Every Cartel Boss The US Has Hunted Down Since Trumpd

January 3rd, 2026. Pre-dawn in Caracus. US Delta Force kicks down the door of Venezuela’s presidential palace, drags Nicholas Maduro out of bed, and flies him to a warship. By morning, a sitting head of state is in a Brooklyn cell, and he’s not even the biggest name on this list. These are every cartel bosses.

The US has hunted down since Trump. President Trump just announced on social media that Venezuela or Venezuelan president rather Nicholas Madura has been captured and flown out of the country. Maduro and his wife are set to be arraigned on drug trafficking and weapons charges after US special forces captured them during a surprise military operation in Venezuela early Saturday.

We’re starting with the most audacious takedown in modern American history. Because in 12 months, the United States didn’t just hunt cartel bosses. It hunted the leader of an entire country. Nicholas Maduro had been running Venezuela for over a decade. To his supporters, he was the president to the United States Justice Department.

He was the head of the cartel de los soles, the cartel of the sons, a state protected cocaine pipeline that had been pumping product through the Caribbean for years. Back in March 2020, US prosecutors had quietly indicted him for narot terrorism. They accused him of partnering with Colombian guerrillas to flood American streets with cocaine.

They put a $15 million bounty on his head. And then nothing happened. Maduro stayed in his palace. The indictment sat in a file. 5 years passed. Then Trump took office. In January 2025, the bounty doubled to $25 million. By August, Marco Rubio doubled it again, $50 million for the capture of a sitting president.

And that’s when the noose started tightening. The US Navy began deploying warships to the Caribbean, fighter jets, Marines. By September, American missiles were tearing apart speedboats off the Venezuelan coast. Boats the Pentagon called narot terrorist vessels. Trump posted the strike footage himself on social media.

The body count climbed into triple digits. Oil tankers were being seized. Venezuelan airspace was choking. Trump formally notified Congress that the United States was now in what he called a non- international armed conflict with the cartels. Language that gave the Pentagon legal cover to keep killing. Inside the palace, Maduro was running out of room.

He moved between safe houses every night. He built a fortress at Fort Tuna. He surrounded himself with Cuban soldiers, actual elite military advisers flown in from Havana, and members of his own intelligence service. He gave defiant speeches on state television. He vowed he would never bow to American threats.

He thought he could outlast the storm. He was wrong. January 3rd, 2026. In the early hours of the morning, US special forces hit Karacas. The operation had a name. They called it Operation Resolve. CIA officers had been on the ground for weeks, mapping his movements, identifying his sleeping locations.

And when the strike came, it came everywhere at once. military infrastructure across Venezuela hit simultaneously while Delta Force closed in on the man himself. 32 Cuban soldiers died defending him. Cuba would later declare two days of national mourning. Maduro and his wife Silia Flores were grabbed, hooded, and rushed to the USS Eoima offshore.

Trump posted the photo himself. A blindfolded Maduro in soundproof headphones, gray Nike sweatsuit, clutching a plastic water bottle. The most powerful man in Venezuela was reduced to a hostage on an American warship. Two days later on January 5th, he was arraigned in a Manhattan federal courtroom. He stood before the judge and said one sentence.

I am the president of Venezuela. I consider myself a prisoner of war. I was captured at my home in Karacas. Then he pleaded not guilty to narotism conspiracy, cocaine importation, and possession of machine guns and destructive devices. He’s now sitting in a federal detention center awaiting trial.

Trump told reporters the United States would run the country until we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. Vice President Deli Rodriguez was sworn in as Venezuela’s interim leader. In the history of the war on drugs, no country had ever captured another country’s sitting president and flown him out to face trial until now.

Well, developing tonight, chaos in Mexico after one of the most wanted cartel leaders in the country was killed in a military operation. For over a decade, Nessio Ogueroa Cervantes was the most hunted criminal in Mexico. 15 million US bounty, 300 million peso Mexican bounty. The DEA called him the most powerful drug trafficker in the world.

