U.S. designates cartel on Texas border as foreign terrorist organization

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The U.S. government has designated two more Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, including one that operates near the U.S. border.

They are the Juárez Cartel, on the border with Texas, and Los Viagras, a criminal group from the western state of Michoacán. The Federal Register, the U.S. government's gazette, published the designation on Thursday.

They joined six other Mexican criminal organizations that the U.S. 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 organizations by the Trump administration.

President Trump began to extend the terrorist label to Latin American cartels in February 2025 to allow U.S. authorities to take more aggressive action against them or against anyone who the U.S. sees as aiding the groups. U.S. military strikes against suspected drug trafficking vessels in Latin American waters have killed more than 200 people since last September.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that both the Juárez Cartel and Los Viagras either have committed terrorist acts or pose a serious risk of committing acts that threaten the security of U.S. nationals or the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the U.S.

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 U.S. operations in Mexico.

Higher pressure on the Texas border

Juárez Cartel is one of Mexico's oldest drug trafficking organizations, which for decades has controlled a key crossing point in the central part of the Mexico-U.S. border: Ciudad Juárez, across from El Paso, Texas.

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 U.S.

The Juárez Cartel was accused in the gruesome 2019 killings of nine American women and children from an offshoot Mormon community.

According to Mexican analyst David Saucedo, the designation is key to enabling the U.S. 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 organizations in February 2025.

The U.S. again targets Michoacán

Los Viagras is a local cartel in the western state of Michoacán, which is already home to two other criminal groups designated as terrorist organizations: Cárteles Unidos and La Nueva Familia Michoacana.

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. Earlier this year, an alleged Los Viagras cartel associate known as "El Botox" was arrested in connection with the killing of an outspoken leader of the state's lime growers.

The cartel is led by Nicolás Sierra Santana, whose alias is "El Gordo." He faces a formal indictment in the District of Columbia for conspiracy to traffic drugs, filed in June 2025. The State Department is offering a $5 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. It also produces synthetic drugs, which it sells to other cartels that traffic them into the U.S.

In 2024, prosecutors said Los Viagras set up its own makeshift internet antennas and told locals they had to pay to use its Wi-Fi service or they would be killed. Dubbed "narco-antennas" by local media, the cartel's system involved internet antennas set up in various towns built with stolen equipment.

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