- Former FBI agent Greg Rogers predicts increased violence from CJNG after leader's death.
- He explains CJNG's notorious brutality and strategic operations, including employing ex-military personnel.
- Rogers highlights the cartel's power and anticipates further unrest affecting Mexico's tourist areas.
SALT LAKE CITY — Amid violence, unrest and fires in Mexico sparked by the killing of a suspected drug lord in a military operation, a former undercover operative said he expected the slain kingpin's cartel to escalate its violence.
Retired FBI agent Greg Rogers said he worked undercover for years, making large methamphetamine and fentanyl purchases with multiple cartels, including the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, also known as CJNG.
"I did a whole lot of dealing with them, and I'm very familiar with the way they do business," Rogers said.
Rogers said the group's reputation of extreme violence — including grisly murders and gory public displays in Mexico — preceded it.
"I mean, they advertise because they want people to know, and people do know, that they're dead serious," Rogers said. "They'll hang people from bridges that cooperated, but there will be banners up, huge signs, saying these people were snitches."
Even working undercover, he dealt with the group using high caution.
"I would never go into Mexico to meet with them," Rogers said. "I'd never have a meeting with them that I didn't have a SWAT team about 30 seconds away."
Rogers said with eyes everywhere — including in Mexican law enforcement and government positions — CJNG wields an incredible amount of power. Which is why he was stunned to learn of the military operation that took out the group's suspected leader, Ruben Oseguera Cervantes, or "El Mencho."
"I was shocked, there's a whole lot going on behind the scenes with this," Rogers said. "My guess is what happened in this case is our intelligence agencies told them, 'This is where he is,' 'We know exactly where he is.' I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it was something like, 'You can get him, or we're going to come get him. How do you want to do it?'"
According to Rogers, not only was CJNG responsible for making extreme violence commonplace as a part of cartel business, but the group also "changed the game" by employing former police and military personnel, and by coming up with increasingly secure drug smuggling methods.
"They get someone in Mexico, and they say, 'You're going to meet us at the border, at the bridge in El Paso,'" Rogers explained. "'We're going to give you a car. That car is going to have something in it,' but they don't even tell them what it is. They tell them, 'You're going to drive it to Ogden or to Salt Lake City, Utah, and here's a phone number. When you get there, you call this number. A person is going to meet you. They're going to take whatever is out of the truck, and then you're going to come back home.'"
Rogers said the drivers are rarely paid more than a couple of thousand dollars to do the job, and they're threatened that they'll be killed and their families will be killed if they cooperate.
As a result, he said, while law enforcement has been able to make some endpoint drug busts, it is extremely difficult to trace the drug shipments to people and places inside Mexico.
"That person that gets pulled over on I-15 and everybody's talking about, 'Oh yeah, we made this seizure of millions of dollars of drugs.' That person doesn't know anybody," Rogers said. "You sit down, and you talk to those folks, and they'll just tell you, 'You know I can't say anything because they'll kill my family,' and that's sadly true."
With all that as context of the calculation with which CJNG operates, Rogers said he didn't believe the violence that surfaced since El Mencho's killing was out of anger but was instead a cold-blooded response to the Mexican government's intervention — intentionally targeting tourist areas that had previously been considered off-limits to the cartels.
"There has always been sort of an agreement between the cartels and the government and the way you do business, and part of that included leaving those areas alone, because that brings in huge money to the Mexican economy," Rogers said. "There have been horrible circumstances and things like that that have happened to American citizens who have been driving around the interior, but that was allowed. The beach areas and, you know, the big tourist areas were sort of off-limits, and that was the way it worked."
Rogers said he expected CJNG to only become more violent as it asserts itself and attempts to retain its territory following the killing of the group's suspected leader.
"They are trying to establish they are the most powerful and violent cartel in the country, and so they just crossed that line," Rogers said. "It's going to be very interesting to see how the government reacts to that, because that's new."