Rival cartels called him the ghost because he had vanished into the mountains of Halisco and stayed vanished for years. His story was almost a cliche. Born dirt poor in Mishoakan in 1966, dropped out of primary school, picked avocados as a kid, crossed illegally into the United States, got busted on drug charges, did his time, got deported back to Mexico in the early 1990s. He was nobody.

Then he joined the millennial cartel and something inside him clicked when his bosses got arrested or killed. Elmentoo took over. He renamed the operation cartel Halisco Noea yenerion CJNG and trained his sakarios like a medieval warlord. One former DEA expert described his approach as Yenis Khan style.

Wipe out opposition completely. Leave nothing alive. Let the bodies be the warning. CJNG exploded across Mexico, 21 states, then 25, then a presence in over a 100 countries. They bought armed drones, rocket propelled grenades. In May 2015, they shot down a Mexican military helicopter with an RPG, killing nine soldiers. They posted execution videos.

Theyized victims during Sakario training rituals. The United States designated CJNG, a foreign terrorist organization, in February 2025, just weeks after Trump took office and the screw started turning. The Pentagon stood up something called the Joint Inter Agency Task Force Counter Cartel.

CIA officers, FBI agents, military intelligence, all pointed at one man. American MQ9 Reaper drone started flying into Mexican airspace at the request of the Shine Bomb government. They mapped his networks. They tracked his romantic partners. They watched. Then a tip came in. A close associate of one of Elmeno’s girlfriends gave him up.

February 20th, 2026, Mexican forces began encircling a remote property in Topalpa, Haliscoco. 2 days of careful staging. Special forces, National Guard, helicopters, fixedwing aircraft, and somewhere overhead, a US Predator drone watching everything in real time. February 22nd, before sunrise, they moved.

CJNG gunman opened up immediately. A firefight ripped through the property. Elmentoo and his inner circle ran for a wooded cabin complex up the hill. A second gun battle broke out. By the time the smoke cleared, six cartel members were dead. Rocket launchers had been seized, including weapons capable of downing aircraft, and Mexican marines had found a wounded Eleno lying with two of his bodyguards.

He didn’t make it to Mexico City. He bled out in transit. The most wanted man in the Western Hemisphere was gone. What came next was hell. CJNG retaliated across 20 Mexican states. 252 violent incidents in the first week. Burning blockades on highways. Businesses torched in Puerto Varta. Convenience stores set on fire. Trucks dragged across major roads to create flaming choke points they call narco.

25 national guard troops killed in coordinated ambushes. Over 70 people dead total before the violence finally cooled. But Elmeno was finished. The ghost was gone and the empire he built started cracking from the top. This morning, four decades after he was convicted in Mexico for orchestrating the murder of an American drug agent, one of the most notorious Mexican narot traffickers is locked in a Brooklyn jail.

Some of these manhunts took weeks, some took months, but in the case of Raphael Cano, it took 40 years. In 1985, Raphael Caro Cano was one of the founders of the original Mexican cartel, the Guadalajara cartel. He was young, he was rich, and he was untouchable. Then a DEA agent named Enrique Kiki Camarena got too close to his operation.

Ko Quantero ordered him kidnapped off a Guadalajara street in broad daylight. What happened to Camarena over the next 30 hours is not something we’re going to describe in detail. What matters is this. When American agents finally found his body, the savagery of it shook Washington to its core.

The DEA never forgot. They never moved on. Carol Quantero was caught, tried in Mexico, sentenced to 40 years. He should have died in a Mexican prison cell, but he didn’t. In August 2013, after serving 28 years, a Mexican state judge ruled that Carol had been tried improperly and let him walk.

The American government was furious. He was supposed to be rearrested. He wasn’t. He vanished into the mountains of Sinaloa and went right back to drug trafficking. The FBI put him on the top 10 most wanted list, $20 million reward. The DEA hunted him for nine more years. In July 2022, Mexican Marines finally caught him in a remote ranch in Sinaloa.

