The last time the World Cup came to North America, football and organised crime collided in the most tragic way imaginable. On the night of July 2, 1994, Colombian defender Andrés Escobar was shot dead in a car park outside a nightclub in his hometown, Medellín. Days earlier, during a World Cup fixture against the United States, he had accidentally scored an own goal. Colombia, widely tipped as a dark horse, crashed out in the first round. In a country where drug money seeped into football clubs and betting syndicates, that mistake carried a deadly price.
Escobar was known as “the gentleman of football”. Calm, disciplined and widely respected, he represented a generation that believed the sport could help cleanse Colombia’s image, then stained by cocaine empires and cartel wars. Instead, his murder became a brutal symbol of how deeply organised crime had penetrated Latin American society. A gunman linked to a powerful trafficking network fired six shots, reportedly shouting “goal” after each one. Many Colombians believed the killing was revenge for cartel gambling losses tied to their own goal.
As the World Cup returns to North America, those ghosts feel uncomfortably close. With barely a few days to go before the opening match at the iconic Estadio Azteca, Mexico—co-hosting the tournament with the US and Canada—finds itself in the throes of a violent crisis. The surge in bloodshed follows the killing of Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, better known as El Mencho, the long-time leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or CJNG.
On February 22, Mexican security forces, acting on intelligence provided by the US, tracked El Mencho to a mountain cabin in Tapalpa, Jalisco. The operation marked one of the most significant blows against organised crime in modern Mexican history. It also signalled a decisive break from former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s controversial “hugs, not bullets” strategy, which prioritised social programmes over direct confrontation.
The raid was authorised by President Claudia Sheinbaum under intense American pressure. A newly formed US intelligence unit, the Joint Interagency Task Force-Counter Cartel, had been mapping cartel networks on both sides of the border. By surveilling an associate of El Mencho’s romantic partner, analysts were able to pinpoint his location. Severely weakened by chronic kidney disease that required regular dialysis, the cartel leader was mortally wounded in a fierce gun battle.
“Our nation must continue to confront organised crime without hesitation. This operation proves that no criminal is untouchable, and our commitment to the millions of people we serve remains our only priority,” said Omar García Harfuch, Mexico’s security minister, announcing the successful operation against El Mencho. For Harfuch, the mission carried personal weight.
Sheinbaum had handpicked him to oversee Mexico’s war against organised crime. When she was mayor of Mexico City, she had appointed him as police chief. During his tenure, crime rates fell sharply, making him a target for the cartels. On June 26, 2020, the CJNG carried out one of the most audacious urban attacks in Mexico’s recent history. Gunmen ambushed Harfuch’s armoured SUV on Paseo de la Reforma, the capital’s grand boulevard lined with embassies and luxury hotels. Around 28 hitmen, disguised as road workers, blocked his vehicle with a construction truck before opening fire with Barrett .50 calibre sniper rifles and grenade launchers.
While Harfuch survived with three bullet wounds, two of his bodyguards were killed. The attack demonstrated that the CJNG had the intelligence, weapons and logistical capability to strike senior officials in areas once considered untouchable. It was a direct challenge to the Mexican state.
Now widely viewed as the second most powerful figure in Sheinbaum’s government—possibly even her successor when her term ends in 2030—Harfuch has become the face of a more aggressive security policy. Yet the killing of El Mencho did not bring calm. It unleashed chaos.
Within hours of his death, CJNG operatives launched a synchronised campaign of retaliation. Across at least 20 of Mexico’s 31 states, gunmen erected around 250 flaming roadblocks. Buses, lorries, cars, banks and supermarkets were set ablaze. Ambushes targeted soldiers and police. A cartel lieutenant reportedly offered a bounty of 20,000 pesos for every Mexican soldier killed. Military commanders were even forced to divert the helicopter carrying the dying cartel boss away from Guadalajara to avoid anti-aircraft fire.
The scale of the response exposed the CJNG’s reach. It operates in every Mexican state and in more than 40 countries worldwide. According to former security official Eduardo Guerrero, “Never in Mexico has there been an organisation with the presence, territorial control or political penetration that the Jalisco New Generation Cartel has.”
Unlike traditional hierarchical cartels, the CJNG functions as a decentralised “franchise”. Regional cells operate under its banner while sharing profits through extensive financial networks. Its criminal portfolio spans cocaine and methamphetamine trafficking, the booming fentanyl trade, illegal gold mining, avocado production, migrant smuggling and timeshare fraud schemes targeting elderly Americans.
Born in 2009 from the remnants of the Milenio Cartel—itself a splinter of the Sinaloa Cartel—the CJNG built its dominance through extreme violence. It deploys armed drones, rocket-propelled grenades and even anti-aircraft systems. Forced disappearances, torture and public displays of mutilated bodies are used to terrorise communities into submission. As Carlos Flores of the Centre for Research and Higher Education in Social Anthropology observed, the cartel’s military-style capacity makes it “practically uncontestable” for ordinary local law enforcement.
