The Justice Department backed away from a central claim it used to justify removing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro — that he led a drug cartel called Cartel de los Soles — according to a revised indictment unsealed Saturday as US forces captured him.
The new indictment still accuses Maduro of drug trafficking but abandons language portraying Cartel de los Soles as a structured organization. Prosecutors now describe it as a “patronage system” and “culture of corruption” fueled by drug money.
The original 2020 indictment mentioned Cartel de los Soles 32 times and identified Maduro as its leader. The revised version mentions it only twice.
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The Trump administration had promoted the cartel narrative for months. The US Treasury designated Cartel de los Soles as a foreign terrorist organization in July 2025. Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered the State Department to do the same in November.
Read: Venezuela Mobilizes 200,000 Troops as US Labels Cartel Terrorist Group
But Latin American crime experts have long said Cartel de los Soles is Venezuelan slang from the 1990s — a term for military officials corrupted by drug money, not an actual cartel.
The revised indictment states that drug profits “flow to corrupt rank-and-file civilian, military and intelligence officials, who operate in a patronage system run by those at the top — referred to as the Cartel de los Soles or Cartel of the Suns, a reference to the sun insignia affixed to the uniforms of high-ranking Venezuelan military officials.”
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Elizabeth Dickinson, deputy director for Latin America at the International Crisis Group, said the new portrayal is “exactly accurate to reality,” unlike the 2020 version. “Designations don’t have to be proved in court, and that’s the difference. Clearly, they knew they could not prove it in court.”
Despite the Justice Department’s retreat. Rubio described Cartel de los Soles as an actual cartel on NBC Sunday, one day after the revised indictment was unsealed. “Of course, their leader, the leader of that cartel, is now in US custody and facing US justice in the Southern District of New York,” he said.
The administration repeatedly cited Cartel de los Soles’s terrorist designation to justify military buildup off Venezuela’s coast.
Jenaro Abraham, a political scientist at Gonzaga University, called the designation “largely a Western construction” that “provides geopolitical utility — it creates a ready-made justification for intervention.”
In December, the US accused Venezuela of trafficking fentanyl and called it a “weapon of mass destruction.” But when charges were announced Monday, fentanyl was not mentioned.
Maduro pleaded not guilty Monday. “I am not guilty, I am a decent man, I am still the president of my country,” he told the judge.
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