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| Firefighters work to extinguish flames from a vehicle used by organized crime members as roadblocks following a series of detentions by federal forces, in Guadalajara, Mexico, February 22, 2026. REUTERS/Michelle Freyria. REFILE - UPDATING SLUG (Michelle Freyria/Reuters - image credit) Source Yahoo News |
By Sirantos Fotopoulos
2-23-26
Yesterday’s events in Mexico will no doubt be packaged, polished, and presented as a triumph of state resolve: Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes — better known as “El Mencho,” the head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel — was killed in an operation hailed by officials as decisive and necessary. And yet, within hours, vast stretches of the country were seized by retaliation: highways choked with burning vehicles, cities paralyzed by blockades, flights suspended, businesses shuttered, families told to shelter in place.
The choreography was grimly familiar. A kingpin falls; the republic trembles.
What is advertised as a surgical victory metastasizes into civic panic. The spectacle invites applause, but the smoke rising over towns and tourist corridors alike is less a banner of victory than an indictment of a state that congratulates itself while its citizens barricade their doors.
It would be comforting to believe that the elimination of a notorious crime lord constitutes a moral turning point. But such comfort is counterfeit. Cartels do not spring from the soil like weeds independent of human cultivation; they are cultivated — by corruption, by collusion, by indifference, by the steady normalization of impunity.
For decades, public officials have oscillated between impotence and complicity, while vast rivers of money — black, gray, and occasionally laundered into spotless respectability — have flowed through banks, businesses, and political campaigns.
The narcotics economy has thrived not merely because criminals are ruthless, but because institutions have been porous, ambition has outrun ethics, and power has discovered that it can coexist quite profitably with vice. To pretend that one man’s death severs this web is to mistake the removal of a node for the dissolution of a network.
Indeed, the retaliatory convulsions that followed the killing offer a bracing tutorial in how shallow the rhetoric of “decapitation strategy” truly is. When a cartel leader dies and entire regions are brought to a halt by orchestrated mayhem, we are not witnessing the collapse of criminal enterprise; we are observing its redundancy and resilience.
The enterprise continues because it is not, in essence, a personality cult but a business model — one lubricated by demand abroad, by inequality at home, and by a surplus of young men to whom the legitimate economy offers little beyond stagnation and humiliation. Remove the figurehead and another will surface, because the incentives remain intact and the structural rot undisturbed.
Meanwhile, the cost is borne, as ever, by those who never signed up for this grim morality play. It is the shopkeeper who pulls down the metal shutter and wonders whether tomorrow will bring customers or gunfire; the teacher who cancels class; the parent who measures the distance between the front door and the nearest patch of floor safe from stray bullets. Airports close, highways empty, rumors multiply.
The language of “security operations” sounds robust in press conferences, but on the ground it translates into uncertainty and dread. The citizen is asked to applaud the state’s resolve while absorbing the shockwaves of its strategy. Victory, in this register, is indistinguishable from collective anxiety.
To speak plainly, the cartels are symptoms of a deeper disorder. They flourish where opportunity withers, where public trust has eroded to a brittle shell, where the distance between official rhetoric and lived reality has become a chasm.
Decades of uneven development, regional neglect, and a political culture tolerant of graft have created fertile terrain for parallel sovereignties — criminal fiefdoms that tax, threaten, and recruit with grim efficiency. Militarized responses, however forceful, address the visible eruption while leaving the subterranean pressures untouched. One may deploy soldiers and drones; one may celebrate tactical successes; but without confronting the entrenched inequalities and institutional decay that nourish the underworld, the cycle will reproduce itself with grim inevitability.
If there is a lesson in yesterday’s conflagration, it is not that the state lacks firepower. It is that firepower alone cannot repair a civic fabric long frayed by corruption and exclusion. The eradication of a cartel leader may satisfy a demand for spectacle and retribution, but it does not restore faith in institutions, nor does it generate dignified livelihoods, nor does it disinfect the corridors of power where complicity has too often found refuge. A society cannot kill its way to moral renewal. Until the deeper architecture of inequality, impunity, and political cynicism is dismantled, the smoke will clear only long enough for the next plume to rise.
And yet, to concede that a society cannot kill its way to moral renewal is not to concede that renewal is impossible. It is, rather, to insist that the work of repair must be undertaken where it has always properly belonged: in the patient reconstruction of institutions, the stubborn defense of civic virtue, and the unapologetic expansion of opportunity.
The same nation that has endured cycles of violence has also produced jurists, journalists, teachers, organizers, and ordinary citizens who refuse to surrender the public square to either the gunman or the cynic. If the smoke has too often obscured the horizon, it has not extinguished the horizon itself. Renewal begins not with a raid at dawn, but with the quiet, unglamorous labor of restoring trust where it has been squandered.
There are, even now, municipalities experimenting with transparency measures that make graft more difficult and accountability less optional; community groups reclaiming public spaces once ceded to fear; investigative reporters who continue, at real personal risk, to expose the nexus between political power and criminal enterprise. Such efforts rarely command the headlines that accompany a kingpin’s demise, yet they constitute the more durable form of resistance.
A cartel may command a territory through intimidation, but it cannot easily survive where courts function, where contracts are enforced without bribery, and where young people can imagine a future that does not require a rifle or a lookout post.
Economic inclusion, too, is a practical antidote to despair. When education is adequately funded, when rural regions are not treated as expendable hinterlands, when small businesses can operate without extortion masquerading as taxation, the gravitational pull of criminal enterprise weakens. The narcotics economy feeds on scarcity — of income, of mobility, of dignity. Reverse those scarcities and the calculus shifts.
A young person who sees a credible path to advancement is less susceptible to the seduction of easy money and borrowed power. Structural change is slow and, to the impatient, maddeningly incremental; yet it is precisely this incrementalism that builds foundations too solid to be toppled by the next eruption of violence.
Finally, moral renewal requires a cultural insistence that neither the state nor its adversaries are beyond scrutiny. A citizenry that demands transparency from its leaders, that rejects the glamorization of criminality, and that prizes the rule of law over theatrical displays of force performs a quiet revolution of its own. It is easy to despair when confronted with burning roads and shuttered cities. It is harder, but far more consequential, to commit to the long campaign of civic reconstruction.
The smoke will inevitably rise again unless deeper reforms are pursued. Thus the task is clear: build a society in which the next plume finds no tinder. In that project — arduous, unsensational, but indispensable — lies the only optimism worthy of the name.
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