Latest news with #JuarezCartel
USA Today
17-05-2025
- Politics
- USA Today
We survived a cartel massacre. Our family didn't. Trump will make us all safer.
We survived a cartel massacre. Our family didn't. Trump will make us all safer. | Opinion We know we can never get our mom and brothers back. But we can help our fellow Americans get the safety we all deserve. Show Caption Hide Caption Mexico takes on American gun companies at Supreme Court Supreme Court justices expressed skepticism as Mexico attempted to hold American gun companies responsible for drug cartel violence. We can still remember our mom's last words: 'My boy! My boy! My baby boy!' Moments before, she was ducking her head down like the rest of us – hoping this was just a nightmare and none of the bullets were real. Not long after she realized that her little boy was taken from her, our mom's life was taken from us, too. On Nov. 4, 2019, the Juarez Cartel and its brutal forces, La Linea, massacred our family as we drove through northern Mexico. They murdered our mother, Dawna, two of our little brothers, Trevor and Rogan, and six others. More than five years after surviving the attack, we're still pursuing justice, and we may finally have our first opening to fight back. It was a miracle that the shooters let us live On that horrific day, bullets tore through our car. It felt as though the shooting would never stop. Our clothes were covered in blood, and none of it was ours. We saw our little brothers lying lifeless and our mother dead, still buckled in the driver's seat. Opinion alerts: Get columns from your favorite columnists + expert analysis on top issues, delivered straight to your device through the USA TODAY app. Don't have the app? Download it for free from your app store. When the shooting finally ended, we watched monsters dressed in camouflage approach our car. In a panic, we scrambled to cover the windows with garbage bags, suitcases and toys – trying anything to keep them from seeing us. But before we knew it, we were staring down the barrel of a gun. They yelled at us in Spanish and forced us to get out of the car. We grabbed our little brother Cody, who was so riddled with bullets that he couldn't move, and our 9-month-old brother, and sat on the ground outside. We thought this was the end for us all. But by some miracle, they let us live. Our attackers were never brought to justice With the attackers gone, we had no choice but to flee on foot. But once we saw the blood trail we were leaving behind, we decided to stop walking and take refuge under a small tree on the side of the road. One of us, Devin, ran 14 miles through the desert to get help. The other six of us stayed under that tree for more than 10 hours, praying that we would be rescued. Opinion: Democrats defying Trump on deportations picked a fight they literally can't afford Days later, we buried our mother and our brothers. And while we are still healing, the killers responsible for this massacre continue to walk free. The cartels that ripped our family apart are still operating with impunity and profiting from human trafficking, smuggling deadly drugs like fentanyl and terrorizing American families like ours. But for the first time in years, we have hope. President Donald Trump is taking on the cartels and giving us a reason to believe we may finally get justice. Trump must add Juarez Cartel to terrorist list After the 2019 massacre, President Trump boldly called cartels 'terrorist organizations.' In February 2025, his State Department officially designated eight cartels as such – putting the full force of the federal government up against the cartels and financial networks that support them. That's a meaningful step forward, and we want to see the Juarez Cartel and La Linea, its enforcement wing – the ones that took the lives of our loved ones – added to that Foreign Terrorist Organization list. Opinion: We targeted drug cartels to stop fentanyl. Now, overdose deaths are dropping. That way the federal government can cut off their resources and bring them to justice. Their financial networks should be put on notice that they must stop supporting these violent criminals. That would finally give our family a little peace. We don't want any other kids to experience the grief of losing a mother or siblings the way we did. We know we can never get our mom and brothers back. But we can help our fellow Americans get the safety we all deserve. And we can help deliver justice to the many families, like ours, who have lost loved ones to cartel violence. With President Trump leading the charge to fight the cartels, and with the strength of countless survivors standing behind him, a safer and stronger America is within reach. Devin and Kylie Langford are Arizona residents who survived a cartel massacre in November 2019, when they were 13 and 14 years old, respectively. This column originally appeared in the Arizona Republic.
