Caracas Chronicles

For the Trump administration, which follows a long history of investigations and indictments from American institutions that go back to the Obama years, the Cartel de los Soles is a Venezuelan criminal and terrorist organization threatening the U.S. led by Nicolás Maduro, the illegitimate ruler of the country. This is not only an opinion or a rhetorical device but an official category with legal and law enforcing effect, established by agencies like OFAC and embraced by the Departments of State and Defense. 

For years, in fact, many Venezuelan military officers of the highest rank—such as Hugo Carvajal, Henry Rangel Silva, and Nestor Reverol—along with civilian or retired military officers who form the chavista elite—from Tareck El Aissami to Diosdado Cabello and several others—have been sanctioned, indicted and in some cases processed in the U.S. and other countries for charges related to drug trafficking or money laundering. In 2025, the U.S. established that Maduro and Cabello lead the Cartel de los Soles, and the narrative that the entire Venezuelan government is a criminal organization that is attacking the U.S. with drugs and assassins, and must be fought as a terrorist enemy, as it happens with other gangs or cartels in Latin America.

The so-called Cartel de los Soles, for years an obscure concept that emerged occasionally from the mouths of TV pundits or protected witnesses, evolved into a brand of evil that common Americans are becoming familiar with, and most of all an essential component of the casus belli that Trump is brandishing against the Maduro regime. And the U.S. is not the only country doing it.

It seems the code name ‘Cartel de los Soles’ was coined by prosecutors and the press, and it was catchy enough to continue to this day as an efficient way of calling the secret networks of drug trafficking in the armed forces. 

However, even if it’s common knowledge that the Maduro regime is among the most corrupt in the world, researchers don’t support Trump’s characterization of the Cartel de los Soles. Chavismo and people on the left such as Colombian president Gustavo Petro say that the Cartel de los Soles doesn’t exist. The subject is indeed tricky and has to do with the liquid nature of crime in the 21st century, but also with the extension of crime in the Venezuelan state.

Chavismo did not invent the cartel

The involvement of military officers in the drug business in Latin America is as old as the crime, mainly because drugs can’t be smuggled out from the producing countries towards deep-pocketed foreign markets without the cooperation of corrupt officials and even high ranks or chiefs of state. The Bolivian dictator Luis García Meza, toppled in 1981, was said to control a part of the production of coca leaves for cocaine producers. Fidel Castro ordered the execution of popular general Arnaldo Ochoa under the accusation of smuggling drugs. General Manuel Noriega cooperated with Colombian cartels until the U.S. found out and launched Operation Just Cause, in December 1989, that resulted in his overthrow in Panama and confinement in an American jail. 

In Venezuela, we have been hearing about a “Cartel de los Soles” even before Hugo Chávez came to power. According to InSight Crime, an investigative platform focused on organized criminal activity in the Americas, the name started to appear in Venezuelan investigations and media in 1993, when two generals of the National Guard were accused of being involved in cocaine trafficking. It comes from the fact that Venezuelan generals, before and after Chávez, use the sun on their epaulettes, while high ranks from other countries use the stars. Four suns for a general in chief, three for a brigadier, etc. 

It seems the ‘code name’ Cartel de los Soles was coined by prosecutors and the press, and it was catchy enough to continue to this day as an efficient way of calling the secret networks of drug trafficking in the armed forces. 

So the Cartel de los Soles did not begin with Maduro or Chávez. However, the militarization of Venezuela under Chávez increased the reach of men in fatigues and made it easier to take part in illegal activities such as drug trafficking. Since 1993, many generals have come and gone, and most importantly, the armed forces were deeply transformed in the historical transition brought out by chavismo. The military acquired the right to vote, became a critical political actor, and was embedded in all kinds of public offices. Generals and colonels were suddenly in charge of public companies, hotels and universities.

The Colombian contagion

Then, history and geography, or more precisely the coincidence of geopolitics and crime, will add to the equation. When president Álvaro Uribe advanced in his seguridad democrática policy, with funding and technical assistance from the U.S., cartels, guerrillas and paramilitary groups in Colombia were forced to find new routes to produce and export drugs, and the chavista government was the obvious choice. Chávez had cut all cooperation with the DEA and shared ideological affinities with FARC and ELN. We even saw guerrilleros in uniform speaking at the Venezuelan parliament.

So the Colombian guerrillas and some paramilitary groups from that country began to expand their footprint in Venezuela during the Chávez years, to escape persecution from the Uribe and Santos administrations, and to profit from the sanctuary that the chavista government provided to leftist guerrillas.

For a strongman as ineffective as Maduro, handing out gold mines and drug routes to the military was easier than working to restore the oil industry, the main source of power and wealth during the Chávez years.

Such a sanctuary has strategic meaning to the chavista regime. According to many accounts, including public statements from several chavista actors and guerrilla commanders throughout the years, the Bolivarian revolution expected that FARC and ELN would help it to repel attacks or an invasion from Colombian and U.S. armed forces. This was based on a strategic assumption of the Cold War-infused, Cuban-influenced chavista military doctrine: Venezuela’s socialism needs to be prepared for a future war against Washington and its subordinated right-wing governments, which were in Colombia during the Uribe, Santos and Duque administrations, and currently are Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, among others that don’t share borders with Venezuela.

Drugs as a business of the privileged caste

However, after the political crises of 2002 and 2003, the purge of FANB and the need to secure loyalty within military ranks provided stimulus to the chavista elite to expand the military’s reasons to support the government. The solution was easy: to let officers take part in drug trafficking, along with guerrillas and gangs. The chavista-controlled courts and security agencies would turn a blind eye, and more frequently collect part of the profits. Public servants like judge Mildred Camero, a former anti drug superintendent who denounced the penetration of mafias in the armed forces, were fired and marginalized. 

