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This is One Thing, I'm David Rind, and Mexico took out a drug kingpin, but will it stop the violence, or... President Donald Trump?

I think that this is part of the calculation of the Mexican government is they're trying to stave these off. Stick around.

It's hard to overstate just how big the Supreme Court striking down President Trump's sweeping tariffs was last week. Tariffs are the bedrock of Trump's agenda. To him, they're not only a way to balance the scales of what he sees as unfair trade agreements, but they're also leverage. CountryX does something he doesn't like, he threatens a huge tariff until they do it or come to the table and hash out a new deal. Look no further than our neighbors to the south.

So let me just put it this way, I am not happy with Mexico.

Now, of course, Trump has raged against Mexico, going all the way back to when he first announced his candidacy for office. Remember, he said, they're not sending their best. Much of his frustration revolves around the flow of two things, undocumented immigrants coming across the U.S. Southern border, which has slowed considerably under Trump, and illegal drugs. Trump has argued the notorious drug cartels and not President Claudia Scheinbaum are actually in control of the country. In this term, he's not only threatened tariffs if she doesn't get things under control. He says the U.S. Military might come in to clean it up themselves.

Would I launch strikes in Mexico to stop drugs? It's okay with me. Whatever we have to do to stop drug.

All over the weekend, Sheinbaum took action on her own.

Fire, smoke and chaos across several Mexican states. Cities brought to a standstill as criminal groups retaliate after Mexico's most wanted drug leader died following a military operation Sunday.

Mexican forces killed Dimezio Osegra Cervantes, also known as El Mencho.

He's a former police officer who then oversaw the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. The U.S. State Department classified him as a specially designated global terrorist earlier this year.

Mexico's defense secretary says this dramatic raid was put into motion after they received a tip from someone linked to one of El Mencho's romantic partners. And the fallout spread quickly. Suspected gang members torched busses and businesses all over the country, clashing with the National Guard. And before long, Americans were caught up in the chaos.

I've never seen anything like this in Mexico, ever.

Some resort towns full of tourists were essentially locked down. The U.S. State Department telling Americans to shelter in place in resort cities like Puerto Vallarta.

'So what does this killing mean for the war on drugs on both sides of the border? Let's turn to Steven Dudley. He's the co-founder of the think tank Insight Crime, which tracks the cartels. So Steven, as we record this, it's been a little over 24 hours since the drug kingpin known as El Mencho was killed in Mexico. What is your read on how the cartel community has been reacting to this?

Well, the cartel reacted in an alarming and coordinated fashion across at least 20 different states in Mexico, which is alarming in and of itself.

You were surprised by just how widespread it was?

I mean the quickness, the coordination and the reach are all alarming.

A young man came running with a gun pointed at our windshield to us screaming in Spanish, get out of the car, get out the car.

We should qualify this a little bit. They mostly stopped civilian cars or public busses and burned them and created chaos.

At that point we started running away, and then there were explosions from the car, and then there was gunfire and people running after us, more people with guns.

They did not go after hard targets. They didn't target military installations or police stations. There were some confrontations with the national guard, but as a friend of mine said to me, this, this was not the Tet offensive, but it was something that was alarming for all of those reasons. Coordinated, it was fast and it was a huge expanse of territory that they were operational or are operational. So that should be alarming.

Coming back up just a bit, who was El Mancho?

He was the head of the most important criminal organization in Mexico that exists today, which is the Jalisco Cartel new generation.

Almento had been part of Mexican cartels for decades, having built up the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or CJNG, into one of Mexico's strongest. The U.S. Had offered $15 million for information leading to his arrest.

It's an offshoot of an offshoot. This is the history of Mexico's organized crime in one person because he cut across three decades almost of activities, going all the way back to the 90s.

Under El Mencho's command, the cartel expanded rapidly, challenging rivals like the Sinaloa cartel for control of territory and trafficking routes.

But I think he's really important because he really represents the history of one important, the most important drug for Mexican criminal groups, which is methamphetamine. More meth is consumed on a global scale than any other drug, aside from marijuana. And these guys were at the heart of the production center, geographically speaking, that was their epicenter of activities. And he grew up in this. Was in this geographic epicenter. Which crosses two very important states, which is Jalisco and Michoacan. So he really is, he embodies that, that part of the drug trade. And the fact that he's less known than the El Chapos of the world and everything else, I think is also indicative of just our misunderstanding of where we are in this evolution of drug production and consumption.

