation (also known as Cartel De Sinaloa or CDS), the Juarez Cartel and the Tijuana Cartel. Unlike them, the CJNG is actually a splinter faction of the Sinaloa Federation and its representative in Jalisco, the Milenio Cartel.
In 2009 Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel, one of the top men in the Sinaloa Federation, was gunned down by Mexican authorities. At around the same time, the operational leader of the Milenio Cartel, Oscar Nava Valencia, was arrested and eventually extradited to America where he pleaded guilty to cocaine conspiracy and is now serving a 25 year prison term. The loss of the two leaders caused the Milenio Cartel to implode with two factions emerging from the chaos. One faction took the name “La Resistencia” and turned on the Sinaloa Federation while the other faction became the Cartel Nueva Generacion Jalisco.
The young cartel went public in 2011 when they began posting various videos on social media introducing themselves to the public. They took on the nickname Los Mata Zetas or “The Zeta Killers” as a force for good that would lead the fight against the Zetas in an effort to bring back peace and tranquility that the Mexican government had been unable to bring back.
“As an ethical principle we are forbidden from taking part in extortion, theft, kidnapping, rapes and anything that affects the national, family emotional and moral wellbeing,” a muscular hooded man says in the video claiming to be an armed force for the public.
Since then the CJNG began killing and dumping the bodies of Zetas and years later the bodies of members of Knights Templars (a dominant cartel in the Southern Mexican State of Michoacán). Along the way, the CJNG kept posting videos telling the public that their fight was against cartels that harassed the public and that the average citizen did not need to fear them. During their fight against the Knights Templars, Mexico’s former Attorney General, Jose Murillo Karam, claimed that the CJNG had been behind the effort to provide weapons to the self-defense groups that appeared in Michoacán. The CJNG has also been tied to various assassinations of corrupt Mexican politicians.
As time has passed, the CJNG has acted in an independent yet friendly fashion with the Sinaloa Federation and has continued to grow in size and territory excelling as warlords. They; however, appear to lag behind the other cartels on the business side.
According to Mexico’s Proceso Magazine, a virtually unknown cartel called Los Cuinis, an group friendly to the CJNG, is believed to be one of the most profitable cartels in Mexico since their market is primarily Europa and Asia. Unlike other outlets have reported, Los Cuinis and the CJNG are not the same group but are organizations friendly to one another, Proceso reported. This means that the vast wealth of Los Cuinis is separate from the CJNG.
ANALYSIS
“I am duly impressed by the progress they’ve made with regards to territorial expansion and organizational strength in such a short period of time,” said border security expert and Breitbart Texas Contributing Editor Sylvia Longmire referring to the CJNG. “However, I would place them nowhere near being in the same league as the CDS. I think they learned a lot by being their enforcement arm, and they certainly made very good connections in that region. But without those connections, networks, and supply lines that they’ve piggybacked onto in the last couple of years, they don’t have much to bolster them as an independent business organization.”
While the efficient killing machine known as the CJNG continues to grow, as Breitbart Texas previously reported, their antics have already earned them a spot on the U.S. Government’s list of criminal organizations that they target in order to freeze their assets and keep U.S. citizens from doing business with them.
“They (CJNG) don’t have the history or the self-discipline that the CDS has; they make way too much noise, and while that brings the desired notoriety, they’re not experienced enough to realize this is bad news if they want to grow and stay in business in the long term,” Longmire said. “As for the police ambush and massacre, they also need to learn that cartels stay in business by influencing cops to bend to their will, not killing all of them.”
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