The Brutal Rise of El Mencho
JULY 11, 2017 1:00PM ET
The Brutal Rise of El Mencho
With El Chapo behind bars, an even more dangerous drug lord has emerged. On the hunt for Mexico’s next-generation narco
By JOSH EELLS
On a hot, humid night last August, two wealthy Mexican brothers went out to party in Puerto Vallarta.
Ivan, 35, and Jesus Alfredo Guzmán, 29, had been vacationing in the resort city all week. Now it was Sunday, the night before Ivan’s 36th birthday, and they booked a table at an upscale restaurant called La Leche to celebrate. Six men and nine women joined them there – young, attractive and well-dressed, driving Range Rovers and Escalades – where they sat at a long candle-lit table in the center of the all-white room, ordered champagne and sang “Happy Birthday.” Three hours later they were wrapping up their night when, shortly after midnight, a half-dozen men with assault rifles burst in and surrounded them.
One gunman forced Ivan to his knees, then kicked him hard in the ribs, sending him sprawling to the floor. Jesus Alfredo was also held at gunpoint. The brothers and the other men were then hustled out to two waiting SUVs and driven off into the night, while the women were left unharmed. The whole operation took less than two minutes – the restaurant’s owner would later describe it as “violent, but very clean.” And thus, without a shot being fired, the two youngest sons of notorious Sinaloa Cartel boss Joaquín Guzmán – a.k.a. “El Chapo” – had been kidnapped.
Chapo’s sons had made the mistake of partying on the turf of Sinaloa’s newest and most dangerous rival: an upstart cartel boss named Rubén Oseguera Cervantes – alias “El Mencho.” A former Jalisco state policeman who once served three years in a U.S. prison for selling heroin, Mencho heads what many experts call Mexico’s fastest-growing, deadliest and, according to some, richest drug cartel – the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación, or CJNG. Although he’s basically unknown in the U.S., Mencho has been indicted in a D.C. federal court on charges of drug trafficking, corruption and murder, and currently has a $5 million bounty on his head. Aside from perhaps Rafael Caro Quintero – the aging drug lord still wanted for the 1985 torture and killing of a DEA agent – he is probably America’s top cartel target. “It was Chapo,” says a DEA source. “Now it’s Mencho.”
CJNG have been around for only about half a decade, but with their dizzyingly swift rise, they have already achieved what took Sinaloa a generation. The cartel has established trafficking routes in dozens of countries on six continents and controls territory spanning half of Mexico, including along both coasts and both borders. “[CJNG] have increased their operations like no other criminal organization to date,” said a classified Mexican intelligence report obtained by the newspaper El Universal. This past May, Mexico’s attorney general, Raúl Cervantes, declared them the most ubiquitous cartel in the country.
More:
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/the-brutal-rise-of-el-mencho-196980/
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Cartel leader who is the brother-in-law of wanted Mexican drug kingpin is extradited to the US from Uruguay to face trafficking charges
By ADRY TORRES FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 18:27 EDT, 14 May 2020 | UPDATED: 18:31 EDT, 14 May 2020
Uruguay extradited a jailed Mexican cartel leader to the United States during a heavily guarded operation that involved armed military helicopters and trucks on Thursday.
Gerardo González Valencia, a member of the Los Cuinis clan, had been named in an April 2016 indictment by a Washington, D.C., federal court that charged him with conspiring to transport five kilos of cocaine and 500 grams of methamphetamines across the Mexico-U.S. border.
He is the brother-in-law of Nemesio 'El Mencho' Oseguera Cervantes, who is the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, considered Mexico's most powerful criminal organization, and reportedly headed their money laundering operations.
El Mencho is also wanted by the United States government, which is offering a $10million reward for his capture.
More:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8321069/Uruguay-extradites-U-S-brother-law-leader-powerful-Mexican-cartel.html
Wikipedia:
Gerardo González Valencia (Spanish pronunciation: [xe'ɾaɾdo ɣon'sales ?a'len?ja]; born 1976/1977) is a Mexican suspected drug lord and high-ranking member of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), a criminal group based in Jalisco. He is part of a clan that heads a CJNG money laundering branch known as Los Cuinis. He was allegedly responsible for coordinating international money laundering schemes by using shell companies to purchase assets in Latin America, Europe, and Asia. His wife Wendy Dalaithy Amaral Arévalo was reportedly working with him on this large money laundering scheme when the couple moved from Mexico to Uruguay in 2011.