Yeah, it sounds like what you're saying is whether Americans realized it or not. This guy had a huge impact on the illicit drugs that were coming over the border.

Huge, and all the drugs. I mean, I didn't say cocaine, but certainly they're involved in the cocaine trade. They're involved with the fentanyl trade. And they are involved in a number of other criminal economies. The thing that makes them a resilient, large and formidable organization is that they have a very wide portfolio of activities, which includes everything from gasoline theft and resale to contraband trade. To forms of human trafficking, to extortion. It's just a very difficult task if you're gonna go after an organization like this that is as diversified on a geographic scale and on a criminal economy scale.

Well, yeah, that's what I was going to ask what happens next. Like we have seen, you know, cartel leaders taken out in the past, whether that's by arrest or, or killed, but that's not usually the end of it. How does a group like this kind of move forward?

'I mean, we don't know if there was or is a plan of succession. It has long been rumored that he was ill. So you would have thought that there would be some notion of what comes after. What we've seen in the past is that these sorts of actions by the government to decapitate the so-called kingpin strategy have not led to less violence. And criminal activity, but often more. You get groups that are now with a large amount of capacity with infrastructure, with training, with access to weapons now with the contacts, and there's a greater number of them and they atomize. So you're not dealing with one group now, you're dealing with a half dozen. They have their own battles, interscene battles or battles with rivals. Data tells us that when you knock out a kingpin, it doesn't mean that you, first of all, you don't end the drug trade, and then second of all it often gets worse in terms of violence rather than better.

Yeah, that's why I was going to ask what, so why was this a strategy from Mexican president Claudia Sheibam and, you know, the authorities to go with this way? Cause they surely knew that this was going to piss off a lot of other cartel members.

'This is the global strategy. I would say there isn't much creativity in this, so you could start there, but it's also a political reality. These politicians don't have 50-year terms or they've propped themselves up on populist notions of might makes right. And so this simplest strategy of the hammer and the nail is what they use. I got a hammer, you're a nail, I'm gonna get rid of you. And it just, it is politically expedient and- But you're telling me it doesn't work. Yeah, but that doesn't matter, David. I mean, if that mattered, there would have been a lot of tossing and turning as it relates to what is the drug war. We're 40, 50 years in on this. And this is where most of the resources go. I'm not gonna say it's completely irrelevant. Don't get me wrong. There is something to having a sort of de facto challenger to your authority. This is the sort of El Chapo factor as well. I mean, you'll recall the former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel and what he represented was The flaunting of a kind of parallel society and in some instances government and the Jalisco cartel has always presented itself as a kind parallel government. They made one of their first major announcements by piling up the bodies of alleged members of their rivals in the setas. Good Lord. Basically saying We are taking control of this space now, away from these other predators. We are the state is the implicit message. So this is what the Almenchos of the world represent, these sort of parallel governments. So you do need to illustrate that you have a monopoly on power if you are a government. And these things are also very difficult to carry out. They do require a lot of intelligence and coordination and secrecy and all the things that you would want as a government and you wanna illustrate as a governments. So they have their function. But in the long haul, they've proven to be less than optimal in terms of results on the violent side and also on the drug side.

We have to take a break when we come back, what this all has to do with President Trump and his war on drugs. Stick around. Well, so you mentioned the intelligence that is needed to carry out something like this. The Mexicans say this particular operation was carried out with US intelligence support. What exactly does that look like and is that normal for these kinds of operations for the US to be helping out?

It is very normal. It has gone through different points in which they're less in contact than others, but the general thrust is always that the U.S. Is involved in some way. These are targets in some ways. The U. S. Also says they want, like they want heads on a platter.

Right. That's what I was going to say. The Trump administration obviously has a vested interest in something like this being carried out successfully because president Trump himself, he has pressured Mexico to go stronger after the cartels. He's threatened big tariffs that didn't comply. Trump at one point even threatened to have the U S military come over the border to strike the cartel's on land. So can we read part of this as Scheinbaum and the Mexicans trying to appease Trump say, Hey, we got this, this guy you wanted, he's off the board.

Yes, we can. We can read very much into the way that the Mexican government has responded to the Trump administration, because some of the actions that they've taken are stark examples of what you need to do when you fight drug trafficking and things that we didn't see before. And I think that's the most important part, is that there is a kind of before and after this second Trump administration in particular enters. Into office. What they did that was different was they used US economic leverage in a way that they hadn't before. That's the main difference, to be honest. There are these other implicit and explicit threats that are made about Mexican sovereignty, about violations of Mexican territorial sovereignty. And I'm not going to say that those won't happen still. Think that everything is still on the table.

