Jose Luis Granados Ceja

And that's because they operated sort of learning the lessons of the previous cartel groups of not necessarily kind of wanting to vertically integrate everything.

They were kind of almost like a franchise model where, you know,

you know, people kind of pay tribute to the central organization without necessarily being tied to it.

And that's generally true of organized crime groups.

They're far less organized than I think people think.

But this is, of course, huge.

I mean, he was the top of this organized crime group.

They had presence quite literally in every corner of this country, obviously mostly concentrated in the states where they were most active, like Jalisco.

And that's where we saw the most violence.

And I think

To explain that, obviously, we all saw these scenes of, you know, billowing cars and roads being blocked.

And of course, you know, those are disturbing to see, but they shouldn't be overstated.

You know, the article that you read to introduce this piece talked about the chaos and things like that.

But that's precisely what these groups wanted to do.

So they had their leader captured.

And so as an act of protest, you can think of.

They go and unleash these kinds of acts of violence, these acts of intimidation, in a sense to send a message, to say they're unhappy with what just happened, to deliver a message to the federal government, the Mexican government, which was responsible for this operation, but also to show who's the strong actor.

Because now there's going to be, as always happens when you take out the top, when you decapitate these organizations, a bit of a competition in terms of who's going to now try to compete to become the new head of the organization.

And what we saw yesterday, in a sense, is that is people trying to flex their own muscle to show, look how many men I can mobilize.

Look how much unrest I can cause.