More recently, the CJNG has taken advantage of the geographic and public relations vacuum left by the decline of the Zetas, the Sinaloa Cartel, and the Knights Templar -- organizations that have all seen their leadership decimated by arrests and shootouts with Mexican authorities. While it may not be the most powerful organization in Mexico, it is one of the few that seems to be at the front end of its narrative arc. 

The group has been linked to notorious crimes in Jalisco and neighboring states over the past five years, most recently the August murder of a Jalisco mayor and the ambush that left 15 state police officers dead in April, crimes that have called to mind the methods of the old Jalisco Cartel of Sinaloa godfather Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo. The CJNG has also employed tactics that are disruptive and harmful to the society at large, such as extortion and blockades of popular thoroughfares. 

Furthermore, though members of the group have been arrested as far away as the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz, the CJNG has been more content to consolidate its control over its native region, largely rejecting the expansionist tendencies that made the Sinaloa Cartel and the Zetas such destabilizing forces. 

But notwithstanding its lower profile, the gang remains a significant force for ill, and has helped spur a years-long wave of violence across Mexico’s Pacific Coast. Through four months of 2015, Jalisco was on pace for nearly 900 murders this year, nearly double the number in 2009, the year before Coronel’s death. 

The CJNG, then, displays something of a dichotomy: its low profile relative to past groups labeled Mexico’s most dangerous and its lack of interest in national territorial expansion contrasting with a consistent willingness to engage in mass violence.

In theory, the targeting of kingpins should have incentivized a less provocative approach to organized crime, one that studiously avoids the kind of actions that could spark a federal security operation aimed at a single gang. But the case of the CJNG shows that the implicit message that the government would seek to send to criminal groups with the constant takedowns of its most violent members -- that is, adopt a defensive approach to the business or you will be destroyed -- is not being heard, at least not by the CJNG. 

There are any number of reasons why this altered approach has not yet manifested itself: maybe the signaling from the government has been inconsistent and crude, or the evolution is ongoing but too slow to be clearly visible just yet, or perhaps criminal gangs operate according to incentives that are largely incoherent and impossible to divine from outside and are immune to the standard calculations of rational interest. 

Whatever the reason, the inability to force gangs to absorb this lesson limits the impact of government successes and helps maintain Mexico's bloodshed at unacceptable levels.