Forrest Hylton

For years, rumours of the death of Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, alias El Mencho, were legion, but none proved true. Last month, however, with help from US intelligence, Mexican special forces located and killed him in Tapalpa, Jalisco. El Mencho ran the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), which the Trump administration last year designated a ‘foreign terrorist organisation’. There was a $15 million bounty on his head, and El Mencho’s girlfriend co-operated. His brother and son are incarcerated in the US. His ex-wife, arrested on money laundering in late 2021 and released in 2025, has disappeared.

Kidnapping, murdering or deposing the president of a sovereign country is one thing; military occupation and administration is quite another, as the US found in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the occupation did not, as Donald Rumsfeld had promised it would, pay for itself. Some people got rich, though, as untold billions went missing and unaccounted for.

The US can bomb Venezuelan military and civilian targets from the USS Gerald R. Ford but it’s difficult to imagine anyone signing off on a ground invasion. Cooler heads in the US military may be wary of a quagmire. If they did invade, US troops would probably end up fighting not only the Venezuelan military, intelligence services and civilian militias but also the Colombian guerrillas that operate along the border.

On 30 October, days after the largest police massacre in the history of a city infamous for them, which left at least 121 dead, President Lula approved a law to fight organised crime. He expressed sympathy, first, for four dead policemen, then for innocent residents and children murdered in the ‘mega-operation’ in the Complexo da Penha and the Complexo do Alemão, in the north of Rio de Janeiro. A photographer discovered the head of one young Comando Vermelho soldier, 19-year-old Yago Ravel Rodrigues Rosário, on a tree. He had no criminal record, but we know he was CV from his social media feeds. Police killed more people than the number of weapons recovered.

Part of Rodrigo Paz Pereira’s success in the Bolivian presidential election lies with his choice of running mate, Edmand Lara, a forty-year-old lawyer and former police captain in Santa Cruz, who was raised in a small town in Cochabamba. He became famous for his TikTok videos about police corruption, and knows how to speak a different language from that of either the middle-class doctores or the coca growers’ leaders.