(End of the American Dream)—Selling illegal drugs to the United States is one of the central pillars of the Mexican economy. I understand that it isn’t a pleasant thing to think about, but it is true. The cartels that control the flow of drugs into the U.S. have become exceedingly powerful over the years. The cartels essentially run much of the country, and collectively they probably possess more military firepower than the Mexican government does. The good news for the Mexican government is that the cartels are not united. They have always spent a tremendous amount of time and energy fighting one another, but if something occurred that changed all that, it would certainly be a very ominous development.
Have we just witnessed such an event?
On Sunday, the death of El Mencho caused violence to erupt all over Mexico…
Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho,” was killed in Tapalpa, Jalisco, Mexico on Sunday, Feb. 22, as part of a Mexican military operation. Oseguera was seriously injured in the shootout and died during air transfer to Mexico City. Six other cartel members were killed and two were arrested, Mexico’s Ministry of National Defense announced. Three military members were also injured during the operation.
The operation set off a wave of civil unrest, with vehicles being torched and gunmen, believed to be supported of Oseguera, blocking highways in a more than a dozen states.
His death is not going to do much to disrupt the operation of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel because it is highly decentralized.
But it could potentially unite the cartels against a common enemy.
Without a doubt, the JNGC is going be seeking revenge, and there have been numerous reports of gunfire in and around Puerto Vallarta within the past 24 hours…
Videos circulating on social media show vehicles burning in Puerto Vallarta, Guadalajara and Tapalpa, which are all located in the state of Jalisco.
Armed thugs on motorcycles and the sounds of their gunfire have also been reported by residents of Puerto Vallarta. Videos of Mexican forces exchanging fire with cartel members have started popping up on X and Instagram.
Videos of chaos at Guadalajara International Airport in Jalisco have also been circulating, showing smoke rising from runways and people running in a panic. Other videos show people hiding inside the airport and laying on the ground.
Cartel members aren’t just setting vehicles on fire because they are angry.
It is a common tactic for cartel members to set vehicles on fire in order to slow down the movements of the Mexican military.
One American that was in Mexico at the time that all the chaos broke out had an interesting story about how he got back to the airport…
Johnson, who co-hosts a morning show on 104.9 The More in Spencer, Iowa, believes he was among the last travelers to catch a cab from his resort before they stopped taking passengers.
“The driver who took us did not brake at all. He drove on parts of the road that he shouldn’t have, and we were dodging, burning buses and burning taxi cabs, and he was clinching a rosary and kissed it a couple of times,” Johnson told USA TODAY.
Another U.S. tourist posted video footage of a Costco that was being engulfed by flames…
A San Diego tourist, James Stephens, posted chilling footage of a Costco store up in flames and revealed the whole city had been locked down.
He said: ‘Stuck in Puerto Vallarta as the cartel is attempting to take over the city. Entire city shut down. Can’t get out. Crazy right? We’re safe.’
So far, I have not seen any reports of any U.S. tourists have been killed, although U.S. Senator Bernie Moreno seems to think that the cartels are “hunting down American citizens”…
Bernie Moreno took to X on Monday to relay ‘troubling’ reports that narco-terrorists are ‘hunting down American citizens’ in Puerto Vallarta amid gangs clashing with authorities in the city.
‘The drug cartels should be aware that if any American citizen is harmed in Mexico there will be a violent and terminal retribution from the US. Any USMCA negotiations should cease until this situation is resolved,’ the senator added.
Yes, there are many Americans that are trapped in Mexico right now that are scared out of their minds.
One man actually called his mother in order to tell her where his will was…
An American couple on their first trip away from their four-year-old son have told their family members where their wills are hidden after becoming trapped in Mexico.
The unnamed individuals were on vacation in Puerto Vallarta when the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel was killed by the Mexican military on Sunday, prompting widespread violence across the region.
‘I had to call my mom today and, you know, just tell her, “Look, here’s where my will is. We just created this. I don’t want you to panic, but I may need you to stay a couple [of] days extra with my son”,’ the concerned father told Fox Digital.
As long as they stay out of the way, almost all of the tourists should be perfectly fine, because this fight is not about them.
A showdown between the large cartels and the central government in Mexico City has been coming for a long time.
And apparently the JNGC had already prepared an extensive plan in case something like this ever happened…
Will the other cartels join the JNGC in their fight against the Mexican government?
If so, we will want to watch how things develop very closely.
If the Mexican government were to fall and the cartels were to take over, it is probably inevitable that the U.S. would feel compelled to invade.
And then we would be at war with Mexico.
The JNGC is already quite upset with the Trump administration, because it turns out that the CIA was heavily involved in locating El Mencho…
The Central Intelligence Agency provided important intelligence on the location of Mexico’s most wanted cartel boss that led to an operation by Mexican special operation forces and his killing on Sunday, according to a U.S. official and others with knowledge of the operation.
The Mexican authorities said on Monday that they had found the cartel boss, Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, the longtime leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel known as El Mencho, by tracking one of his romantic partners. They said they had first followed one of her close associates, who took the woman to a rendezvous with Mr. Oseguera at the cartel leader’s hide-out.
Will there be blowback from this?
One anonymous online account is warning that we will see “massive terrorism operations on U.S. soil”…
This is very serious.
I think that the “war on drugs” just went to an entirely new level, and the JNGC is willing to go all in.
Are the Mexican government and the U.S. government willing to say the same thing?
I believe that we will see a tremendous amount of drug-related violence in the days ahead, and that is not good news for any of us.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