All of this unfolds as Mexico prepares to host 13 World Cup matches. Guadalajara, the CJNG’s heartland, is due to stage four games, including a highly anticipated Spain–Uruguay clash. But in the days following El Mencho’s death, Guadalajara was effectively paralysed. Schools closed. Public events were cancelled. Matches at Estadio Akron were postponed.
The Mexican government insists there is “no risk” to the expected five million visitors. Jalisco’s governor, Pablo Lemus, has reinforced that message, deploying 2,000 additional troops and announcing a new intelligence centre for Guadalajara. Sheinbaum herself travelled to Guadalajara along with her security cabinet and senior military commanders, in an attempt to reassure the rattled stakeholders. She said Mexico would depute 1, 00,000 more agents to ensure security for the event.
While Mexican officials and FIFA assert that the country is returning to normalcy and that World Cup venues are secure, many security experts continue to worry about the “hydra effect”. Removing a cartel leader often leads not to collapse but fragmentation. As drug war analyst Deborah Bonello put it, “When you take out a major leader, there's a detonation of a struggle to take control in that vacuum.” If the CJNG splinters into rival factions fighting for succession, violence could intensify unpredictably. Incidents of violence are not yet contained. Six men, three women and a minor were killed on May 17 in the state of Puebla, exacerbating security fears.
Ironically, the World Cup itself may have influenced the timing of the operation. Guerrero noted that the government was keen “to show the World Cup organisers that the Mexican government has the capacity to confront these organisations and to control and guarantee security in a city like Guadalajara.”
The fallout from El Mencho’s death threatens to deepen Mexico’s already dire security crisis. The country is now fighting a bloody, two-front war against its most powerful criminal organisations: the Sinaloa Cartel in the north and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel in the west.
The civil war within the Sinaloa Cartel has become one of the most consequential power struggles in the modern history of organised crime. The group splintered into two warring factions: the Chapitos, loyal to founder Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, who has been in an American jail since January 2017, and the Mayos, followers of his longtime partner Ismael Zambada García, known as El Mayo.
The final spark came on 25 July 2024. Zambada, the elusive 76-year-old co-founder of the cartel, was allegedly deceived by Guzmán’s son, Joaquín Guzmán López. Lured to what he believed was a meeting to mediate a political dispute, El Mayo was abducted and flown across the American border to El Paso, where both men surrendered to US authorities. Within the cartel’s code, this was viewed as an unforgivable act of treachery, shattering decades-old alliances between the Zambada and Guzmán families. By September 2024, tensions had escalated into open warfare. The cartel fractured into two principal camps.
On one side stood “La Mayiza”, led by Ismael Zambada Sicairos, known as Mayito Flaco, representing the old guard: discreet, territorially rooted and reliant on longstanding corrupt networks. Opposing them are “Los Chapitos”, headed by Guzmán’s sons Iván Archivaldo and Jesús Alfredo. They embody a newer model of organised crime that is media-conscious, expansionist and deeply invested in the lucrative fentanyl trade. Yet they now seem to be under pressure, facing targeted arrests and battlefield losses that weakened their grip.
The “Bridge Hangings” of last July served as a grim psychological operation by La Mayiza, led by El Mayo’s son, Mayito Flaco. Authorities discovered four decapitated bodies dangling from a highway bridge, with a nearby bag containing five severed heads. A van parked beneath the bridge was found packed with 16 more bodies. These displays were accompanied by narcomantas—banners accusing Los Chapitos of cowardice and betrayal. The cruelty lay not only in the killings but in the location: a primary artery for families and workers, designed to show that the Guzmán sons could no longer guarantee order in their own backyard.
As the two factions exhausted themselves, a third force consolidated quietly in northern Sinaloa. Fausto Isidro Meza Flores, known as “El Chapo Isidro”, avoided direct confrontation while expanding synthetic drug production and territorial influence.
Following El Mencho’s killing, Sinaloa’s warring factions—despite their feud—have moved to exploit the CJNG’s instability, pushing into contested territories such as Zacatecas and Colima. What had been a largely Sinaloa-centred civil war is now spilling across western and northern Mexico, transforming into a broader struggle for control of trafficking corridors, ports and urban plazas.
Analysts warn that targeting cartel kingpins without dismantling their financial networks or confronting political complicity rarely destroys illicit markets. “Without dismantling the power networks, yesterday’s victory will become the cause of new violence tomorrow,” warns Carlos Flores. The survival of the cartels is deeply intertwined with high-level corruption; evidence links numerous Mexican governors, mayors and security officials to criminal groups.
