Amid signs that President Trump is mulling sending U.S. troops into Venezuela to remove President Nicolás Maduro from power, the Trump administration has supercharged its public messaging by describing him as the leader of a drug cartel called Cartel de los Soles.
That refrain comes from a range of critics including Marco Rubio, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser and secretary of state, who has accused Mr. Maduro of being “the leader of the designated narcoterrorist organization Cartel de los Soles” and responsible for “trafficking drugs into the United States and Europe.”
In July, the Trump Treasury Department officially labeled Cartel de los Soles a global terrorist entity. On Sunday, Mr. Rubio announced that the State Department would essentially do the same under its own procedures.
But there’s a big catch with the impression created by the Trump administration’s narrative: Cartel de los Soles is not a literal organization, according to a range of specialists in Latin American criminal and narcotics issues, from think-tank analysts to former Drug Enforcement Administration officials.
It is instead a figure of speech in Venezuela, dating back to the 1990s, for Venezuelan military officials corrupted by drug money, they say. The term, which means “Cartel of the Suns,” is a mocking invocation of the suns Venezuelan generals wear to denote their rank, like American ones wear stars.
It is for that reason that the D.E.A.’s annual National Drug Threat Assessment, which describes major trafficking organizations in detail, has never mentioned Cartel de los Soles. Nor has the annual “World Drug Report” by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
“‘Cartel de los Soles’ is a label that was invented by Venezuelan journalists,” said Phil Gunson, a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group who lives in Venezuela. “There is no such thing as a board meeting of the ‘Cartel de los Soles.’ There is no such animal. The organization doesn’t exist as such.”
But that doesn’t mean, he added, that Venezuelan officials “are not up to their eyeballs in drugs.”
There is no legal definition of a drug cartel, but the term is generally understood to refer to a large, centrally controlled, unscrupulous business organization that seeks profits through the production, distribution and sale of illegal drugs, operating across borders and using violence to dominate black markets.
One might think of a drug cartel as a shadowy, mafia-like organization that, among other things, uses bribery to corrupt government officials — as indeed is routine in countries where narcotics shipments transit.
But to the extent Cartel de los Soles is a thing, it is a pejorative way of talking about the Venezuelan government itself as unusually corrupt.
Indeed, Mr. Rubio often talks about it with greater nuance, like saying Cartel de los Soles “is a criminal organization that happens to masquerade as a government.”
Asked for comment about the proposition that some rhetoric about Cartel de los Soles has become detached from reality, the White House said in a statement: “The Maduro regime is not the legitimate government of Venezuela, it is a narcoterror cartel, and Maduro is not a legitimate president. He is a fugitive head of this cartel who has been indicted in the U.S. for trafficking drugs in to the country.”
The experts in Latin American crime and drug trafficking issues — some of whom did not want to speak for attribution, citing fear of retaliation by the Trump administration — had different views on the nature of corruption within Venezuela’s government. Some portrayed Mr. Maduro as directly controlling corrupt activities, while others said he had set up a system that encourages corruption — without directly managing it — as a way to secure military loyalty.
Among the latter is Jeremy McDermott, the co-founder of InSight Crime, a think tank that focuses on crime and security in Latin America and has written reports referring to Cartel de los Soles for more than a decade. He said Venezuela’s government has significant drug trafficking embedded within it. But, he said, the shorthand term refers to all drug trafficking in the military, not a single drug trafficking organization.
“The Cartel of the Suns became a catchall phrase for state-embedded drug trafficking, but these are not integrated — the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. It is absolutely not an organization, per se,” he said, adding, “If you are going to go to war, the language matters.”
In the 1990s — before Mr. Maduro or his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, rose to power — Venezuelans coined the phrase to refer to corrupt military officials who took drug money, Mr. McDermott and others said. In the years that followed, the term began showing up in news articles and think-tank reports as a quick way to invoke the networks of Venezuelan officials who were corrupted by drug trafficking.
Then, in March 2020, an arm of the U.S. government first publicly presented Cartel de los Soles as an actual drug trafficking organization led by Mr. Maduro. That’s when the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, during the first Trump administration, obtained an indictment of Mr. Maduro and several officials in his government on drug trafficking and corruption charges.
The indictment contained accounts of many alleged actions that would support those charges, drawing on witnesses and evidence gathered in a yearslong investigation. But it also laid out a narrative that this was not just a criminal conspiracy, but the activities of Cartel de los Soles.
The drafting of the indictment was overseen by Emil Bove III, then a terrorism and international narcotics unit prosecutor in New York. Mr. Bove went on to be a defense lawyer for Mr. Trump and ran the Justice Department in the opening months of the second Trump administration. He had a turbulent tenure, including firing dozens of officials and ordering the dismissal of bribery charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York, before he was rewarded with a judicial appointment.
At the time, several drug policy specialists said, any hyperbolic language in the narrative passages about a Cartel de los Soles did not seem particularly important. A more obviously edgy thing to note about the indictment was the basic fact of indicting Venezuela’s sitting president: Leaders of foreign governments are usually considered to have immunity as head of state.
During the Biden administration, when one of Mr. Maduro’s accused co-conspirators was extradited to the United States and pleaded guilty, the Biden-appointed U.S. attorney put out a statement calling him part of Cartel de los Soles, repeating language derived from the indictment.
This year, Mr. Trump ordered his administration to deem Latin American drug cartels and gangs terrorist organizations. The State Department made a batch of eight such designations on Feb. 20, including the major Mexican cartels and Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan prison gang that Mr. Trump, contrary to the belief of the U.S. intelligence community, claimed Mr. Maduro controls.
Even then, Cartel de los Soles was not on the list.
And in May, when the D.E.A. issued its annual drug threat intelligence report — which for the first time talked about Tren de Aragua — it still did not mention Cartel de los Soles.
By late July, however, as the Trump administration was ramping up pressure on Mr. Maduro, the Treasury Department announced it was designating Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist entity. That statement largely echoed language from the 2020 indictment.
It soon became apparent that the focus on Mr. Maduro was part of a larger planned operation of targeting boats suspected of smuggling drugs for cartels from South America. Since Sept. 2, the U.S. military, on Mr. Trump’s orders, has hit 21 such boats, killing 83 people, in operations that initially appeared to be centered on Venezuelan suspects but expanded to Colombians.
After the Treasury Department’s announcement, Ecuador, Paraguay, Argentina, the Dominican Republican and Peru followed the Trump administration by putting Cartel de los Soles on lists of terrorist groups, too.
There was a split in Colombia, where the Senate approved a proposal declaring it a transnational criminal and terrorist organization, while the country’s president, Gustavo Petro, called it an “invention” of the Trump administration.
“The Cartel of the Suns does not exist; it is the fictitious excuse of the extreme right to overthrow governments that do not obey them,” Mr. Petro said.
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.
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