The ‘Cartel de los Soles’ Does Not Exist, the U.S. Justice Department Admits

January 6, 2026

Updated indictment no longer alleges it is a formal criminal organization.

On Monday, The New York Times published an article showing that the U.S. Justice Department modified a key charge against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro by removing the claim that he allegedly led a criminal organization known as the “Cartel de los Soles.”

“Justice Department Drops Claim That Venezuela’s Cartel de los Soles Is an Actual Group,” The New York Times headlined its article.

The U.S. newspaper mentioned that the administration of President Donald Trump had used a “slang term for drug corruption in the military” to accuse President Maduro of leading a non-existent organization.

In 2020, a federal grand jury in New York charged the Bolivarian leader with heading the Cartel de los Soles. This claim was reiterated in July 2025 by the Treasury Department, which designated the Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organization, and months later by the State Department under instruction from Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

In the updated indictment, however, prosecutors maintain the drug trafficking conspiracy charges against Maduro but no longer present the Cartel de los Soles as a criminal organization itself.

Instead, the document states the term ‘Cartel de los Soles’ refers to a “patronage system” and a “culture of corruption” linked to drug trafficking.

The 2026 indictment significantly reduces mentions of the Cartel de los Soles, whereas the 2020 indictment mentioned it 32 times and labeled President Maduro as its leader.

The American Lie Collapses Once Again

The change in the U.S. charge against the Bolivarian leader, however, is a belated admission of the reckless character of U.S. foreign policy.

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For years, countless experts on organized crime and drug trafficking in Latin America have pointed out that the term “Cartel de los Soles” does not correspond to an identifiable criminal organization, but to an expression used since the 1990s to describe corruption among officials linked to drug trafficking.

Neither the annual drug threat report from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) nor the World Drug Report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has included the Cartel de los Soles among major drug trafficking organizations.

“The Trump administration falsely claimed for months that Venezuela’s President Maduro leads a group called the Cartel de los Soles, which does NOT exist,” journalist Ben Norton stressed.

“The U.S. Justice Department has now quietly dropped this lie, implicitly admitting it was a fabrication. The entire U.S. war is based on lies. It never had anything to do with drugs,” he added.

“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 U.S., unlike cocaine,” Norton pointed out.

“The Trump administration’s repeated invocation of the fake ‘Cartel de los Soles’ was its version of the WMD lie used by George W. Bush to try to justify his illegal invasion of Iraq. Both U.S. wars were colonial wars of aggression and pillage, based on lies,” he concluded.

teleSUR/ JF
Sources: NYT – El Universo – Ben Norton
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