Having played all the games between world at war to the remastered Modern warfare 2 (And then losing interest in the franchise), I still have to say my favorite villain of all time is Menendez. People often compare him with Makarov, but I think this is an injustice to Menendez. Makarov was actually about to die in Modern Warfare 2, and made a deal with the 141 to kill Shepard and (Hopefully) have them die in a suicide run. I think his biggest moments are the well known (And for good reason) No Russian mission, his plot to start world war 3 (Which was really only Russia vs all of NATO), his, although failed, goals of securing nukes, and ultimately the fact that he was a character for two games.
In comparison, Menendez starts world war 3 as a side plot which you must go out of your way to stop. His hypothetical world war 3 can be avoided, or go from the “Least” bad option (China and it’s Drone fleet vs a severally weakened America and south east Asia), to the entirety of Asia, including Russia, attacking American allies across the globe. He hijacks and destroys the USA’s drone fleet after using it to massacre it’s biggest cities, can kill basically the entire cast of the previous game, and unless you do a perfect run, he can win even at the last minute of the game.
Forgot or couldn’t save Karma? The USA and the entire West will fall to a cyber attack that will leave it in the dark ages.
Saved Karma but you couldn’t kill your best friend and ally for most of the campaign?
Menendez infiltrated the Carrier where she was taking refugee and has his agents execute her.
Save Karma, kill your best friend so that another agent can avoid her execution, but the Admiral died? The Carrier is sunk without his leadership, and she dies.
Do all of the above but you didn’t complete the secondary missions, which are about preventing world war 3? The Carrier is sunk because the Chinese never arrive to reinforce it, and instead attack America.
Even if you do everything right, avoid his manipulation to not kill mason, save Karma, Briggs, Farid, ally china, if you get to the end and anger and the wish for revenge gets the best of him, he wins, and America is destroyed by a gigantic wave of terrorists numbering in the billions.
Not only is he effective, but he’s also well written. Menendez has a really good reason to hate the USA, even before he broke bad. He grew up in the years of the Nicaraguan revolution, seeing american troops and ally massacre his people. Later, after his family had to take refuge in a warehouse because an earthquake destroyed their home, an American business burned down said building to cash an insurance check, permanently disfiguring his sister. From then on, Menendez and his father turned to drugs to finance their lives and, in the son’s case, his politics. Fueled by his newly stoked hate against America, as they had now (justly) killed his drug lord father, Menendez finances American enemies across the globe. His reach gets to a point it’s mentioned Perseus, from Black Ops Cold War gets most of its funding for a good chunk of its active service from Menendez himself.
Menendez rallies downtrodden people all across the globe, conspires with super powers to get them to attack each other, supports coups and assassinations of world leaders, and he does all of this in the name of a revolution to finally make the world fair.
And it’s all a lie. Menendez speaks of his grandiose goals to everyone who can hear him, getting even high ranking american personal to switch allegiances to him, but he’s not really believing it. He is not doing all of this, the untold millions, possible billions of deaths, for the sake of a better world.
He’s doing it merely because he hates. He’s a man with one goal, Revenge, revenge for his family and specially his sister, and he’s told blinded by rage to even realize at one point, he stopped being the victim and became the victimizer. His father’s death came to be because of his brutal drug trading. His sister’s death and the entirety of his villa came to be purely because of Menendez. He became a despicable, grotesque monster, and he knows it.
At the end, If Menendez isn’t killed but Karma died along the way, a cyber attack will cripple all of America’s electric networks, an america that could be stuck in a very one sided world war 3 at this point, with no drone fleet or even a sea fleet to defend it’s coasts. And what does he then? Does he go outside and lead his movement? No. He spends the last moments of his life visiting Woods, the man who (accidentally) killed his sister, kills him, and then kills himself. Menendez had one goal in life, one thing fueling him, one fire in his heart, but the fire already consumed everything. It burned everything it had to burn, and then some more, and now, with the world turning to a new dark age, Menendez does the only thing he’s been doing for most of his life, and kills for the last time.