The Mexican drug lord Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, aka "El Viceroy", has been sentenced to 28 years in prison, the country's attorney general announced. The former head of the Juárez cartel is accused of organized crime, money laundering and illegal possession of weapons. Until his arrest, Fuentes was one of the most powerful and most wanted criminals in the country. In 2014, he went online to the authorities in the city of Coahuila in northern Mexico. There were five arrest warrants against him at the time. He was also on the wanted list of the American drug control agency DEA. There are also two charges against Carrillo Fuentes in the United States.
The Juárez cartel, which is mainly active in northern Mexico, is one of the oldest in the country. It was created in the late 1980s under the leadership of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the eldest of six brothers in the family. The founder of the cartel revolutionized drug smuggling with his own fleet of aircraft and smuggled tons of cocaine from Colombia via Mexico to the United States, which earned him the name “Lord of the Skies”. In 1997, Amado Carrillo Fuentes died after undergoing facial surgery. Although the Juarez cartel subsequently lost its influence and has been increasingly involved in turf wars with other cartels in recent years, it continues to control a significant part of drug smuggling into the United States.