Money laundering, illicit gun possession, drug trafficking: the list of allegations against Vicente Carrillo Fuentes is long. Now he has been sentenced.
Mexico City – One of the once most powerful drug lords in Mexico, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes aka “El Viceroy”, who was caught in 2014, has been sentenced to 28 years in prison.
This was announced by the country’s attorney general on Tuesday (local time) after it had received the verdict itself. The former head of the powerful Juárez cartel had been accused of organized crime, money laundering and possession of weapons, among other things.
Carrillo Fuentes led the Juárez cartel, one of the oldest in Mexico, from the death of his brother Amado in 1997 until his arrest in 2014. The legendary “Señor de los Cielos” had died during a plastic operation with which he wanted to change his appearance. With his own fleet of aircraft, the “master of the air” had revolutionized drug smuggling and brought tons of cocaine into the USA. From the border town of Ciudad Juarez, the cartel fought with other drug syndicates for the supremacy of the smuggling routes into the USA.
In October 2014, Carrillo Fuentes went online by police in the city of Torreón, Coahuila state, in the north of the country. According to media reports, the 58-year-old was one of the most wanted criminals in the country at the time; five arrest warrants had been issued against him for organized crime and drug trafficking. The US anti-drug agency DEA also welcomed the arrest of the cartel chief. The Juárez cartel fueled violence in Mexico and encouraged drug addiction in the United States, said DEA director Michele Leonhart at the time. dpa
