Four close-support helicopters, two transport helicopters, four fixed-wing aircraft, and some 400 additional naval personnel sealed the perimeter.

The security ring scattered on contact, a deliberate distraction manoeuvre designed to buy the principal time to vanish. It had worked before.

This time, aerial and ground tracking followed their target to a sewage drainage conduit near the cabin. Marines pulled him out without firing a shot.

The man in the pipe was Flores Silva, the man that the US Treasury, the DEA, and the State Department had labelled the most important operational commander in the CJNG. He was 45 years old and had been running for close to two years.

Flores Silva was an expert at building escape routes. A military intelligence profile credited him with personally designing the rings of protection that kept his former boss, El Mencho, a fugitive. But this expertise didn’t help hhim escape capture yesterday.

His capture is the second major coup suffered by the CJNG this year, following the killing of Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, alias “El Mencho,” in February. Flores Silva had been ranked by Mexican intelligence as one of four men capable of inheriting the cartel.

World of Crime’s book, CJNG - A Quick Guide to Mexico’s Deadliest Cartel is on sale here.

Hours later, in a separate operation in Zapopan, Jalisco, Army Special Forces and the National Guard arrested César Alejandro “N,” alias “El Güero Conta,” Flores Silva’s principal financial operator, a man who had moved cartel proceeds through shell companies, prestanombres, aircraft, vessels, ranches, and tequila producers.

The simultaneous loss of an operational chief and his financier on a single day is a heavy blow for the CJNG. Within hours, armed men set fire to businesses in Tecuala, Ahuacatlán, and Santa María del Oro in Nayarit.

Flores Silva was flown to Mexico City, and Mexican have confirmed an active US extradition request.

But to understand who was actually captured in that drainage pipe, we need to go back more than two decades and 2,500 kilometres, to a federal courtroom in Charlotte, North Carolina.

From Michoacán to Charlotte to the CJNG

Flores Silva was born on November 19, 1980, in Huetamo, Michoacán, in the eastern Tierra Caliente on the Guerrero border. The date and place are confirmed across OFAC, State Department, and DEA records. He maintained a parallel false identity under the name Gabriel Raigosa Plascencia, and his documented aliases read like a catalogue of the roles he filled: “El Jardinero,” “El Comandante,” “El Bravo 2,” “Audi,” and “Mata Jefes” — the Boss-Killer.

Huetamo in the 1980s and 1990s was shaped by the Valencia family, the avocado-growing clan rooted in Aguililla. Traditional marijuana and poppy cultivation was giving way to something larger, and the region was deep into the cycle of armed competition, weak-state terrain, and recruitment of teenage males into trafficking networks that would define Michoacán’s criminal ecology for the next three decades. Investigative reporting places Flores Silva’s entry into crime in the mid-1990s as a teenager, though his precise path into organised crime and his first patrón remain undocumented.

One common misconception requires correction. Flores Silva and El Mencho are often described as though they rose together from the same soil. They did not. Mencho was born in Naranjo de Chila, Aguililla, in southwestern Michoacán. Flores Silva was from Huetamo, in the east. They were 14 years apart in age. There is noe evidence, at least made public, that they were childhood friends or relatives.

The first hard institutional trace of his criminal life came in the US. In 2002, at the age of 21, Flores Silva was indicted in the US District Court for the Western District of North Carolina on federal narcotics trafficking charges. He was convicted and served a five-year federal prison sentence before being released and deported to Mexico, likely around 2007 or 2008. The Charlotte venue is confirmed in near-identical language by ICE, Treasury, State, and DEA.

Charlotte was a plausible destination. The metropolitan area had become a major “new destination” for Mexican migration in the 1990s and early 2000s, creating exactly the kind of labour, kinship, transport, and remittance corridors that trafficking networks had historically exploited. The Western District of North Carolina prosecuted repeated cocaine-trafficking conspiracies routing drugs from Mexico through Texas and Atlanta into the Carolinas during this period.

What the Charlotte chapter proves, even in outline, is that Flores Silva was embedded in a US narcotics distribution network years before CJNG itself existed. He entered American federal custody as a 21-year-old from Tierra Caliente. He left it, five years later, with an understanding of American law enforcement tactics and distribution logistics.

After his deportation, Flores Silva entered a seven-year documentary silence. No public source places him with a specific cell, boss, or operation between roughly 2008 and 2015.

But around that time, the Valencia family and their Milenio Cartel was disintegrating. They were battered by a war against the Zetas and fled Michoacán, successive Valencia leaders were captured in 2003, and their Sinaloa Cartel patrom, Nacho Coronel, was killed in 2010.

Out of these collapses, CJNG was founded in 2011 by Mencho. Flores Silva is not listed among the founding members by any institutional history of the organisation. Whatever role he later occupied, he was not there at the creation.

He emerged from that silence on April 6, 2015, with one of the deadliest attacks on Mexican police in modern history.

On the Mascota–Las Palmas highway near the village of Soyatlán in San Sebastián del Oeste, Jalisco, a CJNG group of over 80 gunmen ambushed a convoy of 20 Fuerza Única Jalisco officers returning from Puerto Vallarta to Guadalajara. Gunmen set a flatbed truck on fire to block the road in a zone without phone signal, then opened fire from elevated hillside positions with high-calibre rifles and fragmentation grenades. Fifteen officers were killed and five more wounded.

Investigations by the Fiscalía de Jalisco identified Flores Silva as the man who planned the attack.

The motive was allegedly revenge. On March 23, Fuerza Única had killed CJNG plaza chief Heriberto Acevedo Cárdenas, alias “El Gringo,” at Zacoalco de Torres. The ambush was part of a 20-day CJNG offensive that killed 21 officers and triggered a backlash from the government, during which the CJNG would shoot down a military helicopter.

Before Soyatlán, Flores Silva was essentially invisible in the public record. After it, he was a name.

