Mexico has killed “El Mencho,” but the country’s cartel map does not collapse when one kingpin falls, it reconfigures. As the government celebrates the death of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel’s leader, the violence that followed, highways blocked, cars torched, coordinated attacks across multiple states, served as a blunt reminder that these organizations are built to survive decapitation. The state can remove a man; it cannot remove the system of money, protection, and fear that keeps the enterprise functioning. And the list of major figures still at large makes clear that Mexico’s war is entering a new, more unstable chapter rather than closing an old one. One looming fault line sits inside the Sinaloa Cartel, where succession has become open conflict. Ismael Zambada Sicairos, known as “El Mayito Flaco,” is described as a key leader within the cartel’s “La Mayiza” faction, rising after the 2024 arrest of his father, the longtime trafficker “El Mayo.” He is portrayed as a deliberate, low-profile operator, an archetype that often lasts longer than the flamboyant narco celebrity. If El Mencho represented a cartel that advertised itself through terror and spectacle, Zambada’s camp is framed as the opposite: endurance through discretion, networks, and control of distribution. Across from him stands another inheritance project: Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar, “El Chapito” the son of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, depicted as a senior Sinaloa leader and central figure in the cartel’s internal power struggle. The article links him to the infamous violent backlash in 2019 after the arrest of his half-brother Ovidio Guzmán López, when gunmen effectively paralyzed a major city and forced the state to reckon with its own vulnerability. What matters now is the reported scale of the current feud: a leadership battle since 2024 that has fueled mass killings. Sinaloa, long mythologized as a cartel with “order,” is shown instead as an incubator for fragmentation, where family names become rallying flags for armed factions. The roster of fugitives stretches beyond Sinaloa and reminds you that Mexico’s underworld is not one war but many. Fausto Isidro Meza Flores, known as “El Chapo Isidro,” is described as a trafficking boss in Sinaloa so elusive that repeated arrests never translated into long-term imprisonment, until he was placed on the FBI’s most-wanted list with a multimillion-dollar reward. That detail matters less as biography than as diagnosis: capture is not the hard part; containment is. The revolving door, whether from corruption, intimidation, or weak institutions, turns “most wanted” into a recurring title rather than an endpoint. Then there is the Gulf Cartel’s enduring machinery along Mexico’s northeastern corridor. Juan Reyes Mejía-González, known as “R-1” or “Kiki” is described as a senior figure within a factional structure, sought for coordinating cocaine flows from South and Central America through Mexico into the United States, with an enormous reward attached. His profile illustrates something often lost in the headlines about fentanyl: legacy trafficking routes remain powerful, and the older cocaine economy still funds violence, bribery, and territorial control. The drug mix changes; the governance problem stays. What El Mencho’s death reveals is not that Mexico is winning, but that it is willing to strike, and that cartels are willing to retaliate at national scale. The immediate question is succession: whether the Jalisco cartel has a disciplined hierarchy ready to absorb the shock, or whether it splinters into competing commanders who will prove legitimacy through blood. Either outcome is dangerous. A stable succession can preserve cartel capacity; a fractured succession can produce chaos that spreads beyond one organization, as rivals invade contested plazas and local communities become bargaining chips. In the end, lists of fugitives are never just lists. They are portraits of an environment where power is both private and armed, and where leadership is inherited, contested, and defended with public terror. Mexico’s crisis is not simply that men like these exist, it is that the state’s authority still has to negotiate with them indirectly, through fear, through emergency deployments, and through the fragile hope that removing one figure will not ignite the next firestorm. The killings and arrests may change names at the top. The deeper question, whether Mexico can dismantle the cartel economy that keeps producing replacements, remains unanswered.