By Emily Green
MEXICO CITY, March 5 (Reuters) - Mexico’s security chief, the man who helped lead the operation that killed the drug lord known as “El Mencho,” spends his days and nights inside fortified office buildings, including a one-bedroom apartment in the security ministry built for him.
His quarters – inside a modern complex beside a busy thoroughfare – include a bedroom, gym, kitchen and a conference room that seats 25. From the living room, guests can hear the crack of gunfire from a firing range within the building complex, according to a high-ranking government official who has visited the apartment. A red telephone on his desk provides a direct line to the president.
Omar Garcia Harfuch, 44, has lived this way since 2020, when on his commute to work a truck cut off his armored Suburban and gunmen disguised as road workers sprayed his vehicle with more than 400 bullets. Harfuch returned fire and survived with three gunshot wounds. Two of his bodyguards and a bystander were killed.
The security chief blamed the assassination attempt on Nemesio Oseguera, 59, better known as El Mencho, leader of the brutal Jalisco New Generation Cartel, one of Mexico’s largest and bloodiest crime groups. Six years later, bringing down the cartel leader was a deeply personal moment for Harfuch, who friends say was devastated by his security guards’ deaths.
Harfuch declined to comment for this story. The account is based on interviews with a dozen friends, colleagues and security analysts.
Those close to Harfuch say that he's unlikely to let his guard down now that El Mencho is gone. But the death of the kingpin has lifted the profile of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s Minister of Security and Citizen Protection, who’s credited with spearheading her more muscular approach to fighting cartels, so much so he’s considered an early frontrunner for the presidency when her six-year term ends in 2030.
“Omar Garcia Harfuch is the number one presidential candidate today,” said Armando Vargas, the top security expert at the think tank México Evalua. “He is the most visible leader of this new strategy.”
The approach is not without risks: El Mencho’s death triggered a wave of violence across Mexico that killed 25 National Guard members and could fuel deadly feuds as rival cartel factions fight for control.
It’s also a marked departure from former President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s “hugs not bullets” philosophy, under which cartels grew in power and reach to control vast swaths of territory and diversified from drugs into extortion, human trafficking, and contraband fuel.
TRUSTED BY THE PRESIDENT
Harfuch rose to prominence within the Mexico City government when now-President Sheinbaum was the capital’s mayor.
Rodrigo Canales, who advised Sheinbaum on her security strategy, said Harfuch helped her navigate a difficult period early in her mayoral tenure when high-level police officers were accused of corruption.
“He has Claudia’s absolute trust and earned it by being extremely loyal and effective in key moments early in her mayorship,” Canales said.
Sheinbaum promoted Harfuch to head of the city’s police in 2019 after sacking his predecessor over a money laundering scandal.
Harfuch had been in the job for under a year when assassins made the attempt on his life. After initially returning fire, he scrambled into the back seats of his armored SUV and crouched down until reinforcements could arrive, he recalled in interviews after the attack. Twelve alleged members of the Jalisco cartel were arrested and given life sentences.
Following the ambush, he moved out of his house and into Mexico City’s police headquarters. His inner circle, already small, became even tighter. He sees his children in fleeting moments.
"He went from someone who could go to a restaurant, meet friends, attend a colleague's birthday party, to being guarded in an office, spending practically 90 percent of his life inside police buildings," said a friend who has known Harfuch for 20 years.
Like the cartel bosses he hunts, one misstep could cost him his life.
FOLLOWING IN FAMILY FOOTSTEPS
Harfuch comes from a line of Mexican top brass.
His grandfather, Marcelino Garcia Barragan, was defense minister in the 1960s while his father, Javier Garcia Paniagua, was a senator and presidential contender who led a federal security agency in the 1970s.
That mix of police and military heritage is rare in Mexico and puts Harfuch in a unique position to lead the country’s heavily militarized public security structure, two sources who’ve worked with him say.
“Garcia Harfuch was sort of destined to follow in his father and grandfather’s footsteps,” said Gladys McCormick, a professor and historian of U.S.-Mexican relations at Syracuse University.
But that same legacy is regarded with suspicion in parts of the ruling leftist Morena party. Both his grandfather and father oversaw periods of military abuses and repression of social movements by security forces.
Critics also highlight Harfuch’s links to the infamous disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa teaching college in 2014. A 2022 truth commission report cited him—then a mid-level federal police officer—as having attended meetings where officials crafted a version of events that masked the role of security forces in the disappearances.
Harfuch, who was never accused of wrongdoing, has previously said he only attended meetings to help coordinate the search for the missing students. No local or federal officials have been sentenced in the case.
For the United States, Harfuch has emerged as the linchpin in security collaboration with Mexico at a time when U.S. President Donald Trump is piling pressure on his southern neighbor to aggressively combat cartels, and threatening U.S. military force if Mexico can’t show results.
Derek Maltz, former acting administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said he met Harfuch last year shortly after Mexico transferred 29 suspected high-level cartel members to the U.S. in what was then the largest such handover in history.
“He looked me in the eyes, and he said, ‘This is only the beginning,” Maltz recalled.
Maltz had his doubts, but in the coming months Mexico handed over another 63 suspected cartel leaders and took down the country’s most-wanted drug lord. “I'm very impressed with what I'm seeing,” he said.
The prisoner transfers underscore what officials from both countries say is an unprecedented level of cooperation and intelligence sharing as they seek to dismantle cartels through military confrontations, money laundering investigations, and drug and firearm seizures.
HUNT FOR EL MENCHO
The hunt for El Mencho gained urgency in November, when the Jalisco cartel kidnapped two of Harfuch’s investigators in the city of Zapopan, a cartel stronghold, according to the high-ranking Mexican official.
Soldiers raided houses of suspected cartel members and interrogations produced information that helped tighten the net around El Mencho. Reuters is the first outlet to report the role of the kidnappings in the search for El Mencho. The agents were released after a week.
The breakthrough came when authorities tracked one of El Mencho’s multiple girlfriends to his villa, Mexico’s Defense Minister Ricardo Trevilla has said. A new U.S.-military-led task force confirmed the exact location of the house, Reuters reported.
But the government official said the real slip wasn’t the romance; it was that the 59-year-old cartel leader wanted to see his two children with the woman. Mexican troops swooped in after the girlfriend and El Mencho’s children left.
After a shootout, El Mencho died on a military helicopter en route to a hospital. Eight of his bodyguards were also killed. Two soldiers died during the raid; another two died later from injuries.
Harfuch received a confirmation text with an image of El Mencho’s body, still clad in a flak jacket, the Mexican official said.
“I spoke with him Sunday morning after El Mencho was killed,” said Eduardo Clark, a top health official in Mexico who is close to Harfuch. “He told me, ‘this is a huge relief.’”
(Reporting by Emily Green in Mexico City; additional reporting by Laura Gottesdiener in Monterrey; Editing by Stephen Eisenhammer and Michael Learmonth)
