A cartel is a group of competing organizations that decide to cooperate with each other to corner or dominate their market, usually to the detriment of the public. A drug cartel is a group of drug manufacturing/smuggling organizations that are trying to monopolize the illegal drug trade.

Their victims can be anybody: people who didn’t cooperate with the cartel, people who oppose/threaten the cartel, people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time when the cartel decided it needed to make a gruesome statement, etc.