The U.S. government has officially added two more Mexican criminal organizations to its list of foreign terrorist organizations, according to a notice published Thursday in the Federal Register, the official U.S. government gazette.
The newly designated groups are the Juárez Cartel, which operates along the Texas border, and Los Viagras, a criminal organization based in the western Mexican state of Michoacán.
With these additions, eight Mexican criminal organizations now carry the foreign terrorist label in the eyes of the U.S. government. The others include the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Criminal gangs from other Latin American nations — including Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, and El Salvador — have also received similar designations from the Trump administration.
President Donald Trump began applying the terrorist designation to Latin American cartels in February 2025, a move intended to give U.S. authorities greater ability to act against the groups and anyone the U.S. believes is supporting them.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated that both newly designated groups have either carried out terrorist acts or present a serious threat of doing so — endangering American citizens or threatening U.S. national security, foreign policy, or economic interests.
The designations add to the mounting pressure on Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s government, which is already dealing with the indictment of 10 current and former officials from the state of Sinaloa on alleged cartel ties, along with ongoing disputes over U.S. operations inside Mexico.
The Juárez Cartel is one of Mexico’s oldest drug trafficking organizations. For decades, it has held control over a critical crossing point along the central Mexico-U.S. border — the city of Ciudad Juárez, which sits directly across from El Paso, Texas.
The cartel was founded by Amado Carrillo Fuentes, nicknamed “El Señor de los Cielos” — or “Lord of the Skies” — for his use of light aircraft to move enormous drug shipments in the 1990s. His brothers and sons carried on the operation after him, building a multimillion-dollar drug trafficking empire. Despite numerous arrests of its leadership over the years, the cartel and its allied groups have maintained an extensive smuggling network into the United States.
Mexican analyst David Saucedo noted that the designation is significant because it gives the U.S. more tools to act decisively along the border. The Gulf Cartel and the Northeast Cartel — both operating at the eastern end of the Texas border — had already been designated terrorist organizations back in February 2025.
Los Viagras is a regional cartel operating in Michoacán, a state that is already home to two other U.S.-designated terrorist organizations: Cárteles Unidos and La Nueva Familia Michoacana.
The group emerged in the wake of a 2013–2014 armed uprising by local farmers who successfully pushed out many of the established cartels, only to see new criminal organizations fill the void.
Los Viagras is led by Nicolás Sierra Santana, who faces a formal federal indictment in the District of Columbia on drug trafficking conspiracy charges filed in June 2025. The State Department is offering a $5 million reward for any information that leads to his arrest.
The organization has shifted alliances over time to strengthen its regional grip through extortion. It also manufactures synthetic drugs, which it sells to other cartels that then move them into the United States.
