DOJ silently admits there is no drug trafficking group named Cartel de los Soles

The much-publicised Cartel de los Soles, which was allegedly a leading drug trafficking network from Venezuela, does not exist. That was the pretext used by US President Donald Trump to justify a campaign against Venezuela and the abduction of its President, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores. Instead, the term Cartel de los Soles is a slang used to define a “patronage system” and “culture of corruption” that is fueled by drug money.
In March 2020, the Justice Department's indictment mentioned Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns) 32 times. It mentioned that the group provides weapons to a Colombian Marxist rebel group, FARC, which funded its militant activities through drug trafficking and flooding the United States with cocaine.
However, in the 2026 DOJ indictment, the term appears only twice, referring to a culture allegedly supported by successive Venezuelan Presidents Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro. The original drug trafficking pretext for Maduro's kidnapping has been largely dismissed by many of the US allies and adversaries. Now the tacit admission by the DOJ of the absence of an actual Cartel de los Soles reveals the true motivation behind the US imperialist campaign.
“Let me get this straight: We go to a country, we capture their leader, we bomb it, & then we say we run this country now — and that's not war. But when they send cocaine over here, that people are willingly snorting — that is war. That doesn't make any sense,” said Kat Timf, a political commentator at Fox News.

Experts in Latin American crime and narcotics have long argued that the term was a figure of speech, a slang coined by the Venezuelan media for corrupt officials bearing a sun insignia on their uniforms. Neither the United Nations' annual World Drug Report nor the DEA's annual National Drug Threat Assessment mention Cartel de los Soles.
Nevertheless, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared, “We will continue to reserve the right to take strikes against drug boats that are bringing drugs toward the United States that are being operated by transnational criminal organisations, including the Cartel de los Soles.”