No Warning: The El Mencho Raid, 61,000 Canadians, and What It Says About Canada's Intelligence Standing

When Mexican special forces killed Nemesio "El Mencho" Oseguera Cervantes in Tapalpa, Jalisco on February 22, 2026, the United States was inside the operation. The Joint Interagency Task Force–Counter Cartel had provided a targeting package — tracking El Mencho's location through surveillance of a romantic partner — that made the raid possible. Within hours, CJNG retaliation ignited roadblocks across 20 Mexican states, airports locked down, and Air Canada, WestJet, Porter, and Air Transat suspended flights to Puerto Vallarta and Guadalajara.

At that moment, more than 61,000 Canadians were registered in Mexico with Global Affairs Canada. Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand confirmed the following day that Ottawa had not been told the operation was coming. "I was not provided with any indication about this particular operation," she said, "and to the best of my knowledge, I believe the Government of Canada was not informed."

The hedge — "to the best of my knowledge," "I believe" — is worth preserving precisely. Anand was careful not to assert as fact what she could not fully verify. But the substance is clear: a Five Eyes ally with tens of thousands of citizens in the affected region learned about a major North American security operation the same way everyone else did.

The documented trust record

The exclusion from the El Mencho operation did not occur in a vacuum. A pattern of documented institutional failures over the preceding six years provides the context U.S. officials have cited — publicly and through reporting — for reduced intelligence sharing on transnational crime files.

The most significant single event is the Ortis case. As director-general of the RCMP's national intelligence coordination centre, Cameron Ortis had access to Canada's Top Secret Network and to pooled Five Eyes intelligence. His 2023 conviction — for leaking operational information to individuals connected to money-laundering networks, including targets of active Five Eyes investigations — produced what the sentencing judge called potentially irreparable damage to Canada's reputation among its intelligence partners. "Our reputation among Five Eyes partners may never be the same," Justice Maranger said at sentencing. Ortis is appealing both his conviction and sentence.

Alongside Ortis, the Cullen Commission's 2022 findings documented what it called industrial-scale money laundering flowing through British Columbia — including proceeds connected to Mexican cartel networks. The Commission found Canada's federal anti-money-laundering framework ineffective. In 2024, the TD Bank fine added a specific, quantified instance: $670 million laundered through a major Canadian institution for trafficking-linked groups, resulting in the largest bank penalty of its kind in Canadian history.

Investigative reporting by Sam Cooper at The Bureau, drawing on current and former U.S. and Canadian law enforcement sources, has documented a broader pattern of U.S. concern: allegations that Canadian enforcement cooperation on CJNG-linked files became unreliable enough that sensitive cases were routed around Canadian agencies. These accounts are sourced from officials speaking on background, not from public government statements, and should be read accordingly. They are corroborated in part by the State Department's public 2023 assessment that Canada's fentanyl and money-laundering efforts were inadequate — but the specific claims about routing around Canadian agencies remain investigative reporting, not confirmed government policy.

The question the raid actually poses

The exclusion raises two distinct questions that are easy to conflate. The first is operational: was it standard practice not to notify additional allies for a Mexico-led sovereign action? Arguably yes — the U.S. does not routinely loop Five Eyes partners into every bilateral operation with a third country. Mexico had its own sovereign interests in limiting the circle of knowledge before a raid of this sensitivity.

The second question is harder: would the U.S. have notified Canada if the trust relationship on transnational crime files were at full strength? That question cannot be answered definitively from public information. What can be said is that Canada's documented institutional record over the 2019–2025 period gave the U.S. reasons to limit the circle — and that those reasons were not abstract concerns but court-documented compromises, commission-documented enforcement failures, and billion-dollar bank fines.