If the CJNG cannot agree on a clean succession among its remaining commanders, Mexico faces the disastrous prospect of internal fragmentation. Several figures have emerged as potential successors. The most prominent is El Mecho’s stepson, Juan Carlos Valencia González (“El 03”), who commands the cartel’s Elite Group and maintains strong ties with the financial network of Los Cuinis. Another powerful contender is Audias Flores Silva (“El Jardinero”), a regional commander controlling key territories in Nayarit and Zacatecas and overseeing major methamphetamine production routes. Hugo Gonzalo Mendoza Gaytán (“El Sapo”), who directs operations in Puerto Vallarta, is regarded as a strategist behind the cartel’s expansion.
Meanwhile, Ricardo Ruiz Velasco (“El Double R”) commands loyal armed cells and propaganda networks. With Rubén Oseguera González (“El Menchito”) imprisoned in the United States, analysts warn the organisation could fracture into rival factions competing for control.
Security consultant David Saucedo notes: “This is bad news for Mexico because smaller cartels mean more violent cartels, and homicides and other crimes will rise.” Such instability gives rivals fresh openings to push into contested territories, guaranteeing a surge in nationwide bloodshed that will fall hardest on civilians and further strain an already overwhelmed state.
The elimination of El Mencho cannot be separated from the coercive diplomacy of Donald Trump. Confronted with the fact that cartels orchestrate the trafficking of fentanyl, which has caused more than 400,000 American overdose deaths since 2016, Trump designated the Jalisco New Generation Cartel a foreign terrorist organisation and offered a reward of up to $15m for information leading to Oseguera’s capture. He weaponised trade, threatening to collapse the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA) and even to authorise unilateral US military strikes across the border if Mexico failed to act decisively. This hardline doctrine, dubbed the “Trump Corollary”, reframed the cartels as direct, existential threats to the American homeland.
Under intense pressure, Sheinbaum abandoned her predecessor’s more restrained approach and authorised the raid that killed El Mencho. The operation delivered a visible political victory that momentarily eased tensions with Washington and strengthened Mexico’s hand in USMCA negotiations. It also marked a structural shift in bilateral security cooperation as evident from the cooperation with the Joint Interagency Task Force-Counter Cartel (JIATF-CC) that provided real-time drone surveillance and intelligence that guided the Mexican strike, signalling unprecedented operational integration.
Yet the relationship remains volatile. For instance, the Mexican authorities are aggrieved that a majority of the weapons used by the cartels come from the US. Data from the Mexican Secretariat of National Defence indicate that roughly 78–80 per cent of weapons seized from criminal groups originate in the US. Cartels favour high-calibre weapons such as the Barrett .50‑calibre sniper rifle. Nearly 50 per cent of the seized .50-calibre ammunition was produced at the US army-owned Lake City ammunition plant in Missouri. Many are obtained through “straw purchasers” in border states such as Arizona and Texas. Meanwhile, the US Supreme Court has blocked Mexico’s lawsuit against American gunmakers, citing the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. Despite tighter enforcement, an estimated 200,000–250,000 firearms still cross into Mexico each year.
Sheinbaum must therefore balance reliance on US intelligence and trade access with a robust defence of Mexican sovereignty. When Trump claimed on television that cartels were “running Mexico”, and tech billionaire Elon Musk amplified the criticism, she pushed back sharply—threatening legal action, rejecting a return to an extrajudicial “war on drugs”, and insisting that her government would pursue peace within constitutional bounds.
The stakes extend far beyond narcotics. Cartels such as the CJNG are deeply embedded in migrant smuggling networks stretching from Central America to China, exploiting the nearly 2,000-mile border in multi-billion-dollar operations. For Washington, unchecked cartel territorial control raises fears about the long-term resilience of the Mexican state itself—a nightmare scenario given Mexico’s population of 132 million. Even so, most experts feel that the US fixation on taking out the cartel kingpins is cyclical and politically driven. Without dismantling financial infrastructures, confronting corruption and addressing American consumer demand for illicit drugs, removing leaders merely fragments organisations, redirects trafficking routes and intensifies violence.
That enduring cycle of violence echoes back to the Escobar story once again. A couple of weeks before El Mencho’s assassination, Santiago Gallón Henao, a minor cartel boss long investigated in connection with Escobar’s murder, was shot dead while dining in an upmarket restaurant in the Mexican town of Huixquilucan. Gallón was investigated for obstruction of justice in the Escobar case and spent 15 months in prison without ever being brought to trial. His killing on the eve of another World Cup hosted in North America is proof that the networks, rivalries and shadows that haunted football in 1994 have not vanished. As stadiums prepare to welcome millions of fans, the old lesson lingers: in parts of the Americas, the spectacle of the beautiful game has too often unfolded alongside the reign of the cartels.