A deadly new enemy in Mexico's drugs war

Mexico's government has a new nemesis in its drugs war: a cartel flush with cash and weapons from trafficking methamphetamines to Europe and heady with power after it downed an army helicopter.

Security forces have arrested an impressive list of cartel bosses in recent months, including Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, the top kingpin. But just when the old guard appeared to be fading the Jalisco New Generation cartel has taken the limelight as the country's most dangerous criminal organisation.

Led by Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as El Mencho and reportedly a former policeman who served nearly three years in a US jail in the 1990s for distributing heroin, the five-year-old cartel is one of a new generation to emerge from the implosion of historic dynasties whose leaders were captured or killed.

Its rise highlights the fragility of Mexico's progress in its efforts to combat violent crime. It also poses a problem for a government whose security forces are stretched thin by unrest and violence in other states and which is striving to keep its budget deficit under control amid the falling oil price.

The JNG emerged as a splinter group from the Milenio cartel, at one early stage styling itself the "Matazetas" or Zeta killers, in reference to a rival cartel. But it has quietly been gaining power and influence. The gang has fanned out from its base in the west-central industrial state of Jalisco, home to Mexico's second city, Guadalajara, into next-door Colima, Nayarit, Michoacan, Guerrero, as well as parts of the State of Mexico and San Luis Potosi, and across the country to Veracruz.

Last month, the US blacklisted both JNG and Los Cuinis, an allied organisation.

In recent weeks, the JNG has become increasingly bold, ambushing and killing 21 police officers in March and April, and on May 1, thwarting a security operation, ostensibly to capture "El Mencho", by downing an army helicopter with a Russian-made rocket propelled grenade. The attack killed seven soldiers.

Police have seized RPGs from cartels in the past, but this was the first time one had been used and the first time a cartel had scored such a hit.

The cartel then proceeded to wreak chaos across the state and nearby areas with its hallmark distraction technique - so-called narcoblockades. On May Day, it torched 11 bank branches and five petrol stations and erected more than three dozen roadblocks.

"This is a new turn of the screw," said Dwight Dyer at Control Risks, a consultancy. "This co-ordination capability demonstrates that the JNG has a lot of operatives, good logistics and communications structure."

He added: "It will require new thinking on the part of the army, which is used to shoot-outs but not to significant equipment being put at risk. This is an entirely different ballgame."

Things were supposed to have been getting better. The murder rate has been falling for three years and the darkest days of Mexico's failed war on drugs, which cost as many as 100,000 lives, were receding into memory, though cases of extortion and kidnapping remain worrying. "The real figures are likely to be much higher than what the government has been telling us," said Carlos Cardenas at IHS, the consultancy.

President Enrique Pena Nieto's determination to train international attention on Mexico's promising outlook, including a booming car sector and vast oil and gas investment prospects, has backfired.

Violence erupted early last year in Michoacan, a state caught between the Knights Templar cartel, which extorted avocado farmers, stole iron ore and decapitated victims, and self-defence groups that took the law into their own hands.

Then last September came proof that the bad old Mexico may have been out of the limelight but had never gone away: corrupt police allegedly handed over 43 students to drug cartel members, who are believed to have killed them.

The government, its credibility under fire for its slow response to that and a string of conflict of influence scandals, promised an overhaul of the police, but plans have languished and will not be debated in Congress until at least September.

"There's not much that can be done differently," said one former government official, noting that boosting Mexico's weak institutions and overcoming impunity were long-term tasks. "We're making progress but we're not beating this. I think we're in for a long fight."

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