Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, the last great heir of the Juárez Cartel, and brother of the Lord of the Skies, is negotiating an agreement with the United States. The defense of the capo, known as El Viceroy, and the Prosecutor’s Office requested this Tuesday in a hearing in the Eastern District Court of New York more time to finalize the last details of the plea bargain, according to Mexican media reports. The next hearing is scheduled for July 28. U.S. justice accuses Carrillo Fuentes of seven federal crimes. All are related to drug trafficking, money laundering, and murder.
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Viceroy is a remnant of the original leadership of the Juárez Cartel, one of the first drug trafficking organizations in Mexico. Along with his brother, elevated to a legend in narcoculture and protagonist of a television series in the U.S., they established contact before many other narcos with Colombian mafias to cross cocaine across the border. That incursion, between the late eighties and early nineties, turned the corridor between Ciudad Juárez (Chihuahua) and El Paso (Texas) into the largest entry point for drugs into the United States. Carrillo Fuentes was part of the group of 29 drug traffickers extradited by Mexico to its northern neighbor in February.
He assumed leadership of the most feared criminal organization of its time after his brother died in an operating room in Mexico City in 1997 following a failed cosmetic surgery. The Carrillo Fuentes brothers earned respect through terror. Both were known for their bloody methods to intimidate rivals and assert their leadership in the region. They also initiated one of the darkest periods for women in Mexico: Ciudad Juárez became synonymous with gender-based violence and gained worldwide fame for the wave of unpunished femicides that surged from the nineties.
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He was finally arrested in 2014 in Torreón (Coahuila, north). He was sentenced to prison a year later, but in 2016 he won an amparo lawsuit to restart the procedure against him from scratch. He was finally sentenced to prison in 2017. The final sentence was confirmed in 2021. On that date, a judge sentenced him to 28 years in prison for organized crime with the purpose of committing crimes against health, operations with illicitly obtained resources, and possession of firearms.
At the time of his arrest, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was offering a reward of more than two million dollars for his capture. During his leadership of the Juárez Cartel, he was responsible for introducing and distributing hundreds of tons of cocaine in the United States between 1990 and 2014, according to a 2019 report by the North American agency.
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