The tragedy of Iván Morales, a Mexican national hero and victim of the cartels’ vengeance

The Mexican political elite lined up, with then-president Enrique Peña Nieto in the middle, applauding with solemn gestures as a police officer in full dress uniform, his face deformed by fire, advanced toward them. Upon reaching Peña Nieto, the officer stopped, shook the leader’s hand, and received a commemorative badge. On that December day in 2015, a former non-commissioned officer of the now-defunct Federal Police, Iván Morales Corrales, was honored: months earlier, on May 1, he had fallen from the sky in a burning helicopter during a failed attempt to capture the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho.”

“And I turned around and the entire staff started applauding. That was very emotional for me. And it also showed that despite everything and all the circumstances, I was still standing there,” the police officer would later recall in an interview with Univisión. His body burned, in CJNG territory and surrounded by hitmen, Morales Corrales barely escaped with his life. He deserved the honors the state gives to its most select heroes. And that day, Mexico learned his face: the open wound of the failed fight against crime. “I wanted them to see my face. It wasn’t because they felt sorry for me. On the contrary, I know I’d been in an accident, an attack against us, and just seeing it shows that there are scars that hurt, that leave their mark, but you can move forward despite all that.”

On May 1, 2025, exactly a decade after the attack, Morales Corrales was gunned down in a neighborhood in the municipality of Temixco, in the state of Morelos. He had no security, not even an armored truck. The gunmen intercepted his black pickup truck and fired a dozen bullets at it. Both the former police officer and his companion, his wife, died instantly. The killers fled on a motorcycle toward Cuernavaca and have not yet been arrested. The underlying message: not even the national heroes honored by the president, those who risked their lives in the war on drugs and have returned to tell the tale, are safe from the reach of organized crime.

The Mexican government failed to protect Morales Corrales on either of the two May Days that marked his life and death. On the first, in 2015, the then-police officer left the port of Manzanillo, in Colima. No one told him he was going to be part of an elite detachment sent to capture El Mencho: they feared leaks ahead of time. He only knew he was going to participate in a special mission. He boarded a Mexican army helicopter and headed for Jalisco. Near Villa Purificación, they identified the convoy in which the CJNG leader was traveling, but before they could neutralize it, the hitmen opened fire with heavy machine guns. “The only thing I remember is the impacts […] how you could hear the sounds, how they hit the sheet metal, how you could see the .50-caliber bullets passing through more because they were the ones that pierced the helicopter’s hull,” the officer recalled.

The first casualties occurred in the air. At one point, the CJNG men fired at them with a grenade launcher. The projectile crashed into the rotor and the helicopter began to fall. “I grabbed onto something and felt the impact.” Despite the collision, the pilot managed to maneuver the helicopter until it landed. “If we had gone into free fall, it would have exploded,” Morales Corrales said in the interview with Univisión. “I did think I was going to die there, because of all the weapons, everything that’s happening outside, I mean, it was pretty loud.”

The police officer survived the fall, but the only exit from the helicopter was ablaze. “At the time, my wife was pregnant with my first child, and that was the most important reason, that gave me the strength to be able to get out: my family, my son, meeting my son, seeing my wife, knowing that she was okay. I was thinking about that the whole time.” So he threw himself into the flames to escape. His body caught fire. “I started burning very quickly.” As best he could, he removed his clothing and military equipment. “I was wearing a [bulletproof] vest, and that was what saved me. The entire chest and back weren’t burned because of the vest I was wearing, but I had to take it off because it was on fire.”

He rolled on the ground to smother the flames consuming his body. He could still hear the shouts of the gunmen and the bullets all around him. Fueled by adrenaline, he fled the scene, jumped a fence, and took refuge behind a rock until, some time later, the army stormed in and found him with 70% of his skin burned. Nine of his companions died in the attack, which became one of the greatest disgraces of the Peña Nieto administration, already under fire after the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students a year earlier. A couple of months later, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán escaped from the Altiplano maximum-security prison through a mile-long tunnel, once again highlighting the state’s inability to combat organized crime.

After the attack, Morales Corrales left the Federal Police, which was decommissioned years later by former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He was haunted by nightmares and post-traumatic stress disorder. The fire had permanently deformed his face, but he found solace in his newborn son and his partner. “I think one of the things that helped me a lot with psychological issues, that helped me avoid going to extremes, getting depressed, thinking about other things, [was] the fact that my wife was there, the fact that I thought more about my son than about myself, about getting to know him. I knew at the time he was going to ask me, ‘What happened to you? Why are you like this?’ But that was what helped me.”

Although he left the police force, he did not completely abandon the fight against organized crime. Last September, he participated as a witness in the trial of El Mencho’s son, Rubén Oseguera González. “El Menchito,” as he is known, was sentenced to life in prison. Questions swirl around Mexico about whether Morales Corrales’ involvement in the case was related to his murder, fueled by the impunity of organized crime and El Mencho’s habitual policy of revenge. No one has claimed responsibility for the agent’s murder, but the date — exactly 10 years after the attempted capture of the CJNG leader — leaves few in doubt as to who was behind the attack.

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