While petrodollars flooded the country during the last years of the Chávez era, corruption expanded across the oversized chavista state. Once Chávez died and the consumption bubble imploded in 2013, Venezuelans not only found themselves trapped in a devastated economy where inflation and scarcity would reach unprecedented levels, but a state deprived of its original functions and turned into an empty structure, privatized in the interest of those involved in illegal activities and those focused on keeping power at any cost. 

Maduro would not only grant the military control over the Orinoco Mining Arc in 2016, to woo the armed forces with a Venezuelan gold rush; he also allowed the drug business to expand in the hands of gangs, military, police, business people and state clerks of all levels, the vast alliance that shared the goal of keeping Maduro in power in order to keep the money coming. For a strongman as ineffective as Maduro, handing out gold mines and drug routes to the military was easier than working to restore the oil industry, the main source of power and wealth during the Chávez years. 

The Mining Arc began just before the peace accord in Colombia divided the FARC between those fighters who joined party politics and those who refused to surrender, becoming the FARC disidencias. Several fronts of those dissident forces, especially Segunda Marquetalia, found refuge in Venezuela, joining the complex web of illegal activities under the protection of Maduro, where drugs are the most profitable of an entire portfolio of clandestine products. Kidnapping, mining, and human trafficking form the rest, profiting from the collapse of the Venezuelan state and the mass migration that provides victims and workers for the criminal networks. 

You could say that calling a decentralized criminal network a cartel is reductive, inexact and even far-fetched. But it’s working to gather international pressure to a degree that the electoral fraud in 2024 couldn’t.

Along with bribes and old-school administrative corruption, the mines, and the imports of medicine and shoddy food for a starving population (that profitable line of business led by the infamous Alex Saab), drugs became a staple in the income basket of the Bolivarian revolution and for the military in charge of borders, roads, ports, airports and a wide array of public posts.

But, how important is drug trafficking for the regime and the country? Transparency International Venezuela estimated it was an 8-billion-dollar business in 2024, not enough to keep the country, or even the dictatorship, going. Even in its dismal current state, the oil industry is still the country’s main source of income, with exports reaching 17 billion dollars in 2024. We still don’t have reasons to think that if suddenly all drug trafficking ceases, the country will come to a halt. Venezuela has become, no doubt, a very relevant space for drugs coming from Colombia and Peru, and it seems that production has also started at a certain scale, but it isn’t Afghanistan under Taliban rule, exclusively dependent on its puppy monoculture. Drug money is not paying the salaries of public employees or moving the engines of Guri. It’s still oil.  

Facts, myths and pretexts  

It’s very likely that the U.S. is not disclosing all the information it has about criminal and drug trafficking activities linked to the Maduro regime. We can’t understand the full scope of chavismo’s criminal underworld yet, and may find out a lot more if the regime were to fall in a spectacular fashion, as it happened with the Assad dynasty and the unraveling of its Captagon empire. There are many things we ignore about a business whose nature is clandestine, and that operates under the protection of a state unable and unwilling to properly investigate and report criminal activity. Venezuela was deprived of independent institutions that could investigate and punish drug trafficking by civilian and military officers. 

We can be sure that an undetermined number of military officers are involved in illegal activities and drug trafficking, one way or another, and that this happens because Maduro, Cabello and others allow it and, at least, make a benefit from it, be it directly or just by guaranteeing that those officers keep them in power in order to maintain their income. If that does not suffice to match the traditional definition of a drug cartel or a narco state, it’s more than enough to call Venezuela under Maduro a rogue state. 

So, what is Cartel de los Soles? Rather than a mafia organization like Pablo Escobar’s Cartel de Medellín, which had a clear hierarchy, Venezuela’s Cartel de los Soles is not one but many criminal alliances, which exist thanks to the stimulus and protection of the essentially corrupt and evidently criminal regime of Nicolas Maduro. Insight Crime defines it with precision: “Today, the catch-all term ‘Cartel of the Suns’ masks the fact that the state-drug trafficking axis is now less a network run by the military and Chavista politicians and more a system that it regulates. It is composed of a series of regional military-political-criminal nodes that are bound together by a national regime that guarantees impunity for its allies. Within this system, the regime rewards loyalty through assignment to regions known to offer a wealth of opportunities for enrichment through drug trafficking and other criminal economies”.

You could say that calling a decentralized criminal network a cartel is reductive, inexact and even far-fetched. But it’s working to gather international pressure to a degree that the electoral fraud in 2024 couldn’t.

After the U.S. designated Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organization, Ecuador, Paraguay, Argentina and the Dominican Republic followed. Those countries have right-leaning governments (except the DR) and remain aligned with Trump; on the other end, Petro’s Colombia said that no investigations on drugs have proven the existence of the cartel, but the Senate in that country, where the opposition has a majority, voted to declare the cartel a terrorist actor. Trinidad and Tobago fell short of such an official declaration but offered its territory to combat drug trafficking coming from Venezuela, some days before the precision strike to the first boat, which likely happened in Trinidadian waters. It’s possible that Panama and Peru will also join the American stance. Even more important is that Guyana, the neighbor with which Venezuela has a border dispute that Maduro has tried to reignite, supports the “narco-terrorist” character of Miraflores and the “anti drug operation” against the Venezuelan dictatorship. 

Brief, catchy, ‘Cartel of the Suns’ is like ‘Tren de Aragua’: it fits on a hashtag and works well in the era of information and misinformation snacks that fly around on social media. And it might end up in history. It has happened before.