On February 22, 2026, Mexican military forces killed Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, El Mencho, founder of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, in the Sierra de Tapalpa. Within two hours, CJNG's retaliatory protocol paralyzed twenty of Mexico's thirty-two states. Twenty-five National Guard members were killed. More than 250 roadblocks shut down the country. The operation was a success. The aftermath was a catastrophe.

This episode traces the fracture lines that produced that moment and everything that follows from it. Eleven chapters. The cartel's structure and its $20 billion annual revenue machine. The fentanyl pipeline from Chinese precursor chemicals through Mexican labs to American streets. The kingpin strategy and why decapitating leadership consistently produces more violence, not less. The sovereignty trap between two countries that cannot afford to separate and cannot afford to trust each other. The forty million people of the Mexican diaspora caught between both. Claudia Sheinbaum's impossible position. The 98 percent impunity rate. The journalists murdered for reporting. The autodefensas who armed themselves when the state did not come. And the succession crisis now unfolding simultaneously in both dominant cartels for the first time in modern history.

Sources include INEGI, the DEA's National Drug Threat Assessment, the Congressional Research Service, CSIS, the International Crisis Group, the Modern War Institute at West Point, peer-reviewed research by Esberg, Phillips, Calderon, Dell, Trejo, and Skigin, and Mexican investigative journalism by Anabel Hernandez, Proceso, and Articulo 19.