MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexico’s military on Tuesday arrested the wife of Mexican drug lord Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, best known as “El Mencho”, in the western Jalisco state, Mexican officials said.
Rosalinda Gonzalez Valencia was detained in the municipality of Zapopan in Jalisco in a “a significant blow to the financial structure of organized crime in the state of Jalisco”, the defense ministry said in a statement.
Gonzalez was detained for various crimes, with the evidence pointing to her involvement in “the illicit financial operation of an organized crime group,” the ministry added.
Oseguera, a former policeman, is the leader of the ultra-violent Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), the most powerful criminal group in Mexico along with the Sinaloa Cartel.
Oseguera, who had a $10 million bounty placed on his head by U.S. authorities in 2018, has masterminded the CJNG’s emergence as a criminal empire spanning five continents and is one of few long-term cartel leaders to have evaded capture.
The CJNG has been blamed for smuggling vast quantities of drugs, including synthetic opioid fentanyl, into the United States, where overdose deaths mostly linked to fentanyl spiked to more than 93,000 in 2020, U.S. data shows.
Gonzalez was previously arrested in May 2018 but was released on bail a few months later.
Oseguera’s daughter, Jessica Johanna Oseguera Gonzalez, was arrested in February 2020, and last May pleaded guilty in a U.S. court to carrying out financial dealings with Mexican firms identified as narcotics traffickers.
(Reporting by Diego Ore and Raul Cortes; Writing by Drazen Jorgic; editing by Cassandra Garrison and Jonathan Oatis)
