The US Justice Department has quietly stepped back from one of its most controversial claims against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, retreating from the assertion that Maduro led a formal drug cartel known as the Cartel de los Soles (or Cartel of the Suns).
In a revised indictment unsealed on January 3 as US forces attacked Caracas and abducted Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, prosecutors abandoned the language that described the Cartel de los Soles as a structured criminal organisation.
Instead, they reframed it as a patronage system and a culture of corruption tied to drug money inside Venezuela’s military and political elite, according to the indictment brought against Maduro.
The shift marks a significant reversal from the Trump administration’s earlier position.
In 2020, US prosecutors accused Maduro of leading the Cartel de los Soles, portraying it as a powerful drug trafficking organisation.
That language was later echoed by the US Treasury Department in July 2025 when it designated the Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organisation, and again in November when Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered a similar designation.
‘It is not a group’
According to the indictment, the term Cartel de los Soles refers to officials at the top of this system, a name derived from the sun insignia worn by high-ranking Venezuelan military officers.
But experts on Latin American crime have long argued that the term Cartel de los Soles is not the name of a real cartel. Instead, it is Venezuelan slang, dating back to the 1990s, used to describe officials accused of being corrupted by drug trafficking proceeds.
"The idea that the Cartel de los Soles is a unified terrorist organisation is largely a Western construction. It's been circulated not because it reflects empirical reality, but because it provides geopolitical utility — it creates a ready-made justification for intervention," Jenaro Abraham, a political scientist and professor of Latin American politics at Gonzaga University, told TRT World recently.
The revised US indictment appears to concede that point.
Where the original filing referred to the Cartel de los Soles more than 30 times and labelled Maduro as its leader, the new version mentions the term only twice.
It goes on to say that the defendants allegedly turned Venezuela into a narco-state, using government power to protect and facilitate massive cocaine shipments destined for the US.
"They allegedly collaborated with designated foreign terrorist organisations (FTOs), including FARC (and successors), ELN, Sinaloa Cartel, Zetas/CDN, and Tren de Aragua, providing protection and support in exchange for profits," the indictment reads.
It also states that Maduro, like his predecessor Hugo Chavez, participated in and protected a patronage system.
Maduro has denied all charges.
