MEXICO CITY — The United States government has designated two new Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.

These 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 newsletter, published the designation on Thursday.

They joined six other Mexican criminal organizations that the United States considers terrorist groups, including the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Gangs from other Latin American countries, including Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador and El Salvador, have also been designated as foreign terrorist organizations by the Trump administration.

President Donald Trump began extending the terrorist label to Latin American cartels in February 2025 to allow U.S. authorities to take more aggressive action against them or anyone the U.S. views as helping the groups.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said both criminal groups have committed terrorist acts or pose a serious risk of committing acts that threaten the safety of American citizens or the national security, foreign policy or economy of the United States.

The move represents a further increase in pressure on the administration of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum following the indictment of 10 current and former Sinaloa state officials for alleged ties to the Sinaloa Cartel, as well as controversies over US operations in Mexico.

The 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-United States border: Ciudad Juárez, across from El Paso, Texas.

Both its founder, Amado Carrillo Fuentes – known as “The Lord of the Skies” for smuggling massive shipments of drugs in small planes 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 United States.

According to Mexican analyst David Saucedo, the designation is key to allowing the United States to take more decisive action along the border, where two other groups located on the eastern edge of the border with Texas (the Gulf Cartel and the Northeast Cartel) were declared terrorist organizations in February 2025.

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

The Viagras emerged following the 2013-2014 armed uprising led by farmers who managed to oust many of the old cartels, only to see them replaced by new ones.

The cartel is led by Nicolás Sierra Santana, who faces an 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 changed allegiances and alliances to consolidate its regional control of territory through extortion. It also produces synthetic drugs, which it sells to other cartels that traffic them to the United States.