These are Mexico’s 4 Most Dangerous Cartels — Including the Jalisco New Generation Cartel

To understand Mexico’s cartels, it helps to understand where they came from.

The modern era of organized drug crime in Mexico traces back to a single man: Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, known as “El Padrino” (The Godfather).

Operating out of Guadalajara in the 1980s, Félix Gallardo built the Guadalajara Cartel into the dominant force in Mexican drug trafficking, forging the initial smuggling partnerships with Colombian cocaine producers that would define the trade for decades.

When he was arrested in 1989, his organization fractured — and from those fragments grew nearly every major cartel that followed.

1. The Sinaloa Cartel

The most powerful drug trafficking organization in the world today, by most assessments, is the Sinaloa Cartel.

It emerged from the Guadalajara Cartel’s collapse and took root in the Pacific coast state of Sinaloa under the leadership of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and his partner Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada.

Over the following decades it built a sprawling, sophisticated empire: underground tunnels beneath the US-Mexico border, networks of corrupt police and military officials, and distribution channels reaching into every US state and dozens of countries.

El Chapo became the most famous drug lord in the world — captured, escaped from maximum security prison twice, recaptured, and eventually extradited to the United States, where he was convicted in 2019 and sentenced to life.

El Mayo, long considered the cartel’s quieter and more operationally effective brain, evaded capture for decades until his arrest in 2024, also in the US.

A witness at El Chapo’s trial testified that the cartel had paid a $100 million bribe to a former Mexican president. Mexico’s former Secretary of Public Security was convicted in the US for accepting millions in cartel cash.

The cartel’s dominance has not come without internal fracture. Since 2024 it has been consumed by a bloody civil war between two rival factions: the Chapitos — El Chapo’s sons — and the Mayiza, loyal to El Mayo.

The violence has spread across Sinaloa and beyond, with no resolution in sight.

For a detailed overview of the Sinaloa Cartel’s structure and history, see InSight Crime’s profile.

2. The Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG)

If the Sinaloa Cartel is the establishment, the CJNG is the insurgent that refused to accept second place.

Formed around 2011 from remnants of a Sinaloa-affiliated group, the CJNG rose with staggering speed under its leader Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho.”

Within a decade it had established a presence in virtually every Mexican state and in all 50 US states.

The DEA considers it at least the equal of the Sinaloa Cartel in power and reach, as the CJNG is notorious not just for its scale but for its brazenness.

It has attacked Mexican military convoys with military-grade weapons, deployed drones fitted with explosives against law enforcement — tactics reportedly refined using knowledge gained from fighters sent to observe combat in Ukraine — and posted videos of its armed columns online as a form of psychological intimidation.

It is a leading producer and trafficker of fentanyl, the synthetic opioid responsible for the majority of overdose deaths in the United States.

El Mencho carried a $15 million US bounty on his head for years.

On February 22, 2026, Mexican military forces killed him during an operation in Jalisco, triggering immediate retaliatory violence across at least nine Mexican states.

His death leaves the cartel’s future structure uncertain.

In February 2025, the Trump administration designated both the Sinaloa Cartel and the CJNG as Foreign Terrorist Organizations — a designation with significant legal and financial consequences for anyone dealing with them.

For the DEA’s current overview of both organizations, see dea.gov/cartels.

3. The Gulf Cartel

One of Mexico’s oldest criminal organizations, the Gulf Cartel traces its origins to the 1930s, when it was formed in the border state of Tamaulipas to smuggle alcohol into the United States.

By the 1970s it had pivoted to drugs, and by the 1990s it was one of the most powerful organizations in the country under boss Osiel Cárdenas Guillén — a man who earned the nickname “Friend Killer” after ordering the execution of his own partner.

Cárdenas was arrested in 2003 and extradited to the US in 2007, and the cartel never fully recovered its cohesion.

Today the Gulf Cartel has fragmented into competing factions locked in near-constant conflict with each other and with the remnants of their former enforcers, Los Zetas.

Tamaulipas, their home state, carries a Level 4 “Do Not Travel” advisory from the US State Department — the same designation applied to active war zones.

4. Los Zetas

Perhaps no cartel has done more to reshape the culture of violence in Mexico than Los Zetas — and their origin story is unlike any other.

In the late 1990s, Cárdenas hired roughly 31 deserters from an elite Mexican special forces unit, the GAFE, to serve as his personal enforcers. These were trained soldiers, some with instruction from US and Israeli forces, and they brought a paramilitary discipline and brutality to cartel violence that had not existed before.

They were called the Zetas, after the radio code assigned to their first commander.

The Zetas quickly outgrew their role as bodyguards, expanding into drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping, human smuggling, and the mass theft of oil from Mexico’s state energy company Pemex.

Their signature was extreme, theatrical violence — beheadings, torture, public massacres — used as a tool of psychological terror. They influenced every cartel that followed them, effectively setting a new and more savage standard for how criminal organizations operated.

In 2010, the Zetas broke away from the Gulf Cartel entirely, triggering one of the most violent periods in Mexico’s modern history. At their peak they controlled more territory than any other cartel.

But without the discipline of their founding members — all of whom were eventually killed, captured, or extradited — the organization fractured badly.

Today Los Zetas as a unified force no longer really exist. What remains are splinter groups, the most significant being the Cártel del Noreste, which controls the border city of Nuevo Laredo and was designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the US in 2025.

For in-depth reporting on Los Zetas and other Mexican organized crime groups, see InSight Crime’s Zetas profile.

The Larger Picture

Mexico’s cartel landscape is not static. Organizations rise, fracture, form alliances, betray them, and collapse — often within years.

The Beltrán Leyva Organization, the Juárez Cartel, the Tijuana Cartel, La Familia Michoacana, the Knights Templar, Los Rojos, the Guerreros Unidos — each has had its moment of dominance in a particular region or era, and most have either dissolved or been absorbed into larger structures.

What persists is the underlying dynamic: the enormous profitability of supplying drugs to the United States, the institutional corruption that allows criminal organizations to operate with relative impunity, and the cycle of fragmentation in which the arrest or killing of a leader tends not to end a cartel but to splinter it into smaller, often more chaotic and violent pieces.

The cartels have also diversified well beyond drugs — extortion, fuel theft, avocado and lime farming rackets, human smuggling, and control of local economies have all become significant revenue streams, making them harder to dismantle through drug enforcement alone.

The human cost has been catastrophic. Estimates of deaths attributable to cartel violence since 2006 range from 350,000 to over 450,000.

Tens of thousands more have disappeared. Journalists who cover the cartels do so at extraordinary personal risk.

Mexico ranks consistently among the most dangerous countries in the world for members of the press.