The United States government has designated two new Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. 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 July 16, 2026.
They joined six other Mexican criminal organizations the U.S. considers terrorist groups, including the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Gangs in other Latin American countries, including Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador and Venezuela, also have been designated as foreign terrorist organizations by the U.S.
U.S. President Donald 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 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 U.S. nationals or the national security, foreign policy or economy of the U.S.
Higher pressure on the border
Juarez 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. One of its factions is considered responsible for the 2019 deaths of nine U.S. 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 U.S.
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.
U.S. targets Michoacan
Los Viagras is a local cartel in the western state of Michoacan, which already is home to two other criminal groups designated as terrorist organizations: 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 after 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 U.S. 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 affecting key exports to the United States, such as avocados. It also produces synthetic drugs.