14 Mexican servicemen died in the operation. But here’s the thing. Getting him was only half the problem. Getting him to the United States was the other half. And for two and a half years, the Mexican government quietly sat on the extradition request. The previous Mexican administration had cut off cooperation with the DEA.

The paperwork went into a drawer and stayed there. Then Trump came back to office. In January 2025, the Camarina family wrote a letter to the White House. They begged for extradition. Just weeks later, Trump threatened a 25% tariff on every Mexican import. He designated the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.

The New Mexican President, Claudia Shinbomb, picked up the phone February 27th, 2025. A military plane took off from an airirstrip north of Mexico City carrying 29 of Mexico’s worst cartel figures. Carro Quantero was on board. So were the founders of the Zetas. So was the leader of the Huarez cartel. The Mexican government called it a transfer, not an extradition.

They bypassed the entire treaty process to get it done before the tariffs hit. 14,631 days of hope. 40 years of agents retiring without seeing justice. 40 years of Camarina’s son, now a judge in San Diego, growing up without his father. Caro Quantero walked in wearing a bright orange t-shirt under a Navy Smok.

And here’s the detail that’ll give you chills. The handcuffs on his wrists were inscribed with a name, Enrique Kamarena Salazar. The DEA had brought their fallen agents handcuffs to the courtroom, a symbol older than the suspect on trial. A message that could not have been more pointed if it had been written on the wall.

He’s now held under the same isolation measures as El Chapo. And even though it came 40 years late, justice was still served. Two brothers, Settha 40 and Seta 42, the leaders of the Setthus cartel, now known as cartel del are now in US custody after being extradited. Most cartels were criminal organizations.

The Zetas were a paramilitary force. Miguel Trevinho Morales, Alias Z40, and his younger brother Omar, Alias Z42, turned the Zetas into something that even other cartels were terrified of. The Zetas didn’t just kill rivals. They left bodies hanging from highway overpasses. They dissolved enemies in acid. They massacred entire villages.

In one infamous case, they slaughtered 72 migrants in San Fernando, Tamo Lipus, just to send a message. In 2011, they ambushed and killed an American ICE agent named Haime Zapata in Mexico. US prosecutors estimated the brothers personally trafficked 45 tons of cocaine and pulled in $10 million a year in profits.

They were accused of being personally responsible for dozens of murders. Mexican authorities arrested Miguel in 2013. They got Omar in 2015. The Americans immediately requested extradition and then nothing happened. For over a decade, the brothers ran the cartel from inside Mexican prisons. Cell phones, visitors, bribes.

They renamed the organization Cartel Delores, CDN, and kept moving cocaine, kept ordering kidnappings, kept directing torture and murder, all from behind bars. The Mexican Attorney General himself called the delay truly shameful. The United States gave up trying. They figured it would never happen.

Then Trump returned and everything changed. February 20th, 2025, the State Department officially designated CDN as a foreign terrorist organization. One week later on February 27th, both brothers were on the same flight as Caro Quantero. Chain silent, finally on their way to American soil. When their lawyer found out he called the transfer impossible because no Mexican judge had reviewed it, he was right.

The Mexican government had used a national security loophole to bypass the entire judicial process. The lawyer’s complaint went exactly nowhere. March 14th, 2025, the brothers were arraigned in Washington DC federal court. The charges read like a war crimes indictment. Continuing criminal enterprise, multiple murder conspiracies, machine gun use during drug trafficking, kidnapping, money laundering.

They face up to life in prison. For the survivors of the 2011 ICE ambush, the moment was personal. Retired Homeland Security agent Victor Aila, who took bullets in that ambush while his partner, Haimei Zapata, died beside him, called it long overdue justice. He’d been waiting 14 years. Now, a major arrest involving a senior member of me Mexico’s Haliscoco New Generation Drug Cartel.

This is video of Audius Flores Silva being arrested by special forces from the Mexican Navy. 3 months after Eleno died, the entire CJNG was scrambling to pick a new leader. Three or four men were considered serious contenders. One of them was a guy nicknamed the gardener. His real name was Audias Flores Silva. The aliases told you everything.