Mexican Federal Police first captured him on July 26, 2016, near a hotel in Bucerías, Bahía de Banderas, Nayarit, carrying false identification as Gabriel Raigosa Plascencia and facing six outstanding warrants. He was publicly identified as CJNG’s plaza chief in Nayarit: production, transport, sale of drugs, plus huachicol. The state charges included aggravated homicide, attempted aggravated homicide, and organised-crime participation, all linked to Soyatlán. He was held at CEFERESO No. 2 “Puente Grande” for approximately three years.

Then, in 2019, a Jalisco state court of first instance absolved him, and he walked out of Puente Grande free. Mexican reporting universally links the release to rumours of a multi-million-peso bribe. h

On May 11, 2024, Jalisco’s Supreme Court revoked the absolution and sentenced him, in absentia, to 45 years of prison.

The Architect of the Pacific Corridor

There has been widespread reporting that Flores Silva was El Mencho’s “right-hand man” but this misses the nature of the relationship.

A federal witness statement, cited by Infobae in March 2026, states bluntly that Jardinero and Mencho were not close friends, and identifies another lieutenant, Hugo Gonzalo Mendoza Gaytán, alias “El Sapo,” as the founder’s actually closer confidant. But Flores Silva was evidently a skilled lieutenant who was intimately trusted with crucial operations.

A military intelligence profile reviewed by Milenio described the specifics: he supervised the construction of a clandestine private hospital where the kidney-diseased Mencho could receive discreet medical care, he purchased heavy weaponry from suppliers in the United States and Europe, and he designed escape routes through the natural geography of the Jalisco highlands.

The US Treasury’s 2025 OFAC designation added the harder institutional framing: he was a regional commander controlling clandestine methamphetamine and fentanyl laboratories across central Jalisco and southern Zacatecas, supervising clandestine airstrips and light aircraft, coordinating tractor-trailers moving cocaine from Central America, and managing passenger vehicles feeding US distribution cells in California, Texas, Illinois, Georgia, Washington, and Virginia. His portfolio stretched across at least six Mexican states: Jalisco, Nayarit, Zacatecas, Michoacán, Guerrero, and Colima, including the corridor to the port of Manzanillo.

Puerto Vallarta became, under his tenure, simultaneously a tourism-based money-laundering node and a strategic headquarters. His consolidation in Nayarit was inseparable from the corrupt political-security order that shaped that state in the 2010s.

But what made Jardinero more than just a conventional, if important, plaza boss was the sophistication of his financial architecture. The Treasury’s February 2026 OFAC action exposed the Kovay Gardens / Vallarta Gardens timeshare fraud network: a 17-company scheme operating out of Bahía de Banderas that had defrauded American and Canadian retirees of millions of dollars over 14 years. Named lieutenants collected payments from cartel-linked boiler rooms on his behalf.

A separate Treasury action in 2023 identified Mary Cruz Rodríguez Aguirre as his money-laundering broker, moving more than $6 million in US drug proceeds to Mexico through currency exchange houses and US-based businesses between 2020 and 2022. His empire fused drug manufacture, transport, extortionary governance, and white-collar fraud aimed at foreign victims.

The arrest of El Güero Conta exposed the other side of that ledger: shell companies, prestanombres, aircraft, ranches, and tequila producers, alongside accusations from residents of Los Naranjos, Tequila, that he had displaced 40 families since January 2024 to secure a strategic CJNG corridor.

Envoy to the Chapitos

After Joaquín Guzmán López’s July 2024 betrayal of “El Mayo” Zambada and the subsequent Sinaloa civil war, Flores Silva reportedly personally brokered an alliance between CJNG and Los Chapitos. The opening contact came through a CJNG emissary at a ranch in Huajicori, Nayarit, treated as neutral territory, according to Milenio. A subsequent meeting in Guadalajara paired Flores Silva with Abdiel Guzmán Araujo, son of “El Guano.”

The deal: Los Chapitos shared trafficking routes for drugs, weapons, and migrants; CJNG provided protection in Sinaloa, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí, Nayarit, and Chiapas; and Flores Silva personally kept close ties with Chapitos leader, Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar.

This would represent a level of cross-cartel trust previously unimaginable in the Mexican drug trade. His capture now puts that alliance, and CJNG’s strategic depth against the Mayiza, in immediate doubt. Without the guarantor, the friction points between mid-level commanders of both organisations are likely to surface.

In November 2023, Flores Silva demonstrated why he had been so difficult to capture. Marine commandos descended on the Cima Park luxury complex in Zapopan’s Valle Real and secured two luxury apartments. They found a firearm, undisclosed cash, paintings and sculptures dedicated to CJNG leaders, and a rescued kidnap victim. Flores Silva had been operating under cover as a businessman and art collector, but mamaged to escape jus tin time.

During those years, the narcocorrido industry had already crowned him. Gerardo Díaz y su Gerarquía released “El Sucesor” in June 2022, naming the geography, the bounty, the succession claim: “para todos el jardinero.” Los Farmerz released “El Jardinero” in January 2025, which soon rocketed to over 1 million views.

On the day of the capture, Milenio observed acidly that the corridos had got it wrong: they crowned him before he could be crowned.

What Happens Next?

He will most likely be extradited to the US, as many top narcos have been under President Claudia Sheinbaum.

He faces an indictment in the US District Court for the District of Columbia for conspiracy to distribute cocaine and heroin. But the case is handled by the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division rather than the local US Attorney’s Office. Treasury designated him under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Act in April 2021. The State Department posted a $5 million reward. In June 2025, he was designated a Specially Designated Global Terrorist.

The intelligence value of Flores Silva in US custody is potentially enormous. As the former security chief, the architect of the Chapitos alliance, the manager of Pacific corridor logistics, and the controlling figure behind the Kovay Gardens fraud network, he is a living repository of CJNG’s financial architecture, its corrupt government contacts, its laboratory and airstrip locations, and the operational terms of the most significant cross-cartel alliance in recent Mexican history.

Flores Silva’s capture caps a 70-day stretch in which the CJNG has lost its founder, its number-two operator, and one of its principal financiers. The cartel’s unparalleled ability to remain united will now be tested more than ever.

