La Jefa: the wife of slain drug kingpin El Mencho and the women at the heart of the cartels

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Adriana Marin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Women often play a central role in the business activities of organised crime. Krakenimages.com/Shutterstock

The death of Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, the leader of the Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), on February 22 was immediately framed as the fall of a narco kingpin. Images of gun battles, torched vehicles and retaliatory violence dominated headlines. Commentators spoke of a power vacuum, of fragmentation, of the possible weakening of one of Mexico’s biggest cartels.

It was presented as the removal of a singular, hyper-violent male figure at the apex of a criminal empire. But this framing tells us more about how we imagine organised crime than about how it actually works.

The obsession with kingpins rests on a dramatic understanding of cartel power: a gun in one hand, territory in the other, masculinity performed through brutality. El Mencho embodied that image.

Yet cartels are not sustained by spectacle alone. They endure because someone moves the money, launders the profits, manages the assets, cultivates legitimate fronts and binds networks of loyalty through family. In the case of CJNG, that figure was not only El Mencho. It was also, allegedly, his wife Rosalinda González Valencia.

González has often been described as “La Jefa” (the Spanish feminine form of “the boss”). It’s a label that gestures toward authority while still situating her in relation to her husband. But she was not simply the spouse of a drug lord. She came from the Valencia family, historically linked to Los Cuinis, a network deeply embedded in CJNG’s financial operations.

Authorities have alleged that she oversaw dozens of businesses, property holdings and shell companies tied to the cartel’s laundering apparatus. Arrested multiple times and jailed for five year for money laundering in 2021 (she was released last year for good behaviour), she occupied the grey zone where criminal capital bleeds into the legal economy. If El Mencho represented the cartel’s violent face, González represented its economic spine.

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This is where gender matters. Organised crime is routinely portrayed as an arena of exaggerated masculinity. Women appear in these stories as victims, girlfriends, trafficked bodies or glamorous accessories.

Even when they are prosecuted, they are often framed as appendages: “the wife of”, “the daughter of”, “the partner of”. Such language, while often difficult to avoid, obscures the structural reality that many cartels operate through kinship capitalism, where family is not sentimental but strategic.

Within these systems, wives are not incidental. They help keep the business secrets in environments where betrayal is fatal. In patriarchal criminal orders, loyalty is policed through blood ties.

A spouse managing accounts is not a deviation from power but an extension of it. Gender does not exclude women from authority, but rather reshapes how that authority is exercised and perceived.

The sensational truth is this: violence may conquer territory, but finance governs it. And, as the International Crisis Group – a western non-government organisation which aims to prevent conflict – spelled out in a 2023 report, finance in many cartels is deeply gendered.

This does not mean romanticising women’s roles within organised crime. Nor does it suggest emancipation through criminality.

The power reportedly exercised by figures like González tends to be situated within male-dominated hierarchies and violent systems that are also responsible for extreme forms of violence against women, including femicide and sexual exploitation. The same structures that allow elite women to wield financial authority simultaneously reproduce brutal patriarchal control elsewhere. That contradiction is not accidental – it is the way things work.

El Mencho’s death exposes that contradiction. When the state removes a male leader, the assumption is that the organisation will collapse or descend into chaos. But cartels are not merely built around a single dominant figure. They are hybrid enterprises combining coercion, corporate structures and family governance. The removal of the public face does not automatically dismantle the private architecture.

Hidden power structure

The question, then, is not simply who will pick up the gun, but who keeps the books. Who maintains the corporate fronts? Who sustains cross-border financial channels? Who negotiates the transformation of illicit profits into legitimate capital? These are not secondary concerns. They determine whether an organisation fragments or adapts to a leader’s death or imprisonment.

By centring El Mencho alone, media narratives are perpetuating a blindness to the role of women in cartels. They equate power with violence and masculinity with control, leaving the economic and relational dimensions of authority under-analysed.

Yet organised crime studies increasingly demonstrate that durability lies in governance, not gunfire. Governance depends on management, financial oversight, logistical coordination, and embedded social networks. These functions are often feminised – not because women are naturally suited to them, but because patriarchal systems allocate them in ways that render them less conspicuous and therefore less targeted.

Nemesio K.C. Alfred/San Diego Union-Tribune/TNS)
There is something unsettling about recognising the strategic authority of cartel wives. It complicates comfortable binaries of victim and perpetrator. It challenges the idea that women in violent systems are either coerced or just marginal figures.

But in Italy, Rafaella D’Alterio reportedly maintained the operational and financial coherence of her Camorra clan following her husband’s death. She did this – not through spectacular violence – but through administrative control, alliance-building, and family networks. Her case, as many others, underscores that durability often lies in governance rather than gunfire.

Decapitation strategies – killing a cartel’s leader – are politically dramatic and symbolically powerful. But they rest on the assumption that criminal organisations are vertically dependent on a single male. If financial governance and kinship networks remain intact, the system may regenerate.

El Mencho’s death is therefore both a rupture and a revelation. It is a rupture in the sense that the figurehead of one of the world’s most powerful cartels has fallen. But it is also a revelation of how narrow our understanding of organised crime remains.

We fixate on the spectacle of masculine violence while overlooking the quieter, gendered infrastructures that sustain it. To understand cartels solely through their kingpins is to misunderstand them. Power in organised crime does not reside only in the man with the gun, but also in the women who, whether publicly acknowledged or not, often stand at the centre of that architecture.