Command Dante, Bravo 2, Boss Killer. He’d already done five years in an American prison for drug trafficking. As a young man, he came out hungrier. He spent the next two decades building one of the most profitable operations in CJNG, methamphetamine superlabs in central Jaliscoco, fentinil distribution corridors, even a time share scam that defrauded American and Canadian retirees out of millions.

He’d been arrested in Mexico before in 2016 for ambushing police. He spent 3 years in a maximum security prison. Then in 2019, a Jaliscoco court mysteriously absolved him and let him walk out the front door. Mexican reporters universally linked the release to a massive bribe. When Eleno died in February 2026, Eljardiniro was suddenly one of the most powerful men in Mexico.

The US State Department had a $5 million bounty on his head. The Mexican Navy had been tracking him since October 2024. And after Elmeno fell, the surveillance kicked into overdrive. American intelligence. Those same Reaper drones, that same joint task force was feeding location data straight to the Mexican Navy.

April 25th, 2026, his exact location was confirmed. A cabin near the resort city of Puerto Varta. He was protected by 30 SUVs and more than 60 armed gunmen. He had escaped before. He thought he’d escape again. April 27th, dawn raid. 500 Mexican Navy troops, six helicopters, four planes. The cartel security perimeter scattered immediately, a deliberate distraction so the boss could escape.

It had worked before. This time it didn’t. Aerial trackers followed him to a sewage drainage pipe in a roadside ditch near a tiny community called Elmir. The most powerful potential successor of Eleno was hiding in a sewer. Mexican Marines reached down into the pipe and dragged him out. They didn’t fire a single shot.

The Mexican security secretary posted the video the same day. Flores Silva, covered in dirt, hands behind his back, being walked to a helicopter. Hours later, his money launderer, a man called Elguero K, was arrested in Zapopan in a separate raid. In a single day, the CJNG lost its most likely successor and its principal financeier, and he’s now awaiting extradition to the United States, where federal prosecutors have been preparing his case since 2021.

The gardener got pulled out of a sewer. There’s no coming back from that. Elvis Viseroy. New video just into our newsroom tonight of Vicente Cario Fuentes being taken to a police helicopter. Kio Fentes is a suspected leader of the Huarees drug cartel. One of Mexico’s most wanted criminals now behind bars in Mexico City.

For most of the 2000s, the deadliest city on earth was Soda Huarez. And one man was running it. Viciente Carillo Fuentes was the younger brother of Amato Carillo Fuentes, the legendary Lord of the Skies, who built the Huarez cartel into the most powerful drug operation in Mexico.

When Amato died in 1997, bizarrely from complications during plastic surgery to change his face, Vicente took over. He inherited the most valuable trafficking corridor in the Western Hemisphere, the Seudad Huarez to El Paso pipeline. Every gram of cocaine moving through that corner of the border was paying him a tax.

The 2000s were a war. Vicente fought El Chapo Sinaloa cartel for control of those routes and the bodies piled up by the thousands. In just 3 months in early 2008, Suad Huarez recorded over 200 murders,less corpses stuffed in barrels, bodies dumped vacant lots, innocent civilians caught in the crossfire.

The city’s homicide rate became a global news story. At one point, Huarez was deadlier than active war zones. The FBI had been hunting Vicente since the year 2000. He had a $5 million US bounty and a Mexican bounty of 30 million pesos. He changed his name, changed his face, moved to a quiet apartment in Toron Kawila and tried to disappear.

October 9th, 2014, Mexican federal police kicked his door in. He didn’t even fight. He pulled out a fake ID, claimed to be someone else. It didn’t work. He was sentenced to 28 years in Mexican prison. The United States immediately filed for extradition. The request sat for over a decade until February 27th, 2025 when Vicente Curio Fuentes was on that same plane heading north.

Brooklyn courtroom, same arraignment day as Carol. He pleaded not guilty to running a criminal enterprise. Conspiracy, cocaine distribution, and money laundering. His lawyers tried for a plea deal in June 2025 to spare him a life sentence. By early 2026, he was once again pleading not guilty as the case moved forward. The man who turned Suad Huarez into a graveyard is now an American defendant facing the rest of his life behind bars.

