Eladio Vuente and several Cartel capos.
The Vuente Cartel was a Mexican drug cartel based mainly in the state of Chihuahua which transported cocaine and methamphetamine to the Northern United States-Mexico border, especially to New Mexico, from the 1970s to 2009. Its founders and top leaders, Eladio Vuente, Hector Salamanca and Juan Bolsa, became tremendously wealthy and feared not only as a result of their activities, but also their ruthlessness in punishing rivals. In 1989, the Cartel struck a deal with Chilean drug chemists Gus Fring and Max Arciniega to import their product to the U.S., but Vuente was discontented at the way in which they attained the meeting, so he had Salamanca shoot Arciniega dead in front of Fring, thus setting him on a campaign to destroy the Cartel and the Salamanca family, as Hector's nephews Lalo, Tuco, Marco and Leonel, as well as his grandson Joaquin, were all high-ranking Cartel enforcers. Fring's decades-long plan began reaching success when he convinced Vuente to use trucks from his legitimate Los Pollos Hermanos restaurant chain to move the Cartel's cocaine in 2002 instead of Salamanca's, and by the late 2000s, he had successfully dispatched the Salamanca Twins and Bolsa, starting a brief war with Vuente where several of his trucks were ambushed. In an apparent truce to end hostilities, Fring offered to lend his top methamphetamine cook, Jesse Pinkman, to produce a higher quality product, but he poisoned Vuente and his capos' tequila shots, and they all quickly died, ending the Vuente Cartel.