Jalisco: How powerful is "Nueva Plaza", CJNG's enemy splinter group?

Posted by Char for Borderland Beat from La Opinion 

Facing protests and outrage over the deaths of three film students, the Jalisco state authorities blamed the events - and later ones that have occurred Guadalajara, the country's third largest city - on a deadly dispute between the powerful Cartel Jalisco New Generation Cartel and an antagonistic CJNG splinter cell, named “Nueva Plaza”.

The leader of Nueva Plaza, according to the authorities, is Carlos Enrique Sánchez, aka 'El Cholo', 38 years old. He is accused with multiple antecedents of violence and capable of being released from jail with great secrecy, He did not stay in prison, not even when charged for the murder of a rival.  When arrested Sanchez had one million pesos.  

Neither the judges nor the state prosecutor (whose head, Luis Carlos Nájera, recently suffered an attack and resigned) has explained, how 'El Cholo' managed to achieved his freedom, after he killed a man in Tlaquepaque in 2007 who tried to defend a woman the scoundrel was arguing with.

Only eight years later, he was arrested in an operation against drunk driving and because he was driving half-drunk with cash and drugs, according to a press release issued by the state attorney's office. He spent a few days in the Preventive Prison of Guadalajara and then left prison: presumably for lack of evidence.

Since that time, the whereabouts of 'Cholo' is not very clear. The state government had not spoken of him again, until the death of the three film students who were dissolved in acid. Then the prosecutor said it was the CJNG that confused the boys with people from Nueva Plaza, a cartel who are in dispute with CJNG, ever since "El Mencho" put a price on El Cholo’s head in March of 2017.

[After the split, a new operator of the CJNG emerged, identified as El 2, who has the task of eliminating Carlos Enrique Sánchez "El Cholo" and take control of the plaza in the municipalities of Guadalajara, Tonalá, San Pedro Tlaquepaque and Tlajomulco of Zúñiga. Among the alleged collaborators of El 2 are El Karton, El Padrino, El Pipo and El Tortas.]

"The problem in Jalisco is that there is a significant presence of organized crime groups without any state strength" said Orlando Camacho, general director of Mexico SOS. "The local government has dismissed the numbers of violence, the perception of insecurity in the day to day while its interventions against delinquency have been delayed and opaque."

According to local press reports, the rupture between El Mencho and El Cholo, who was his trusted enforcer hitman,  was due to the latter assassinating a man with the nickname "El Colombiano", financial operator of the CJNG, whjo was killed on March 10 during a shootout that occurred in the parking lot of a Walmart store in Puerto Vallarta.

El Cholo then became independent and he formed Plaza Nueva with other CJNG criminals.

Governor Aristóteles Sandoval recently acknowledged that criminal groups and, particularly the CJNG, include training experts from Colombia, Venezuela and "other parts of the world".  This move was to expand their power and protect the territory they dispute with Nueva Plaza and others, after the weakening of the Sinaloa Cartel by the extradition of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán.

Diego Gabriel Mejía - another of the leaders of Nueva Plaza - was arrested with four other men: the Colombian Brayan Hernán Almario; Miguel Ángel Goche Fernández; Hugo Israel Palomera and José Jonathan Cárdenas Sánchez. The police also secured weapons and two vehicles.

For three years, Mejía has been imprisoned; However, a CJNG cartel commander received information that he had already been released, so he ordered a group of men to watch his house known as "La Cabaña", where the film students were confused with rivals from the CJNG. The rest is history.