If Elmeno was the public face of CJNG, his two older brothers were the bones of it and they fell within 48 hours of each other. Antonio Oera Cervantes was the second oldest. He was born in 1958, 8 years before Eleno. And back in 1983, when a young Mexican kid first watched Al Puccino and Scarface, he picked up a nickname that stuck for life, Tony Montana.

Tony Montana ran the financial and weapons side of CJNG. He’d done time in American prisons in the late 1990s. He came back to Mexico, helped his little brother build the cartel, and operated as part of what local reporters called the Osaguera triumvirate. Three brothers running everything as a family business.

Mexican army raided him in Guadalajara in December 2022. He was held for over two years while the United States waited for extradition. February 27th, 2025, Tony Montana was on the plane with the others sent to face American justice on charges that could carry the death penalty. Less than 24 hours later, the third brother fell.

Abraham Oera Cervantes, known as Don Roto, was the oldest of the brothers. Around 70 years old, he was the money man, the property man. He bought ranches and land for Elmeno through a network of corrupt notaries in Sudad Guzman and Outland de Navaro. His own wife, Virginia Leon Oorno, was laundering cartel cash through gold mines in Mishawa and Nayarit.

Don Roto had been arrested before April 2024. He spent exactly 9 days in custody before a federal judge let him walk, claiming insufficient evidence. It was the kind of release that made every Mexican news outlet roll its eyes. This time was different. February 28th, 2025, Mexican Army, National Guard, Marines, and federal prosecutors descended on a tiny town called Ataras de Kovarius in Chaliscoco.

They caught Don Roto with weapons, cash, and drugs. Three CJNG bodyguards went down with him. Within 48 hours, both of Elmeno’s brothers were behind bars. One year later, Elmeno himself was dead. The dynasty that built CJNG, three brothers from a tiny Mitchakan village who started a cartel together was completely dismantled.

You couldn’t write a more complete fall if you tried. The last man on our list is the man who paid for everything. Abigail Gonzalez Valencia was El Mencho’s brother-in-law, married to Eleno’s sister-in-law family. And while El Mencho was the muscle and the public face, Elqueeni was the bank. He led an organization called Los Queenis, technically an armed wing of CJNG, but in reality, something far more important.

They were the financial engine. They moved the money. They bought the hotels and the real estate firms and the shopping centers that laundered cartel profits across Mexico. The US Treasury called Los Quinus, one of the most powerful and violent drug cartels in Mexico. His own brother, Jose, was sentenced to 30 years in a Washington DC federal court in mid 2025 for cocaine trafficking.

Elqueeni got arrested back in February 2015 in Puerto Varta. And then he did what every cartel boss does. He fought extradition. He hired lawyers. He filed appeals. He waited out the Americans. 10 years passed. He won every round. Then came the second wave. August 12th, 2025. Mexico transferred 26 more high-ranking cartel figures to the United States.

It was the second mass transfer of the Trump era. Bigger pressure, more tariff threats, more designations. El Queenie was on that plane. He pleaded not guilty in his first hearing. Methampetamine trafficking, cocaine trafficking, organized crime, firearms possession. But then the prosecutor started showing his lawyers what they had.

Text messages between Elqueeni and Eleno. conversations with El Mencho’s son, Menchito, cocaine shipment, logistics, pricing, debts, names. By October 2025, the hearing was postponed. The defense was negotiating a plea deal. The financial brain behind Mexico’s most violent cartel was preparing to cooperate against the empire he funded.

American prosecutors had reportedly built a wall of evidence against him. text messages, financial records, witness testimony, and the man who had spent 10 years swearing he would never break suddenly had no cards left to play. For decades, Eleno had been untouchable in Mexico. Now, his death squad was decimated.

His brothers were locked up. His potential successors were captured or dead, and his brother-in-law, the man who knew where every dollar went, was getting ready to talk. Is this the beginning of the end for the CJNG? There’s only way to find out.