One of the central claims the Trump administration has used to justify the overthrow of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and describe his government as “illegitimate” is the allegation that he is the leader of a multinational narco-terrorist organization known as “Cartel de los Soles.”
But now that the Department of Justice (DOJ) must prove the allegation in court following the US military’s kidnapping of Maduro last week, prosecutors are backing off the claim and, in effect, admitting what critics had long protested: that Cartel de los Soles is not, in fact, an organization at all.
In the months leading up to the illegal US invasion that plucked Maduro from power, the Treasury Department and State Department both designated Cartel de los Soles as a foreign terrorist organization.
That allegation originated from a 2020 grand jury indictment of Maduro, drafted by the DOJ during Trump’s first term. The document described the Cartel de los Soles as a “Venezuelan drug-trafficking organization comprised of high-ranking Venezuelan officials.”
As the New York Timesexplained back in November:
There’s a big catch with the impression created by the Trump administration’s narrative: Cartel de los Soles is not a literal organization, according to a range of specialists in Latin American criminal and narcotics issues, from think-tank analysts to former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officials.
It is instead a figure of speech in Venezuela, dating back to the 1990s, for Venezuelan military officials corrupted by drug money, they say. The term, which means “Cartel of the Suns,” is a mocking invocation of the suns Venezuelan generals wear to denote their rank, like American ones wear stars.
It is for that reason that the DEA’s annual National Drug Threat Assessment, which describes major trafficking organizations in detail, has never mentioned Cartel de los Soles. Nor has the annual “World Drug Report“ by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
Nevertheless, the claim that Maduro was at the helm of an international terrorist cartel was a core justification the Trump administration has used over the past year to legitimize pushing him out of power.
“Maduro is NOT the President of Venezuela and his regime is NOT the legitimate government,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a post on social media in July. “Maduro is the head of the Cartel de Los Soles, a narco-terror organization that has taken possession of a country. And he is under indictment for pushing drugs into the United States.”
Such a portrayal was useful when attempting to drum up support for US aggression against Venezuela. But now, Maduro stands on trial in the Southern District of New York, where a jury will decide his guilt or innocence based on the evidence presented after he pleaded not guilty on Monday.
Elizabeth Dickinson, the deputy director for Latin America at the International Crisis Group, told the New York Times that the designation of Cartel de los Soles as a foreign terror organization was “far from reality,” but that “designations don’t have to be proved in court, and that’s the difference. Clearly, they knew they could not prove it in court.”
Following Maduro’s abduction by US forces on Saturday, the DOJ released a new indictment. While it still accused Maduro of participating in a drug trafficking conspiracy, it totally abandoned the claim that any organization called “Cartel de los Soles” actually existed.
To the extent that any such group does exist, the indictment says it’s not as a criminal organization, but as “a culture of corruption in which powerful Venezuelan elites enrich themselves through drug trafficking,” and a “patronage system run by those at the top.”
But even a day after the new indictment fatally undercut his claims, Rubio continued to insist on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Cartel de los Soles was a “transnational criminal organization” and that “the leader of that cartel,” Maduro, “is now in US custody and facing US justice in the Southern District of New York.”
“They’ve been pretending that this made-up thing was real for a year. But now that they’d have to actually demonstrate its existence in court, they’re going to cram it down the memory hole,” marvelledDerek Davison, a Washington-based researcher and writer on international affairs and American politics.
Ben Norton, editor of the Geopolitical Economy Report, wrote on social media that the administration’s abrupt abandonment of one of its central justifications for war demonstrates that “the entire US war is based on lies.”
While the initial phase of Trump’s ramp-up of military aggression against Venezuela was premised, with scant evidence, on the need to prevent alleged drug boats from reaching the US, President Donald Trump has now said explicitly that the administration’s goal is to take control of Venezuela’s massive oil reserves and hand them to US-based companies.
“It never had anything to do with drugs. Venezuela’s role in the global cocaine trade is small and insignificant, and it has absolutely nothing to do with fentanyl (which is actually responsible for many drug-related deaths in the US, unlike cocaine),” Norton said. “The Trump administration’s repeated invocation of the fake ‘Cartel de los Soles’ was its version of the weapons of mass destruction lie used by George W. Bush to try to justify his illegal invasion of Iraq.”