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MEXICO CITY — <\/span>The U.S. government has designated two new Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. <\/p>\n They are the Ju\u00e1rez Cartel, on the border with Texas, and Los Viagras, a criminal group from the western state of Michoac\u00e1n. The Federal Register, the U.S. government’s gazette, published the designation on Thursday. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n President Donald Trump began to extend the terrorist label to Latin American cartels in February 2025<\/a> to allow U.S. authorities to take more aggressive action against them or against anyone who the U.S. sees as aiding the groups.<\/p>\n 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 United States.<\/p>\n The measure represents a further increase in pressure on Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum\u2019s administration following the indictment of 10 current and former officials from the state of Sinaloa<\/a> for alleged ties to the Sinaloa Cartel, as well as the controversies about U.S. operations in Mexico<\/a>. <\/p>\n Juarez Cartel is one of Mexico\u2019s oldest drug trafficking organizations, which for decades has controlled a key crossing point in the central part of the Mexico-U.S. border<\/a>: Ciudad Ju\u00e1rez, across from El Paso, Texas.<\/p>\n Both its founder, Amado Carrillo Fuentes \u2014 known as \u201cEl Se\u00f1or de los Cielos\u201d for smuggling massive drug shipments by light aircraft in the 1990s \u2014 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..<\/p>\n According to Mexican analyst David Saucedo, the designation is key to enabling the United States to take more decisive action along the border, where two other groups both located at the eastern end of the border with Texas \u2014 the Gulf Cartel and the Northeast Cartel \u2014 were declared terrorist organizations in February 2025.<\/p>\n