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The United States has designated the Cartel de los Solis (Sun Cartel in Spanish) – a group that, according to the United States, is led by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and other members of his government – as a foreign terrorist organization.
This designation gives US law enforcement agencies and the military more authority to investigate and dismantle the group.
In recent months, the United States has intensified its pressure on Maduro, deeming his government illegitimate after the 2024 elections, which were widely rejected due to accusations of fraud. This action represents another tool to increase pressure.
But on the other hand, questions about the existence of the Cartel de los Soles gained strength. The Venezuelan Foreign Ministry rejected the classification “categorically, firmly and absolutely,” describing it as “a new and ridiculous lie.”
Not surprisingly, Venezuelan Interior and Justice Minister Diosdado Cabello has long described the cartel as a “fabrication.”
Cabello, whom the United States names as a senior member of the cartel, accuses the American authorities of using this allegation as a pretext to target opponents.
“Whenever someone bothers them, they call him the boss of the Cartel de los Soles,” Cabello said in August.
Gustavo Petro, the leftist president of neighboring Colombia, also denied the cartel’s existence.
“It’s a fake excuse from the far right to overthrow governments that don’t obey them,” Petro wrote on the X social media network in August.
However, the US State Department asserts that the Cartel de los Solis not only exists, but has “corrupted the military, intelligence, legislative and judicial power of Venezuela.”
Experts consulted by BBC News Mundo (the BBC’s Spanish-language service) say the truth lies somewhere among these claims.
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The term Cartel de los Soles appeared in the early 1990s.
It was coined by the Venezuelan press in the wake of drug trafficking accusations against a general in charge of anti-drug operations in the Venezuelan National Guard, and referred to the sun-shaped insignia that generals wear on their shoulder pads to indicate their rank.
The term quickly began to be used to refer to all Venezuelan officials allegedly linked to drug trafficking, regardless of whether they were part of the same organization or not, said Mike Lasosa, an expert on organized crime in the Americas and deputy director of content at Insight Crime.
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Raul Benitez Manao, an organized crime expert at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), said the group’s activities began in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in response to events in neighboring Colombia, the world’s largest cocaine producer.
At the time, the powerful Medellin Cartel, based in the Colombian city of the same name, was being dismantled, and the country’s anti-drug campaign was bearing fruit.
With traditional smuggling routes under pressure, the Cartel de los Soles have begun offering alternative routes to transport cocaine from Colombia, Benitez Manao says.
The group’s strength increased in the first years of the presidency of Hugo Chavez (1954-2013), the leftist president who led Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013, according to Benitez Manao.
Benitez Manao explained that “Chavez liked to challenge the United States and sever all military cooperation between the Venezuelan army and the United States.”
He added that without DEA oversight, “some (Venezuelan) army officers felt comfortable dealing with criminals.”
He added that Chavez’s sympathies with Colombia’s leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas – which was largely funded by cocaine trafficking – also led to part of the smuggling operations being redirected through Venezuela.
Benitez Manao explained that under military pressure in Colombia, the rebel group transferred some operations to Venezuela, after learning that the Venezuelan president “considers them as leftist ideological allies.”
Not only did the FARC find “a safe haven in Venezuela,” but many government officials, “from street police to military aviation,” quickly became partners in drug trafficking, said Wesley Tabor, a former DEA agent who served in Venezuela.
Together, he said, they “began flooding the United States with hundreds of tons of cocaine.”
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La Sosa said the Cartel de los Soles differs from other drug networks in that it does not have a formal structure.
He said this was not a group per se, but rather a “widespread system of corruption.”
He adds that the economic crisis that struck Venezuela during the era of Chavez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro, fueled it.
“The Maduro regime is unable to provide decent salaries to its security forces, and in order to maintain their loyalty, it allows them to accept bribes from drug traffickers,” Lassa explained.
Middle- and low-ranking officers who control the country’s main entry and exit points, such as airports, make up the Cartel de los Soles, because they are in a privileged position to facilitate the flow of drugs, Benitez Manao said.
But US officials insist that the cartel’s tentacles reach the highest levels of Maduro’s government, including the president himself.
In 2020, the US Department of Justice charged Maduro and 14 others with conspiring with Colombian armed groups to send cocaine to the United States. High-ranking officials cited include Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino and former President of the Venezuelan Supreme Court Michael Moreno.
US prosecutors also stated in the complaint that since at least 1999, the Cartel de los Soles had been led and operated by Maduro, Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, former head of military intelligence Hugo Carvajal, and former general Claver Alcalá.
According to them, information provided by former high-ranking Venezuelan officials, including Carvajal and Alcala, confirms these accusations.
Lemsi Salazar, a former security chief under the late Hugo Chavez, provided information about the Cartel de los Soles to US authorities as early as 2014.
Salazar, who left Venezuela with the help of the DEA, said Cabello led the Cartel de los Soles.
Cabello denied the accusation, saying it was an “international conspiracy.”
But accusations from former Venezuelan officials persist.
In 2020, General Alcala surrendered himself to DEA agents after disagreements with the Maduro government and pleaded guilty to supporting the FARC and cocaine trafficking operations.
Earlier this year, former Venezuelan intelligence chief Hugo Carvajal, who also fled Venezuela after falling out with Maduro, pleaded guilty in a US court to drug trafficking and narco-terrorism.
“For years, he and other officers of the de los Soles cartel used cocaine as a weapon, flooding New York and other American cities with poison,” the federal prosecutor said of Carvajal, known as “El Pollo” (The Chicken), during the trial.
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Maduro and Interior Minister Cabello remain in Venezuela, but the US recently increased rewards for information leading to their capture to US$50 million (R$190 million) and US$25 million (R$95 million), respectively.
BBC News Mundo contacted the Venezuelan government for comment on the US accusations, but did not receive a response before publication.
However, Maduro’s government has long dismissed the drug trafficking allegations as an attempt by the United States to justify the ouster of the president.
In a statement issued on Monday (24/11), the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry described the designation of the Cartel de los Solis as a terrorist organization as a “ridiculous slander.”
The government insisted that the Cartel de los Soles “does not exist” and that this action constitutes a “despicable lie to justify an illegal and illegal intervention against Venezuela.”