New York Times
28-02-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
After Extraordinary Step by Mexico, Drug Lord Appears in New York Court
A Mexican drug lord notorious for his role in a U.S. drug enforcement agent's brutal 1985 murder was arraigned on sweeping drug-trafficking charges in New York on Friday. The arraignment of the drug lord, Rafael Caro Quintero, a founding member of the Sinaloa Cartel, came a day after he was transferred to the United States from Mexico in a move that potentially signaled a new era of cooperation between the two countries. Mr. Caro Quintero was arraigned in Federal District Court in Brooklyn along with Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, a former leader of the Juarez Cartel. Mr. Caro Quintero, 72, was charged in a superseding indictment in 2020 with smuggling thousands of kilograms of illegal drugs across the U.S. border as well as with a four-decade effort to murder his rivals. Mr. Carrillo Fuentes, 62, was charged in a separate indictment with similar crimes from 1990 to 2014. The arraignments came a day after the Mexican authorities turned the two men and 27 other top drug-cartel operatives over to their American counterparts in an extraordinary move. The transfer was widely seen as a sign of Mexico's willingness to increase its cooperation with U.S. plans to crack down on its criminal mafias. President Trump and his allies have pressured Mexico's president, Claudia Sheinbaum, with threats of tariffs on her country's goods and suggestions that the United States might take military action in Mexico if officials there did not work to stem the flow of drugs. But while the handovers of Mr. Caro Quintero and Mr. Carrillo Fuentes on Thursday came against that backdrop, they were also the product of highly sensitive negotiations between U.S. and Mexican officials that unfolded over several weeks, aided by American experts with deep experience in dealing with the cartels, according to a person familiar with the matter. Bringing Mr. Caro Quintero, in particular, to the United States has been an obsession for U.S. officials since long before Mr. Trump became fixated on defeating the cartels. And as word of Friday's court appearance spread in law enforcement circles, federal agents and prosecutors, along with retired colleagues who had worked on cases connected to Mr. Caro Quintero, hastily made plans to travel to the Brooklyn courthouse. He and a second man were convicted in Mexico in 1989 of murdering Enrique Camarena, an undercover drug enforcement agent known as Kiki, four years earlier. Both defendants were sentenced to 40 years in prison in the killing; convictions on other charges that included kidnapping and drug trafficking stretched the sentences to more than 100 years apiece. The gruesome killing of Mr. Camarena, whose body was found mutilated and wrapped in a plastic bag on a ranch southwest of Guadalajara, was a seminal moment in U.S.-Mexico relations. It is considered to have accelerated the war on drugs, intensifying both countries' efforts to eradicate the cartels and deepening the United States's role in targeting the organizations' leaders. The wound left by Mr. Camarena's murder was reopened in August 2013, when Mr. Caro Quintero was released from prison in the middle of the night after serving only 28 years of his sentence, thanks to a legal loophole. The United States asked Mexico to rearrest him, but he evaded the authorities for nine years before being captured in Sinaloa in 2022. The transfer to the United States of Mr. Caro Quintero and the others took place not under the longstanding extradition treaty between the two countries, but rather in response to Mr. Trump's recent order designating six drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement Thursday night. The order allowed for the men to be sent across the border without protracted court proceedings in Mexico. It also opened the possibility that federal prosecutors in the United States could seek terrorism and death penalty charges against them, Ms. Bondi said. In a news release announcing the transfers, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, called Mr. Caro Quintero 'one of the most evil cartel bosses in the world.' The Sinaloa Cartel, the indictment says, employed vicious hitmen known as sicarios who exacted brutality on anyone who stood in their path. While Mr. Caro Quintero was the focus of attention in court on Friday, prosecutors also arraigned Mr. Carrillo Fuentes, a significant figure in his own right. Mr. Carrillo Fuentes, who is known as El Viceroy, was a longtime leader of the Juarez Cartel. He took over the border gang from Amado Carrillo Fuentes, his older brother, who died unexpectedly in 1997 while having plastic surgery. The younger Mr. Carrillo Fuentes was first charged in Brooklyn in 2009 in an indictment that was updated 10 years later. It accuses him of smuggling thousands of kilograms of cocaine into the United States and conspiring to murder his organization's rivals. Until 2004, Mr. Carrillo Fuentes and the Juarez Cartel were closely allied with the Sinaloa Cartel, which was run at the time by the infamous drug lords Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as El Chapo, and Ismael Zambada García, who is also known as El Mayo. But after bitter disputes over turf and trust, the Juarez organization split with Sinaloa and the two criminal groups fought a bloody battle for control of Juarez, resulting in one of the goriest urban conflicts in the history of the drug war. The Mexican authorities arrested Mr. Carrillo Fuentes in 2014 and tried, convicted and ultimately sentenced him to 28 years in prison. The U.S. attorney's office for the Eastern District of New York has a long history of pursuing Mexican cartels and their leaders, including Mr. Caro Quintero's organization and his associates. Mr. Guzmán was prosecuted in the Eastern District, where he was convicted on a vast set of criminal-enterprise charges and sentenced to life in prison in 2019. The office is currently handling the case against Mr. Zambada García, who will go on trial in Brooklyn after being abducted in Mexico over the summer by one of Mr. Guzmán's sons and forcibly flown across the border into U.S. custody. In 2023, Ismael Quintero Arellanes, whom prosecutors have said is Mr. Caro Quintero's nephew and right-hand man, was extradited and arraigned in Brooklyn federal court on drug trafficking and weapons charges. Craig Heeren, a former Eastern District deputy chief of national security and cybercrime, said the arraignments on Friday reflected the 'aggressive and international focus' of the office. 'The prosecutors at E.D.N.Y. are tenacious and take the long view on their investigations,' Mr. Heeren said. The office also secured the October 2024 conviction of Genaro García Luna, Mexico's former top law enforcement official, who was sentenced to 38 years in prison for taking millions of dollars in bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel.