Juan Carlos Valencia González, alias “El 03,” El Mencho’s stepson, is reported to be the new top leader, though analysts caution he lacks influence among older, battle-hardened regional commanders who viewed Flores Silva as their peer.

The most consequential reframing the evidence supports is this: Flores Silva’s power came from his skill. Reading across his entire career, his multi-faceted skill as a criminal operative shines fort. He could plan ambushes, run significant drug trafficking pipelines, protect his boss, organize a timeshare fraud ring, ensure weapons procurement, and broker a peace deal with Sinaloa.

The corridos treated him as a successor to Mencho, but he seemed to be the CJNG’s . chief operating officer.

For the better part of a decade, Kinahan was the most wanted drug trafficker in Europe. He is accused of leading a drug organisation from a Dubai penthouse, which moved cocaine from South America to the ports of Antwerp and Rotterdam on an industrial scale. The Garda (Irish police) estimates it is worth €1 billion.

Kinahan once anchored a “super cartel” that Europol assessed controlled roughly one-third of Europe’s cocaine trade. The US State Department had a $5 million bounty on his head. He is alleged to have laundered narcotics profits through more than 200 shell companies in 20 countries.

Finally, he infiltrated professional boxing at its highest level.

Yet, when Dubai Police arrested him on 15 April, none of all this was in the arrest warrant. Kinahan was detained on an Irish High Court Order for directing a criminal organisation and the murder of one man, Eddie Hutch, shot dead three days after a gangland attack in a Dublin hotel in 2016.

Al Capone had his tax returns. Daniel Kinahan has Eddie Hutch.

There has been so much written about the Kinahan gang it’s difficult to know what I can add to it. But what I wanted to retrace here are seven turning points in the career of Daniel Kinahan, from a Dublin flat to a Dubai penthouse, which rewrote Europe’s criminal playbook.

And first, to understand Kinahan’s methodology, we have to understand his family.

Daniel Joseph Kinahan was born in Dublin on 25 June 1977 and grew up between Tallaght and the Oliver Bond flats in the Liberties, “the ultimate nepo baby” of Irish gangland, according to the Irish Times. His inheritance came from his father, Christopher “Christy” Kinahan Sr, born 23 March 1957, whose first convictions in the late 1970s were for house, breaking, car theft and forgery.

The father’s trajectory is unusual. Caught with heroin worth 117,000 pounds in Clontarf in 1986, he was jailed for six years in March 1987. While in prison, he took a degree and learned Spanish and Dutch. He reportedly refused early release to finish it. Moving to Amsterdam, he rode the 1990s ecstasy boom while Daniel and his brother Christopher Jr istributed drugs in Dublin’s south inner city. Together, they formed the backbone of what would come to be called the Kinahan Organised Crime Group (KOCG).

By the mid-2000s, Christy Sr had relocated to a €6 million villa in Estepona on the Costa del Sol, directing an international supply operation from southern Spain.

As the years passed, Christy Sr stepped back from the narcotics side and let his sons take over. By the time OFAC formalised the picture in 2022, the succession was complete: "Christopher Sr.'s sons, Daniel Kinahan and Christopher Jr., now manage his drug trafficking operations while Christopher Sr. oversees the property portions of the enterprise."

Daniel sourced cocaine from South America and ran day-to-day operations. Christopher Jr, Treasury said, "regularly contributes to a fund that is used to pay KOCG members" and was involved in transporting narcotics in the United Kingdom; he was also caught travelling on a false identity document in Germany. The Irish High Court concluded the KOCG was "a murderous organisation involved in the international trafficking of drugs and firearms." An EU-funded Transcrime study found the cartel had built more than 200 companies across 20 countries.

As of Daniel's arrest on 15 April 2026, neither his father nor his brother has been detained. Both remain subject to $5 million US bounties. Bellingcat footage from an MMA event in Dubai in June 2025 confirmed all three were still in the city as recently as last summer.

1. How a cartel survives a 750 officer raid

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And yet on April 10, 2026, Albanian President Bajram Begaj signed a decree making him a citizen of the Republic of Albania. Within days, Adams had registered as a resident of Tirana and applied for a passport.

He tweeted that the citizenship was “honorary.” It isn’t.

This is a real citizenship, obtained through Article 9 of Albania’s citizenship law, which allows the president to naturalise a foreigner who meets none of the standard requirements, provided the country has a “scientific, economic, cultural or national interest” in doing so.

It is the same pathway used to grant citizenship to Dua Lipa in 2022. The difference is that Dua Lipa has Albanian-Kosovar heritage and is one of the most famous people on the planet.

Eric Adams is a former mayor who left office in December 2025 earlier under a cloud of federal corruption charges, a sexual assault lawsuit, millions of dollars in unpaid legal bills, and a circle of associates who are either indicted, convicted, or under investigation.

Albania has offered no public explanation of what national interest Adams serves. Albanian media have noticed.

To understand how a Brooklyn-born ex-cop ended up as a proud son of Skanderbeg you have to follow two threads at once: Adams’ deepening relationship with Albania, and his accelerating legal troubles.

The Courtship

Adams’ Albanian connections began during his mayoralty, modestly at first. In November 2022, he hosted the first Albanian flag-raising ceremony at Bowling Green, declaring Albania’s 110th anniversary day.

Eric Adams makes the sign of the double-headed eagle, a symbol of Albania, at a flag-raising ceremony in New York. Source: Forbes.

New York is home to one of the largest Albanian-American communities in the United States, and for a mayor who branded himself the “international mayor,” the Albanian community was one of many constituencies he courted. His son Jordan Coleman competed on Albania’s version of American Idol that same year, giving Adams a personal anecdote he would deploy repeatedly.

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The report’s writers report were careful to note what it did not capture. The $9 billion was the portion of the system that left traces. The portion that did not: the hawala transfers settled in cash, the cryptocurrency transactions routed through specific exchanges, the commodity trades invoiced at fictitious prices, the construction contracts paid in kind rather than currency, was not quantified.

The $9 billion figure does not reveal the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) financial operation. It reveals the size of its shadow.

