Juárez Cartel
Mexican drug cartel
The Juárez Cartel (Spanish: Cártel de Juárez, pronounced [ˈkaɾtel ðe ˈxwaɾes]), also known as the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes Organization, is a Mexican drug cartel based in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, across the Mexico—U.S. border from El Paso, Texas. The cartel is one of several drug trafficking organizations that have been known to decapitate their rivals, mutilate their corpses and dump them in public places to instill fear not only in the general public but also in local law enforcement and their rivals, the Sinaloa Cartel. Its current known leader is Juan Pablo Ledezma. The Juárez Cartel has an armed wing known as La Línea, a Juárez street gang that usually performs the executions and is now the cartel’s most powerful and leading faction. It also uses the Barrio Azteca gang to attack its enemies.
The Juárez Cartel was the dominant player in the center of the country, controlling a large percentage of the cocaine traffic from Mexico into the United States. The death of Amado Carrillo Fuentes in 1997 was the beginning of the decline of the Juárez cartel, as Carrillo relied on ties to Mexico's top-ranking drug interdiction officer, division general Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo.
History
The cartel was founded around the 1970s.
When leader Pablo Acosta Villarreal was killed in April 1987 during a cross-border raid by Mexican Federal Police helicopters in the Rio Grande village of Santa Elena, Chihuahua, Rafael Aguilar Guajardo took his place along with Amado Carrillo Fuentes, nephew of Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo.
Guajardo was eventually betrayed and murdered in 1993 by Amado, who became the leader of Juarez.
“Juárez Cartel” enters the record as mexican drug cartel. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Juárez, Cartel and Mexican can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1575189. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1997, 1987 and 1993.
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This entry incorporates text from “Juárez Cartel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.