Fentanyl will flow to US despite arrest of brother of ‘El Mencho’

EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – The brother of one of the most wanted drug traffickers in the world is scheduled to appear before a judge in Mexico City later this week on drug and weapons charges.

The Mexican army in the state of Jalisco on Sunday arrested Abraham Oseguera Cervantes while carrying two guns and unspecified amounts of drugs. Oseguera, aka “Don Rodo,” is considered “one of the principal coordinators of logistics and financial operations” for the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), the Defense Ministry (SEDENA) said in a statement .

He is a sibling to Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, aka “El Mencho,” whom the U.S. Justice Department considers one of the bigger exporters of fentanyl and other illicit drugs from Mexico . The Drug Enforcement Administration is offering a $10 million reward for his capture.

“Because Abraham (Oseguera) is considered a principal operator in that structure (the Jalisco cartel) and a generator of violence, this action represents a major blow against that criminal organization,” the statement said. Various news outlets in Mexico this week aired leaked footage of soldiers leading Abraham Oseguera in jeans, a plaid shirt and handcuffs as he stepped off an airplane in Mexico City prior to being taken to a maximum-security prison.

International security experts, however, are not as optimistic as the Mexican government that the arrest of Mencho’s sibling will dent CJNG’s pipeline of fentanyl to the United States.

“We’ve seen the arrest of high-ranking folks within these organizations (cartels). It doesn’t tend to make a whole lot of difference,” said Mike Ballard, vice president of intelligence at Virginia-based Global Guardian security group. “These organizations are designed so that if one individual leader, captain or upper management is arrested or killed, the show must go on and they’ll continue to operate.”

Other individuals close to Nemesio Oseguera have been arrested in the past and the Jalisco cartel has gotten stronger, not weaker, since then. The DEA says CJNG and the Sinaloa cartel are making billions of dollars in profits from the sale of fentanyl because they can produce an illegal $10 pill for under a dime.

These cartels are not confined to Mexico but have a presence in all 50 states in the United States and 100 foreign countries, DEA Administrator Anne Milgram told a House committee last year .

“There may be some after-effects internally, where they operate a little bit more carefully, but I don’t think this is going to have a long- or even short-term impact on their operations,” Ballard said.

Earlier, the director of the Center for the United States and Mexico at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, Tony Payan, told Border Report to expect Mexico to make some high-profile arrests and extraditions of cartel leaders because 2024 is a presidential election year in both countries.

Payan agrees such arrests are unlikely to disrupt transnational criminal organizations that have moved away from the old model of a single, micromanaging boss to one resembling a corporation that expands or splits up and replaces CEOs as needed.

“There’s certainly a lot of inner workings in Mexico right now with the election coming up,” Ballard said. “It might be political, I can’t really say. It might just be they were looking for someone else and they found (Abraham Oseguera) because he’s the closest they can get to Nemesio.”

Abraham Oseguera in 1993 received a 10-year prison sentence in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California for conspiracy to distribute heroin and possession of a firearm by a felon. He was also found to be in the United States illegally, was charged with illegal re-entry and eventually deported to Mexico.

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