The full system, built over thirty years, refined by every round of pressure applied to it, currently sustaining a regime at, moves somewhere between $30 billion and $50 billion annually

It moves through Dubai’s exchange houses and Hong Kong shell companies, through Iraqi banks controlled by militia figures, through a Turkish gold-trading system that laundered $20 billion, and increasingly through a cryptocurrency infrastructure that no sanction can reach.

What the IRGC has built is a norm, a parallel financial system, institutionally embedded and deliberately designed, that converts criminal income from oil, drugs, arms, and construction into usable economic and political power. The sanctions regime that was supposed to strangle it has, at every turn, made it more sophisticated.

Understanding why requires going back to the beginning, to an institution that decided, in 2007, that financial compliance was not in its interests.

This is the third in a five-part series, The Organized Crimes of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, examining how the IRGC built, operates, and is adapting one of the world's most complex and profitable criminal enterprises. Part One examined the IRGC's seizure of Iran's oil sector and how it weaponized it. Part Two traced the IRGC's narco empire from Afghan heroin to captagon.

1. The FATF Problem

If Iran has been on the financial crime blacklist since 2007, why does the money keep moving?

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The language was careful but the charge was extraordinary. Baghbani, the Treasury stated, had used his position as a senior military commander to allow Afghan drug traffickers to move heroin and opiates through Iranian territory. He had also supplied those traffickers with precursor chemicals for producing drugs inside Iran.

In exchange, he had arranged for the smugglers to deliver weapons to the Taliban, then actively fighting and killing American soldiers in Afghanistan. His direct superior in this arrangement was Qasem Soleimani, the Quds Force commander who would become, in the years before his 2020 assassination, perhaps the most powerful military figure in the Middle East.

“Today’s action exposes IRGC-QF involvement in trafficking narcotics,” said Under-Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David Cohen, “made doubly reprehensible here because it is done as part of a broader scheme to support terrorism.”

Baghbani was not an ordinary drug trafficker. He did not sell drugs and did not move drugs. Instead, he controlled a border through which vast quantities of the world’s heroin had to pass, and monetized it.

He ran the world’s most consequential drug corridor the same way the IRGC now runs the Strait of Hormuz: not as a trafficker but as a toll collector.

The IRGC is not a drug trafficking organisation in any conventional sense. It does not own laboratories, distribute product, or employ street dealers. What it owns is are borders, the ports, the checkpoints, and the authority to decide who passes and who dies.

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Ships approaching the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow corridor through which one in every five barrels of oil on earth must pass, were ordered to halt. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) declared the strait closed. Any vessel attempting passage without authorisation risked being be set ablaze.

Within 72 hours, vessel traffic through Hormuz collapsed by 95 percent. War-risk insurance was withdrawn. Brent crude surged toward $120 a barrel. The International Energy Agency called it worse than the 1973 and 1979 oil shocks combined.

But the IRGC did not just blockade the strait. It is monetising it.

Ships seeking transit have been instructed to submit their ownership details, cargo manifests, and crew nationalities to IRGC-connected intermediaries. If approved, they received a clearance code and a mandatory escort through a specially designated corridor north of Larak Island: the Qeshm-Larak passage, a route controlled entirely by the Guards.

The fee for this service: $2 million per vessel, payable in Chinese yuan or stablecoins on the Tron blockchain, settling outside every Western financial system simultaneously.

By late March, Iran’s parliament had a bill in committee to codify the arrangement permanently into law. On April 7, the international acceptance of that fee became a key demand for any negotiation with the US.

This should surprise no one. For three decades, quietly and then loudly, the IRGC has been building a highly sophisticated state-backed oil smuggling operation.

Prior to the war, it controlled approximately half of Iran’s total petroleum exports, some 1.5 million barrels per day, through a ghost fleet of hundreds of tankers, a labyrinthine network of shell companies spanning dozens of jurisdictions, and a payment infrastructure that has migrated, piece by piece, entirely beyond the reach of Western sanctions.

The Hormuz toll booth is not a departure from this system. It is its logical culmination: the moment a criminal enterprise built on smuggling oil past the world’s attention decided to charge the world for looking.

The conflict has cost the IRGC dearly, however. The wartime crackdown in the UAE, long part of its central washing machine, has seen IRGC-linked money changers arrested, front companies shuttered, and the trust-based sarafi networks that moved billions disrupted in ways that analysts describe as potentially the most damaging single blow to IRGC finances in a decade.

The Venezuela channel, worth billions in stranded investments, collapsed with the capture of Nicolás Maduro. Key commanders who built and operated this architecture are dead.

Yet the oil flows on. Since the conflict began, United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) has documented 27 Iranian oil loadings from Kharg Island, moving approximately 38 million barrels worth more than $3 billion at elevated wartime prices. The ghost fleet sails in part. The Chinese buyers are buying.

And as Iran’s conventional military is degraded, its criminal oil economy has become not a secondary revenue stream but the primary mechanism keeping the regime alive.

Even with the temporary two-week ceasefire reached on April 7 between the US and Iran, and its almost inevitable collapse. the monetization of the Strait and the oil going through it was a key negotiation demand.

Understanding how we got here requires going back to the beginning.

This is the first in a five-part series, The Criminal Empire of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, examining how the IRGC built, operates, and is adapting one of the world’s most complex and profitable criminal enterprises. Subsequent parts will examine the IRGC’s narcotics trafficking network, its global financial architecture, its proxy criminal franchises from Hezbollah to the Houthis, and the seizure of Iran’s domestic economy. Together, they constitute the most comprehensive account in English of the IRGC as a criminal organisation rather than merely a military-political actor.

1. The paramilitary force

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was established on May 5, 1979, by decree of Ayatollah Khomeini, purpose-built as an ideological counterweight to the regular army. Its mission was to protect the revolution from enemies foreign and domestic. For its first decade, that mission was defined by the Iran-Iraq War — eight years of grinding attrition that consumed an estimated one million Iranian lives and left the country’s infrastructure in ruins.

The war’s end in 1988 created a problem. The IRGC had emerged from the conflict as Iran’s most powerful institution, commanding hundreds of thousands of battle-hardened soldiers, a formidable intelligence apparatus, and deep loyalty from the Supreme Leader. But it also had a demobilisation crisis: what do you do with a revolutionary army in peacetime?

