US drops claim that Maduro led Cartel de los Soles drug organization

The US Department of Justice has withdrawn the allegation, put forward by the Trump administration last year while preparing the ground to remove Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela, that the president led a drug cartel named “Cartel de los Soles.”

According to the New York Times, this allegation is based on Maduro’s 2020 grand jury indictment prepared by the Department of Justice. In July 2025, copying the language of this indictment, the Department of the Treasury designated the Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organization. In November, Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio ordered the State Department to do the same.

On the other hand, experts on Latin American crime and drugs stated that this was actually a slang term invented by the Venezuelan media in the 1990s for officials corrupted by drug money.

On Saturday, after the US kidnapped Maduro, the Department of Justice released a rewritten indictment tacitly admitting this point.

Prosecutors continued to accuse Maduro of participating in a drug trafficking conspiracy, but they abandoned the claim that the Cartel de los Soles was a real organization. Instead, the revised indictment speaks of a “patronage system” and “culture of corruption” fueled by drug money.

While the old indictment mentioned the Cartel de los Soles 32 times and stated that Maduro was the leader of this organization, the new one mentions it twice and alleges that Maduro, like his predecessor Hugo Chávez, participated in, maintained, and protected this patronage system.

Suggesting that profits obtained from drug trafficking “flowed to corrupt civil, military, and intelligence officials,” the indictment states, “These officials operate in a patronage system managed by high-ranking individuals. This system is referred to as the Cartel de los Soles or the Cartel of the Suns. This name refers to the sun emblems affixed to the uniforms of high-ranking Venezuelan military officials.”

This backtracking makes the legitimacy of the Trump administration’s designation of the Cartel de los Soles as a “foreign terrorist organization” last year even more questionable.

Nevertheless, Rubio characterized the Cartel de los Soles as a real cartel in an interview given on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program a day after the revised indictment was announced:

“We will continue to reserve our right to interdict drug boats that are run by transnational criminal organizations, including the Cartel de los Soles, bringing drugs into the US. Obviously, the leader of that cartel is currently in US custody and facing US justice in the Southern District of New York. That person is Nicolás Maduro.”

The Cartel de los Soles is never mentioned in the annual National Drug Threat Assessment report, which handles major trafficking organizations in detail, by the Drug Enforcement Administration. This organization was also not included in the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s annual World Drug Report.

But the 2020 indictment, which contains a long narrative about a conspiracy lasting years, depicts the Cartel de los Soles as a drug trafficking organization under Maduro’s leadership.

In the indictment, it was stated that the group engaged in actions such as providing weapons to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and “flooding” the US with cocaine “as a weapon.”

The 2020 indictment was prepared under the supervision of Emil Bove III, who was a prosecutor in the terror and international narcotics unit in New York at the time. Bove ran the Department of Justice during the first months of Trump’s second term and spent a tenure that drew suspicion, such as firing dozens of officers and ordering the dropping of bribery charges against Eric Adams, the mayor of New York at the time, before Trump appointed him to a lifetime position on the federal appeals court.

In the new indictment, the leader of the prison gang named Tren de Aragua in Venezuela, who is alleged to be a partner in crime with Maduro, was also added as a defendant. The link explained in the indictment is weak: The indictment only states that the gang leader offered escort services to protect drug shipments passing through Venezuela in phone calls made in 2019 with a person he thought was a Venezuelan official.

Last year, Trump had suggested that Maduro directed the activities of Tren de Aragua, but the US intelligence community believes this is not true.