Editor’s Note
This article examines the Jalisco New Generation Cartel’s expanding network of illicit alliances and business fronts, revealing how criminal enterprises adapt and sustain their operations.
In recent years, the capacity of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) to establish alliances and business networks to keep its criminal enterprises afloat has become evident.
One of the most striking cases of companies linked to the organization of Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, alias ‘El Mencho’, was a ticket company headed by music promoter Jesús Pérez Alvear, who was murdered on the afternoon of December 4 in a restaurant at the Plaza Miyana, located in the Polanco area, west of Mexico City.
On April 6, 2018, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued a sanction against Gallística Diamante (also known as Ticket Premier), a company dedicated to selling concert tickets, which the CJNG, through the financial arm of Los Cuinis, used to launder its assets.
According to US government investigations, Pérez Alvear was close to the family of Abigael González Valencia, alias ‘El Cuini’, and used violence to obtain concessions that allowed him to organize events primarily in Aguascalientes and Metepec, State of Mexico.
Months earlier, in October 2017, the then president of the Board of Trustees of the National San Marcos Fair, José Ángel González Serna, denied that Gallística Diamante had links to drug trafficking, after information about such links surfaced in the press. Gallística Diamante was in charge of managing the Palenque and the Casino of the San Marcos Fair.
However, in June 2023, journalist Ángel Hernández revealed that Pérez Alvear reached a guilty plea agreement with the US Attorney’s Office in which he accepted having conspired in favor of the CJNG’s criminal network.
According to the report published in Milenio, Jesús Pérez acknowledged his participation as a financial operator through the properties mentioned in the OFAC investigation.
To date, the Department of the Treasury keeps Gallística Diamante on its blacklist and identifies two addresses linked to the company, one in Aguascalientes—without a specific address—and another at Quinta Los Pirules No. Ext. 182, León, Guanajuato.
US government alerts about this series of illicit operations began with a series of Gerardo Ortiz concerts at the San Marcos Fair and in other states, including Baja California, Guanajuato, and Chiapas. For that tour, 11 deposits totaling three million 500 thousand pesos were detected. All the presentations were managed by Ticket Premier, which by then had already been on the OFAC blacklist for weeks.