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The entire vehicle and its cargo have not been recovered. No suspects have been identified.

Nestlé confirmed the theft publicly on 28 March, deploying a batch-code tracing system so retailers and consumers can flag any bars from the stolen shipment that surface through unofficial sales channels.

Their response was decently funny as such statements go. “We've always encouraged people to have a break with KitKat. But it seems thieves have taken the message too literally and made a break with more than 12 tons of our chocolate,” it read.

However, the heist is worthy of note. The haul was worth an estimated €870,000 at retail and targets KitKat's new F1 chocolate range, a moulded chocolate shaped like a Formula 1 car, launched in January 2026 as part of a multi-year deal making KitKat the Official Chocolate Bar of Formula 1.

It is another example in a rapidly escalating criminal trend: organised cargo theft across Europe now costs businesses an estimated €8.2 billion every year.

So there is a chocolate theft problem?

An extensive one.

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1 - The Son of the Sierra

The boy sat at the edge of the field and watched the road.

He had been born into a Mexico that had promised to fix places like this. The Tepalcatepec Commission had poured money and engineers into the lowland valleys, building dams and irrigation channels, dragging the Tierra Caliente into the modern era. None of it reached Culotitlán. Perched in the folds of the Sierra Madre del Sur, the village where Rubén Oseguera Cervantes came into the world in 1966 was accessible only by a dirt track that turned to mud four months of the year.

There was no electricity. No running water. The houses were adobe — earth packed with grass and agave fibre — and the only buildings made of anything else were the church and the municipal office down in Aguililla.

This article was written by Chris Dalby and first published in Spanish by Perpetuo Magazine on March 24, 2026. It has published by World of Crime, in its English form, with their kind permission.

He grew up in that adobe house with five brothers, Juan, Miguel, Antonio, Marín and Abraham. The older brothers worked. The younger ones watched the older ones and understood what was expected. Their father worked the Valencia orchards, which meant the family’s survival was tied, as it was for most of Aguililla, to one clan’s goodwill.

Into the absence left by the Mexican state, the Valencia family had grown like the avocado trees themselves: deep,rooted, pervasive, entirely in charge of what the soil produced. In the 1960s the patriarch was José Valencia, already a reliable supplier of marijuana and opium poppy to larger trafficking groups further north in Sinaloa.

By the time Rubén was entering adolescence, a younger generation was consolidating that power. Armando Valencia Cornelio, who would become known by the alias “Maradona”, was formalising the family’s operation into something more structured, more ambitious, and considerably more dangerous.

The Valencias were not criminals in the way that word implies disorder. They were order. They employed half the municipality in their orchards and packing plants. When a farmer needed seed money and the bank said no, the Valencias often said yes. When a dispute needed settling, the Valencias settled it.

The state visited Aguililla the way weather visits a drought: sporadically, without warning, and without staying. The Valencias never left.

Nemesio left school in the fifth grade and went to work in the orchards. There was nothing unusual about this. The harvest was grinding work. The picker’s tool was a gancho, a long bamboo pole with a metal hook and a small cloth basket at the tip. The avocado trees bled a milky sap when the fruit was pulled away and the sap turned black in the air, a viscous resin that stained everything it touched. The children of Aguililla walked home each evening with blackened hands and blackened clothes, the mark of the field class ground into their skin.

What schooled him instead was the palenque. The cockfighting pit was where the real curriculum of Aguililla played out on Saturday afternoons: who had money and who did not, who commanded silence when they walked in and who made way for them. The Valencias held court there. A boy who paid attention could learn the entire social architecture of the narcopueblo from a single afternoon in the palenque’s dust and noise. Nemesio paid attention.

By 1980, the Valencias needed something more than pickers. The Mexican Army had begun running search and destroy missions through the Sierra, looking for the marijuana plantations that had been growing quietly alongside the avocado groves.

The solution was simple and ancient: put the sons of trusted workers in the hills above the crops and have them watch the roads.

The elevation, when it came to Ruben, was not offered as a choice. It was a promotion: from the laboring class to something with a different kind of status and a different kind of danger. He was given a weapon and shown where to sit. The marijuana grew in clearings below, hidden under the avocado canopy.

On the road beneath all of it, nothing moved.

He watched anyway.

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Outside the Asunción parliament, government officials called it a historic moment. Independent congressman Raúl Benítez had a different take. "The security of a country," he told deputies, "is not built by importing troops or shielding foreign agents with diplomatic immunities."

He was comprehensively ignored.

Why did Paraguay grant complete impunity to US soldiers?

It began with a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) signed on December 15, 2025 by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Paraguayan Foreign Minister Rubén Ramírez Lezcano in Washington.

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Faced with a referendum that would have allowed foreign military bases to return to their country, more than 60 percent of voters rejected the proposal outright. Ecuador did not want foreign boots on its soil.

Less than four months later, US military forces are operating on Ecuadorian soil anyway.

On March 3, US Southern Command announced that American forces had launched operations against "designated terrorist organizations" alongside their Ecuadorian counterparts.

The Pentagon did not say what the operations would entail, and a short video posted to social media showed figures boarding a helicopter.

That same day, in a separate action, the US, Ecuador and Europol dismantled a major trafficking network linking Los Lobos, one of Ecuador's most violent cartels, to criminal organizations in Belgium and the Netherlands.

So why has Trump made this Ecuador his next target, after Venezuela and Mexico, in his war on drugs?

World of Crime explains.

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While I can’t independently verify this individual’s claims, his story is not beyond the pale. Since the early 2010s, thousands of Colombians have gone abroad to serve in all manner of conflicts, both righteous and reproachable.

Colombians can be found today on the front lines of Ukraine’s grinding struggle against Russian aggression, defending businessmen in Latin American urban centers, and serving as instructors for the Libyan military. In fact, the same individual might end up doing all three of these things over the course of their mercenary career, moving between global hot spots in search of increasingly lucrative contracts.