The original documents of the investigation framing González Valencia were leaked in 2015 through the Panama Papers, where it detailed real estate transactions and industrial sector investments tied to him. After a multi-year investigation by Latin American officials and the U.S. Department of the Treasury, González Valencia was arrested in Montevideo, Uruguay, in April 2016, and imprisoned for money laundering charges. He was wanted by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia for conspiracy to distribute cocaine and methamphetamine. In May 2020, he was extradited to the U.S.
. . .
Criminal career
Time in Argentina
González Valencia's envoys were detected in Argentina in 2009 when they moved to Puerto Madero, Buenos Aires. Argentinian officials also uncovered that they created an entity in Buenos Aires and opened a supermarket chain.[15] The investigation started on 10 March 2009, when three Mexican nationals posing as tourists were driving a Chevrolet Astra and got involved in a car accident with another driver in Puerto Madero. The Mexicans were living in Torres Le Parc Puerto Madero [es], an upscale complex in the city. The Argentine Naval Prefecture got involved in the incident, but the three Mexicans threatened the officers and told them that in Mexico they would be dead for getting involved with them. The officers took note of the license plates of the vehicle before the Mexican nationals left.[16]
Upon further investigation, they discovered that the Chevrolet Astra was owned by an Argentinian strawperson from Ituzaingó, Buenos Aires, and that the jurisdiction thus fell to officials in Morón, Buenos Aires. Officials in Morón began investigating the Mexican nationals and discovered that there was a suspicious entity, Círculo Internacional S.A., that served as a bar and café store. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) provided evidence to the investigators that the Mexican nationals were likely linked to the Sinaloa Cartel, but the Morón officials were not able to continue the investigation successfully.[16][17]
On 9 September 2009, the three Mexicans inaugurated a convenience chain store, Corner, in Puerto Madero.[16] The project included plans to open 15 stores with a US$2.5 million investment.[18] They also bought a large storage facility and two other stores in Congreso and Microcentro that did not open. In mid-2010,[d] however, the three individuals fled Argentina after the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) identified that one of Círculo Internacional S.A.'s sister companies, Círculo Comercial Total de Productos S.A., had invested millions of dollars to the Argentinian entity from Mexico with drug proceeds from Los Cuinis.[e] Investigators later discovered that the three men worked with González Valencia.[16][17]
He arrived in Argentina the following year and managed Círculo Internacional S.A. He lived at Hotel Faena and sent his three children to a private school in the northern part of the city, and investigators discovered that he paid 6 months of tuition in advance in cash.[16] Círculo Internacional S.A. received about US$1.8 million sums as paid-in capital and deposited them at Banco de la Nación Argentina. Investigators believe that the money originally came from Los Cuinis. Argentinian authorities investigated if Los Cuinis had bought assets in the provinces of Buenos Aires, Entre Ríos, Salta, and Corrientes.[15]
More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerardo_Gonz%C3%A1lez_Valencia
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Uruguayan paper, google translated:
IT WAS ARRESTED IN OUR COUNTRY IN 2016
The drug trafficker González Valencia was extradited to Washington
Jorge Larrañaga said that the Uruguayan government "is going forward in causes of this significance."
Posting Date May 14, 2020
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Gerardo González Valencia, known as "Lalo", arrested in 2016 in Uruguay for cocaine and methamphetamine trafficking, finally arrived at the Dulles International Airport, in Washington, thanks to the collaboration between the Uruguayan and American governments.
According to a statement released by the United States Embassy, both the DEA and the Department of Justice of that country thanked Uruguay for having made extradition possible.
For his part, the Minister of the Interior, Jorge Larrañaga, gave a press conference in which he thanked the National Police, the National Rehabilitation Institute, the Republican Guard, the Judiciary, among others, for facilitating the process of extradition that he considered "of singular importance".
Larrañaga explained that "at the 6.12 hour the flight left for the US. to comply with a process that began in June 2016 and took four years to elucidate, culminating in an appeal to the Supreme Court of Justice in February of this year. "
https://www.republica.com.uy/el-narcotraficante-gonzalez-valencia-fue-extraditado-a-washington-id765652/
