El Mencho sold drugs in San Francisco before becoming brutal cartel king — was deported twice
The vicious cartel boss El Mencho cut his teeth as a small-time drug dealer in San Francisco — where he lived for years even after being deported in the 1980s and 1990s — before becoming a most-wanted narcotics kingpin at one of “most powerful and ruthless criminal organizations” in Mexico, according to drug enforcement authorities.
El Mencho, born Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, illegally crossed the US-Mexico border multiple times during the 1980s under assumed identities like Rubén Ávila, José López Prieto, Miguel Valadez, according to Univision.
He spent years as a drug dealer in San Francisco — where he returned even after being caught and deported in 1989, according to a Rolling Stone investigation.
He was arrested by San Francisco police in 1986 for possession of stolen property and a loaded gun. A booking photo shows a teenage 19-year-old Mencho wearing a hoodie and a blank expression.
He was deported back to Mexico, where he’d spent his early years working on his parents’ avocado farm.
But he managed to sneak back into the US several times before resettling in San Francisco — a city known for its lax attitude towards drug dealing — by 1989, per Rolling Stone.
That year, he was yet again arrested, this time for selling drugs, and deported.
By 1992, he was back in the Bay Area and busted by federal authorities for selling heroin.
He and his brother, Abraham, were reportedly wiretapped discussing a deal to sell five ounces of heroin for $9,500 at Imperial, a San Francisco bar.
He was again deported after serving three years in prison, before washing up in a Jalisco town called Tomatlán, according to Rolling Stone.
He fell in with the Milenio Cartel, which eventually splintered and fueled his rise in the bloodthirsty Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
Oseguera Cervantes’s killing Sunday by Mexican military forces unleashed a wave of chaos in at least 20 of Mexico’s 31 states — leading the US State Department to issue stay-in-place orders in tourist hotspot Puerto Vallarta and other parts of the country.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum appealed for peace on Monday in her first address to the press since “El Mencho’s” death in a gunfight between military special forces and his security.
“The most important thing right now is to guarantee peace and security for the entire population of all of Mexico,” she told reporters.