This guest piece was contributed by Henry Suckow Ziemer, Associate Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. I warmly recommend you subscribe to his excellent Caballeros newsletter for his reports on the geopolitics of Latin America.

A watershed moment came in 2021 when Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated, kicking off the political and security crisis that continues to engulf that nation. 26 Colombians were arrested in connection to the killing, mainly ex-soldiers who had been brough into the country as private security contractors, drawing renewed attention to Colombia’s role in the global mercenary ecosystem.

In the years that followed several articles have shed light on the reasons for Colombian soldiers are in such high demand. A combination of U.S.-training, hands-on expertise, all at relatively low cost makes Colombian fighters desirable to a wide range of groups looking for hired guns. At home, a weak military pension system and extensive informal recruiting networks create powerful push factors for ex-soldiers to try out the mercenary lifestyle.

But these explanations offer only part of the puzzle. Colombia is no longer at war, and the pace of military operations has slowed down especially under President Gustavo Petro’s “total peace” agenda. This seems like it would put a damper on demand for Colombian fighters, but the geographic scope of these soldiers of fortune has seemingly never been greater.

This is because the country’s mercenaries are no longer selling just their experience at home, but instead boast resumes speaking to a history of service in all manner of battlefield conditions. Like the CJNG gunman, many Colombian mercenaries are now veterans of three or more wars.

Fighters with experience in Ukraine especially seem to be in demand by groups looking to tap into expertise forged in the crucible of the world’s deadliest conventional war. Indeed, it should come as no surprise that the CJNG, which has been particularly active in recruiting Colombian fighters, has also been the fastest cartel to innovate when it comes to the use of armed drones.

The Call to Arms

With more than a quarter of a million active-duty personnel, Colombia’s military is the second-largest in South America, surpassed only by Brazil. In 2021 the New York Times reported about 10,000 military personnel retire each year across all branches. Most enlisted soldiers retire after two decades, receiving a pension that amounts to around $400 a month as thanks for their service. That’s not nothing, but for a 38, 40, or 45 year-old retiree who may have never held a civilian job and might now have a family to support, the prospects aren’t heartening.

Going abroad to work for private military contractors or cartels can be appealing for ex-soldiers. According to recruiters, some of these gigs can pay upwards of $4,000 a month, a full order of magnitude greater than what they might be collecting from pension disbursements. The work is dangerous, sure, but no more so than patrolling the same regions they’ve spent the last 20 years operating in.

At least, that’s what the recruiters say.

Word-of-mouth recruiting networks are key to explaining why Colombian mercenaries have spread so far and wide. While the country is not the only place in the Americas home to large numbers of underpaid and underemployed ex-military personnel, would-be mercenaries in Colombia have access to well-established and trusted channels for securing foreign employment.

These networks have their origins in Plan Colombia itself, when the United States brought in several contractors to assist in a host of activities, from training special forces, spraying chemical defoliants over coca fields. Working with military and security contractors exposed thousands of Colombian soldiers and police to the concept of mercenary work.

Then in 2005, the now-notorious U.S. private military contractor Blackwater began recruiting ex-military and police forces to deploy as building security guards in Iraq and Afghanistan. As World of Crime has documented, this operation was set up under the nose of the U.S. government, and ultimately earned the PMC a $42 million fine. In 2009, Blackwater went legit with its efforts and stood up a formal recruiting arm in Colombia to funnel personnel to its operations in the Middle East.

Demand for Colombian mercenaries continued to grow when Blackwater founder Erik Prince launched a new venture known as Reflex Responses (R2) based in and backed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Dozens of Colombians were among the first recruits to arrive for this project, and would eventually form the core of the UAE’s own bloodstained venture into power projection by proxy in places like Yemen and Sudan.

It’s also worth noting as well that at the time these networks were coalescing, Colombia seemed to be a rare example of successful counterinsurgency operations. While the country has suffered setbacks since, through the mid-2000s until the 2016 peace agreement with the FARC, Colombian security forces were steadily gaining ground and beating back an insurgency which just a decade prior had seemed like it might be a genuine threat to the state’s existence. Compared to Iraqi or Afghan troops who also received extensive U.S. training during that same period, Colombian forces looked head and shoulders more competent, fighting and winning against their guerrilla foes thanks to their own skill at arms.

Starting in the early 2010s, path dependency starts to set in. While Blackwater also employed a number of ex-military personnel for other Latin American countries, especially Chile, the sheer number of Colombians who went abroad helped recruit their former squadmates and friends, who in turn recruited their own personal connections, growing both the absolute number, and proportional representation of Colombians in private armies and security details.

Personal ties could also help alleviate some of the issues associated with false or misleading recruitment campaigns. The war in Ukraine has generated no shortage of horror stories involving foreign nationals brought to the front lines without their knowledge or against their will. Many Cuban nationals fighting in the Russian armed forces were lured there with promises of civilian work, only to be coerced into signing enlistment contracts. Colombian veterans of multiple different conflict zones should, in theory, now be able to share knowledge with prospective recruits about which entities are trustworthy and which deployments are safer than others.

Of course, this system is far from perfect, and Colombian volunteers with Ukraine’s International Legion as well as soldiers contracting for the UAE have at various points reported being pressed into combat roles unexpectedly, receiving pay that is far below advertised levels, and enduring dehumanizing living and training conditions. Still, if the pipeline for Colombian mercenaries is even slightly better-vetted than that for other nationalities, it could have a big effect in terms of how many people are willing to sign up to fight abroad.

Darfur, Donbas, and Durango

It is difficult to fully describe the sheer range of activities and geographies where Colombian mercenaries are present today. Broadly speaking, the current loci of mercenary activity seem to be the Middle East and North Africa, and Ukraine. However, the nature of this work is transient, and evidence increasingly suggests a relatively free-flowing market for Colombian military entrepreneurs willing to hop from conflict to conflict plying their trade.

