U.S. Department of Justice Drops ‘Cartel of the Suns’ Accusation Against Maduro, Reports NYT

Original article: Se les cayó el cuento: EE.UU. borra el “Cártel de los Soles” de la acusación contra Maduro, revela NYT

In a significant legal twist with far-reaching political implications, the U.S. Department of Justice has formally withdrawn one of the central accusations against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro: leading a narcotrafficking organization known as the ‘Cartel of the Suns.’

This information, revealed by The New York Times and confirmed through court documents, indicates a revision of the original 2020 accusation, dismantling a narrative that has frequently been used to justify maximum pressure campaigns against Venezuela, culminating in the recent military raid and abduction of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.

The Disappearance of a ‘Cartel’

The updated accusation, presented in the Southern District Court of New York, where Maduro and Flores are currently detained at the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center following their capture last Saturday, shows substantial changes. While the March 2020 version, promoted by Donald Trump’s administration, described the ‘Cartel of the Suns’ as a structured and operational criminal organization, the new rewriting reduces it to an abstract concept.

According to the Times article, in the 2020 document, the alleged cartel was mentioned 32 times, portrayed as a drug-trafficking organization personally led by Maduro, that was arming dissidents from the FARC in Colombia with the explicit purpose of «flooding the United States with cocaine.» In contrast, the revised accusation only refers to it two times, and no longer identifies it as a defined criminal entity, instead referring to it as a «patronage system» and a «culture of corruption» fueled by drug money.

U.S. authorities continue to accuse Maduro of participating in a narcotrafficking conspiracy, but they have removed the claim that this cartel was a real organization,” the report clarifies. This tacit change seems to validate Venezuela’s accusations, which for years have labeled the ‘Cartel of the Suns’ as a fictional construct.

Experts cited by the newspaper indicate that the term is actually a colloquial expression used since the 1990s by Venezuelan media to generically refer to civil and military officials corrupted by drug trafficking, rather than a cartel comparable to other criminal organizations in the region.

Venezuela Denounces ‘An Infamous and Vile Lie’

The Venezuelan government had vehemently rejected the cartel narrative long before recent events. In November 2023, in response to a maneuver by Senator Marco Rubio to designate the ‘nonexistent Cartel of the Suns’ as a terrorist organization, Caracas issued a stern statement.

The official declaration stated that the strategy aimed to rehash «an infamous and vile lie to justify an illegitimate and illegal intervention against Venezuela, under the classic U.S. regime change format.»

Venezuela’s position was supported by the absence of references to the ‘Cartel of the Suns’ in key reports: neither in the National Drug Threat Assessment, prepared annually by the DEA, nor in the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) annual World Drug Report.

Weak Argument for a Serious Aggression

The notable change in the judicial accusation sheds critical light on the foundations of the military operation carried out last Saturday by U.S. forces on Venezuelan territory, which affected Caracas and the states of Miranda, Aragua, and La Guaira, culminating in the abduction of the president and the first lady.

Caracas classified the action as a «grave military aggression» and warned, in a statement from the interim presidency now led by Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, that the objective «is none other than to seize Venezuela’s strategic resources, particularly its oil and minerals, attempting to forcibly undermine the nation’s political independence.»

Maduro’s defense, which declared his innocence at his first court appearance in the U.S., will find in this revision of the accusation a crucial element to consider. The disappearance of the ‘cartel’ as a structured criminal entity weakens one of the key public justifications for the escalation and extraordinary capture.

The revelation from The New York Times occurs amid widespread international condemnation of the U.S. operation. Russia, among other countries, has urged the release of Maduro and Flores. The Kremlin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, condemned the attack and stated that «Venezuela should have the right to decide its own destiny without any external intervention,» reported RT.

Moreover, it is worth noting that Colombian President Gustavo Petro has repeatedly rejected the narrative of the existence of the Cartel of the Suns as a terrorist organization made up of Venezuelan military officials.

Through his account on social media platform X, he had already made it clear that no Cartel of the Suns appears in judicial investigations in Colombia and stated that there is no evidence supporting its existence. According to the president, cocaine that reaches Venezuelan territory primarily comes from central Colombia and does not correspond to a criminal structure based in Venezuela.

The progressive leader warned that this narrative has been used for political and military purposes and does not reflect the reality of drug trafficking in the region.