Do you think that's land strikes from the US in Mexico? It's a possibility.

Yes, I think that this is part of the calculation of the Mexican government is they're trying to stave these off. And in as much as they can illustrate that they are capturing the largest, capturing or killing in this case, the largest cartel operators, then they can say there's no need for you to come across the border. Why would you? We got this under control. We got it.

Game that out for me, if the Trump administration looks at this and is still not fully satisfied, you know, and tries to do something, you know akin to kind of what we've seen in some of their other international adventures, whether in Venezuela with Nicolas Maduro or the alleged drug boats, which you and I have talked about before in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, that is still ongoing. What would the reaction be in Mexico if something like that were to happen?

'I think in a way, in the same way that President Trump has normalized a lot of things that we wouldn't have expected in the United States, I think that his actions abroad are also normalizing things that we wouldn t expect in the international sphere. So while under, let's say, quote unquote, normal circumstances, there would be shock, there would outrage, there will be political mobilizations. I think there will be all of that, but I feel like... It's so much of what's happening around us is new. Just going back to the boat strikes, that is still, it's still new. It's still not resolved. I mean, they're still killing people extra judicially on the waters of the Caribbean and Pacific seas. There's no due process there. And we have essentially, we just accept it now. So I think that there is a normalization of these things as well. So while I would under normal circumstances expect outrage, breaking up of relations, et cetera, I mean, I don't think that that would happen. I think, especially if it's a targeted, uh, short-term kind of strike, which is the kind that you would expect from the Trump administration, given minutes. Given its history and also its rhetoric about not wanting to get involved directly in any prolonged type of conflict.

Right, that is the debate that is playing out right now over Iran and whether to strike more precision oriented or to kind of go wider, which could have all kinds of effects. And the dance.

And the dance they're doing with Venezuela. I mean, are they in, are the running it, or they're not running it? What's going on? Who's running it. I don't know, but I mean there's not really a clear path there. So I think the same is true as it relates to Mexico.

And of course we should say caught in the middle of all this are just everyday folks trying to go about their lives. And, you know, in these parts of Mexico we're seeing people afraid to go out. You know, American tourists being caught up in things. And it's also worth noting that the World Cup this summer will have multiple matches in Guadalajara which is in the same state where we saw a lot of this. Finally, how will we know if the blowback to this from the cartels against the government is tipping into like a new terrain? Like where you will look and say, oh, they did something like this, this is going in a really dangerous direction. Like how do you see the next, you know, weeks and months playing out?

'Well, I mean, the dangerous direction was taken when they decided to continue down the kingpin strategy route because there are different ways of going at this that are not necessarily what they did. They could also debilitate it from a financial perspective. They could debilitated going after the mid layers of the organization instead of the top. They could go after the corrupt actors that are facilitating. The activities of the criminal groups. There's a lot of ways you can debilitate these criminal groups, and again, I think it is important to go after a top-level person, but also you should be ready for then also the reverberations that happen thereafter. I think one of the things that is gonna be most interesting going forward, though, is this the kind of beginning of the end of this group? You know, if it does atomize. It's atomizing at the same time that the other huge criminal group in Mexico, the Sinaloa cartel is also atomizing. And this is because more because of captures and arrests and subsequent extraditions or handovers to the United States, then it is the death of a leader. But nonetheless, these are the two biggest criminal organizations in Mexico, and they are both looking at a very uncertain future. And those from our perspective at Inside Crime is the thing that we'll be watching.

You have Mexican civilians on one side, you have Americans and the illicit drugs that come over on the other side, all kind of wrapped up in this uncertain moment. Well, Stephen, thank you so much. Appreciate it.

David, great to be with you again.

We should say CNN has reported that the Trump administration has justified those deadly strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific we mentioned earlier, through a classified legal opinion that characterized at least two dozen cartels and suspected drug traffickers as enemy combatants. That's a claim legal experts and Democrats remain highly skeptical of since there is no declared or congressionally authorized war on drug traffickers. According to CNN's analysis, at least 151 people have been killed in the strikes. That's all for us today. Thank you, as always, for listening. You can leave a rating and a review wherever you listen. It helps other people find the show. We'll be back on Sunday. I'll talk to you then.