In the Middle East and North Africa, the UAE has continued to recruit heavily from ex-military and police ranks. According to one ex-Navy officer interviewed by the newspaper El País, since 2014 some 2,000 Colombians have been deployed to Yemen to assist with campaign against the Houthi rebels spearheaded by the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

More recently, in 2024 Colombian outlet La Silla Vacia, broke a story of a unit of at least 300 ex-soldiers fighting in Sudan on behalf of the UAE-backed Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Some of these fighters were reportedly hired as security guards in Dubai, only to be shipped off to Sudan via circuitous routes. At least 20 have died there because of kamikaze drone attacks, while other Colombian fighters have reported that a large part of their job involves training RSF fighters, including child soldiers.

Since 2022, the outbreak of full-scale war in Ukraine has proven a magnet for foreign fighters of all stripes, including Colombians. According to the latest reports, as many as 7,000 Colombians may be serving with the Ukrainian armed forces, making them one of the largest contingents of foreign fighters in the country. While it’s easy to ascribe cynical motivations to fighters who sign up to fight for the UAE, in the case of Ukraine I believe there is genuine heroism on display.

Ukraine must rank near dead last on your list of best places to be a soldier, especially if you are simply looking for an easy payday. Still, stories abound of Colombian fighters who traveled to Ukraine, in some cases with nothing but the clothes on their backs, to help it resist foreign aggression. A friend of mine who visited Kyiv last year has often remarked of the plethora of Colombian flags that decorated a memorial to fallen foreign soldiers.

Given the pusillanimous approach of most Latin American governments to the war in Ukraine, it is inspiring to see citizens from the region standing behind their principles and risking their lives.

However, the influx of foreign fighters to Ukraine has clearly enabled some bad actors to sneak in as well. Last summer, Intelligence Online reported that a joint operation between Mexican and Ukrainian intelligence services had uncovered a scheme by cartels to send their members to Ukraine in order to receive training on drone warfare.

For Mexican cartels, Colombians veterans of Ukraine are the easiest way to gain access to a higher caliber of tactical knowledge, especially concerning the use of drones, mines, and fortifications. A shared language facilitates information transmission, and even the brutality of cartel warfare could be a welcome change of pace when compared to the grinding nature of frontline battle in Ukraine.

There is even a chance that Colombian mercenaries’ experiences abroad are now boomeranging back to haunt the country’s domestic security situation. While Mexican cartels have been using weaponized drones for years, Colombia has witnessed a rapid escalation in its fight against unmanned aerial systems since 2023. The country reported its first lethal drone incident in the summer of 2024, by that same time in 2025, dozens more attacks had struck at military bases and civilians alike.

In my opinion, there is a chance that the new drone skills picked up by Colombian mercenaries in Ukraine, and subsequently exported to Mexican criminal groups, have in turn been observed by armed groups like the ELN and FARC dissidents as templates for non-state drone tactics.

I don’t necessarily think there is direct transfer of knowledge happening here, but rather a kind of osmosis driven by social media and cartel propaganda videos. This would, I think in part, help explain why we’ve seen such a dramatic uptick in the sophistication of criminal drone tactics within Colombia, despite the fact that the country’s armed forces themselves are only just beginning to roll out UAV and counter-UAV equipment. For the time being however, this is just a hunch, I’d be eager to get your thoughts on the argument though.

A Golden Age for Mercenaries in the Americas

The above challenges have prompted calls within Colombia to outlaw mercenaryism or at least take steps to account for ex-military members travelling abroad. Whether such efforts actually end up driving legislative action or not, I worry it may be too little, too late as the Americas seem on the verge of a boom in demand for private security forces.

Part of the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine espoused in the 2025 National Security Strategy is a kind of new, sharper-edged vision for the war on drugs and crime in the Americas. That alone is a tall order, given the reach and power of the Western Hemisphere’s largest criminal networks. It seems likely that the United States won’t be able to achieve its desired security outcomes using military force alone, at least not without suffering major tradeoffs in terms of readiness in other regions.

If the past is any guide, when the United States wants to achieve certain security outcomes, but doesn’t want to put its own military on the line, it turns to contractors.

Take Venezuela for instance. Any U.S. company about to invest millions or even billions of dollars setting up shop in that country again is going to want to protect their investment from the multitude of armed criminal groups eager to extort foreign businesses with deep pockets. The Trump administration may be of little help for countries that fall prey to such intimidation. For all its early bluster, it seems unlikely that the United States will want to deploy its own armed forces to safeguard every potential investment.

However, at the same time the White House is likely more than happy to allow U.S. firms to contract their own private security to defend their new assets. Such an approach kills two birds with one stone, contributing to the stabilization mission in Venezuela without imposing the burden of public security on the U.S. military.

In this scenario, Colombian security personnel will find themselves in even greater demand, but other countries could also come to the fore.

One theory of mine is that we could see an uptick in Salvadoran private security contractors in the next couple of years. El Salvador’s military and police forces are far smaller than Colombia’s, so there may be issues getting a critical mass of recruits, but the Central American country’s newfound reputation for brutally effective counter-crime operations has won it a sizeable coterie of admirers.

Notably, the Wall Street Journal claimed that Salvadorans were already playing key roles in Blackwater founder Erik Prince’s operations in Haiti and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Given the chummy relations between Prince and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, private military contracting could end up a convenient way for the country’s ex-military and police forces to feather their nests upon at the end of their service.

A golden age for mercenaries could deliver security gains in the short term, but as the recruitment of Colombians by the cartels in Mexico shows, criminals have their own means of soliciting hired guns. A less regulated, more opaque private security ecosystem bodes ill for hemispheric stability.

In Mexico City, the mood is much more solemn. For President Claudia Sheinbaum, the neutralisation of El Mencho risks plunging Mexico into a far more chaotic criminal insurgency.

But it’s not altogether clear if Mexico has a choice. Sheinbaum has been very keen to placate the US by meeting its demands, whether extraditing dozens of narcos, haviing FBI Director Kash Patel come to Mexico to be seen accompanying Canadian drug trafficker Ryan Wedding to the US, and now killing El Mencho following US-led intelligence.

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This is largely due to the way Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, alias “El Mencho,” killed yesterday in a raid in Jalisco viewed his group.

