MEXICO CITY — The US government has designated two new Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organisations.
They are the Juarez Cartel, on the border with Texas, and Los Viagras, a criminal group from the western state of Michoacá\an. The Federal Register, the US government's gazette, published the designation on Thursday (July 17).
They joined six other Mexican criminal organisations that the US considers terrorist groups, including the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Gangs in other Latin American countries, including Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador and El Salvador, also have been designated as foreign terrorist organisations by the Trump administration.
President Donald Trump began to extend the terrorist label to Latin American cartels in February 2025 to allow US authorities to take more aggressive action against them or against anyone who the US sees as aiding the groups.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that both criminal groups either have committed terrorist acts or pose a serious risk of committing acts that threaten the security of US nationals or the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the US.
The measure represents a further increase in pressure on Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum's administration following the indictment of 10 current and former officials from the state of Sinaloa for alleged ties to the Sinaloa Cartel, as well as the controversies about US operations in Mexico.
Juarez Cartel is one of Mexico's oldest drug trafficking organisations, which for decades has controlled a key crossing point in the central part of the Mexico-US border: Ciudad Juárez, across from El Paso, Texas.
One of its factions is considered responsible for the 2019 deaths of nine US citizens, six of whom were children.
Both its founder, Amado Carrillo Fuentes — known as "El Señor de los Cielos" for smuggling massive drug shipments by light aircraft in the 1990s — and the brothers and sons who succeeded him, turned the trafficking of tons of drugs into a multimillion-dollar business.
Despite the arrests of many of its leaders, the cartel and its allied gangs maintained control of a vast infrastructure for smuggling illegal shipments into the US.
According to Mexican analyst David Saucedo, the designation is key to enabling the US to take more decisive action along the border, where two other groups both located at the eastern end of the border with Texas — the Gulf Cartel and the Northeast Cartel — were declared terrorist organisations in February 2025.
Los Viagras is a local cartel in the western state of Michoacan, which is already home to two other criminal groups designated as terrorist organisations: Cárteles Unidos and La Nueva Familia Michoacana.
The Jalisco New Generation Cartel and partners of Sinaloa Cartel also operate in this state.
Los Viagras emerged following the 2013-2014 armed uprising led by farmers who succeeded in driving out many of the old cartels, only to see them replaced by new ones.
The cartel is led by Nicolás Sierra Santana, who faces a formal indictment in the District of Columbia for conspiracy to traffic drugs, filed in June 2025. The State Department is offering a US$5 million (S$6.4 million) reward for information leading to his capture.
The group has shifted its loyalties and alliances to consolidate its regional control of the territory through extortion affecting key exports to the US, such as avocados.
It also produces synthetic drugs, which sells to other cartels that traffic them into the US.
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