Mexico Is Punishing Narca Boss ‘La Jefa’ for Her Dodgy Car Wash Transactions

Rosalinda González Valencia, also known as “la Jefa” [the female boss], who married one of the DEA’s most-wanted drug traffickers, Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera-Cervantes, was recently sentenced to five years in prison in Mexico. 

Although a judge in Morelos ruled that González Valencia had hidden some financial transactions in 2015 and 2016 related to a car wash she owned in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, according to her lawyer the case stopped short of connecting her to organized crime, and the money laundering charges she faced.

González Valencia was arrested in Guadalajara, Mexico in November 2021 and charged with laundering money for the hyper-violent Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), which her (possibly former) husband allegedly runs. 

“[The prosecutor] didn’t demonstrate that [Mrs. González Valencia] belonged to an organized crime group, didn’t demonstrate that she has operated with illicit proceeds, didn’t prove that this is money-laundering and didn’t show that she has manipulated her bank accounts,”her lawyer Víctor Francisco Beltrán García told the Mexican newspaper El Universal.

He argued that El Mencho’s wife was accused of laundering money, not hiding financial transactions, and is appealing his client’s sentence. 

It’s not clear whether the criminal couple remain married, or together. Some reports, citing Mexican government sources, suggest that although the mother of his children, González Valencia is no longer the “pareja sentimental” [love interest] of one the most feared cartel leaders in Mexico.

But González Valencia, who is from the state of Michoacán, ground zero in Mexico’s “drug war” and home to a plethora of organized crime groups, appears to have been born into the crime world before she met and married El Mencho, who currently has a $10 million bounty on his head by U.S authorities. 

Los Cuinis, another organized crime group closely allied with CJNG and - like El Mencho’s group - a major trafficker of fentanyl to the U.S, was reportedly founded by her brother Abigael Gonzalez Valencia, according to officials. She allegedly grew up as one of 18 siblings, in a state where clandestine marijuana and poppy plantations have dotted the verdant mountains since the 1970s.

Her family was also believed to be behind the founding of the Milenio Cartel, predecessor to the CJNG, which eventually formed following the fracturing of the Milenio group around 2010.

This also wasn’t the first time she has been in Mexican custody. She was arrested in 2018, also in Guadalajara, and held briefly on money-laundering charges again before getting out three months later after paying bail. It's unclear what happened to those charges.

Rosalinda is one of a number of El Mencho’s close family members to feel the strong arm of the law in recent years, whilst the patriarch of the family remains at large. 

Her son, Rubén Oseguera González, known as El Menchito, was arrested by Mexican authorities in 2015 on drug charges, and extradited to the U.S where his trial is due to start next year. 

His sister - El Mencho’s daughter - Jessica Oseguera was also arrested, extradited and  sentenced to 30 months in prison in June 2021 for her role in a number of businesses linked to her father's cartel. She left U.S. custody on Mar. 14 last year after serving just two years behind bars. 

Oseguera, who goes by the alias “La Negra,” was arrested in February 2020 when she showed up at a Washington, D.C., courthouse to attend her brother’s hearing.