From 2011 to 2026, he ruled the CJNG with an iron grip. He built a cult of personality, exemplified by the war cry spoken in every video, written on every banner, “Somos la pura gente del Sr. Mencho.”

Now he is dead, can the CJNG stay united? Can any of his lieutenants claim the throne single-handed, or are we heading for a cartel civil war that may lead to horrendous violence?

Will the CJNG’s local rivals take advantage of its “weakness” and try to nibble off drug trafficking routes, illegal mining, fuel theft, extortion, and more?

Have the US and Mexico given any thought to what happens next?

Here, World of Crime answers six essential questions about El Mencho’s death and what happens next for the CJNG and for Mexico.

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He has, to date, not been charged and was released within hours.

Public attention around Andrew has long centred on his association with Jeffrey Epstein and potential sexual offences. The arrest, however, was based on an entirely different allegation.

The arrest was on suspicion of misconduct in public office (MIPO), a rare common-law offence used to prosecute serious abuses of state power.

Documents recently unsealed by the US show that, while Andrew served as the UK’s trade envoy in 2010, he seemingly forwarded confidential government itineraries and sensitive commercial intelligence from official visits to Singapore, Vietnam, and China directly to Epstein, as well as information about Afghanistan. The documents were classified.

So why arrest him on suspicion of misconduct in public office?

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The gunmen returned two days later. But as they drove near the house on June 20, law enforcement swooped in, forcing the suspects’ car off the road where it crashed into a police cruiser. Three people were arrested, including a man named Almar Heath and two minors.

York Regional Police had uncovered the conspiracy and stationed officers around the home. The prison guard was unharmed.

This foiled assassination attempt triggered Project South, an investigation that has exposed one of the most egregious criminal infiltrations of the police in modern Canadian history. The corruption network was tied to organized crime groups fighting for control of Toronto’s tow truck industry.

Read more

The gunmen returned two days later. But as they drove near the house on June 20, law enforcement swooped in, forcing the suspects’ car off the road where it crashed into a police cruiser. Three people were arrested, including a man named Almar Heath and two minors.

York Regional Police had uncovered the conspiracy and stationed officers around the home. The prison guard was unharmed.

This foiled assassination attempt triggered Project South, an investigation that has exposed one of the most egregious criminal infiltrations of the police in modern Canadian history. The corruption network was tied to organized crime groups fighting for control of Toronto’s tow truck industry.

Read more

The raid was one of dozens in the last couple of years that have revealed the extent of one of the most significant criminal economies of the 21st century: scam compounds.

Discoveries of compounds, or parts therein, focused on the Japanese market have kept coming. Between the end of 2024 and October 2025, authorities identified 104 Japanese nationals abroad as suspects or participants in scam operations across Cambodia, the Philippines, and Thailand. The Poipet site was the largest, accounting for nearly a third of all known Japanese nationals extracted from such facilities during that period.

What emerged from Poipet was the final piece of evidence that, for several years now, Japanese citizens were being identified at home, transported abroad, and absorbed into compounds run by organised crime groups.

Those in Japan responsible for this have been named tokuryu.

They are upending Japan’s underworld, especially at a time when the yakuza and their hold over major criminal economies is fading fast.

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But in the year prior to his arrest, Wedding had been rapidly recast as something far larger: a “new Pablo Escobar,” a billionaire drug kingpin, and the alleged architect of an industrial-scale cocaine pipeline. He was described as a go-between Mexico’s warring cartels, an ally to Hezbollah and Hells Angels, a man worth an astonishing $15 million reward from the FBI.

Now, World of Crime has combed through the superseding indictment, (U.S. v. Wedding et al., Central District of California), a previous indictment from October 2024, and Treasury sanctions against Wedding’s network to see what is actually included and what remains unproven or exaggerated.

The investigation below proceeds mystery by mystery, using court filings, sanctions records, and financial intelligence to test the claims made about Wedding and see which may hold up in court.

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By the late 2010s, the group had been publicly attributed to operations such as the 2014 Sony Pictures attack and the 2016 Bangladesh Bank heist, placing it at the forefront of the growing number of state-sponsored cyber criminals

But Lazarus never stopped evolving. Culminating in 2025, it has confirmed its ability to be one of the main money-making methods for the North Korean regime.

cyber-Between February and December 2025 alone, Lazarus conducted major cryptocurrency thefts totalling more than $2 billion. The February breach of the exchange Bybit saw around $1.5 billion be stolen. This was the largest cryptocurrency theft on record.

Within weeks, hundreds of millions of dollars from the Bybit theft were laundered through informal financial infrastructure. A coordinated international response and multimillion-dollar recovery bounties, only a small fraction of the proceeds were ever recovered

The question for 2026 is not whether Lazarus will continue their heists, but whether any existing enforcement architecture can meaningfully constrain it.

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But this ecosystem has not remained static.

By the early 2020s, Yahoo Boys had shifted toward romance fraud and business email compromise, higher-yield schemes built on psychological manipulation rather than narrative invention. Since then, their arsenal has continued to expand.

AI-generated profiles, real-time deepfake video calls, and integrated laundering pathways can move funds through multiple jurisdictions in hours, expanding their scope and profitability. This has all been made possible through a clever interconnection with one of Nigeria’s most sophisticated criminal networks: the Black Axe.

Training that had previously circulated through encrypted chat groups and informal tutorials became systematised. Recognisable “format writers” and scamfluencers emerged, marketing their expertise as packaged instructional services.

The sextortion of minors has shifted from a marginal tactic into an industrial operation. Between 2022 and 2024, reported sextortion incidents targeting children in North America and Australia increased by more than 1,000 per cent, with the overwhelming majority traced to operators based in Nigeria. Over 20 suicides linked to these schemes have been documented in North America.

There has been some pushback. Police operations in 2024 and 2025 have arrested hundreds of suspects in Nigeria, extraditing key operators, and disrupting online training platforms. But this revealed an ecosystem that had already metastasised. Yahoo Boys have embedded themselves across global social media platforms, financial networks, and now confraternity structures.

They are now a criminal enterprise operating across five continents.

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