US drops drug cartel claims against Maduro
US drops drug cartel claims against Maduro after invasion, kidnap
The US Justice Department has quietly scaled back its indictment of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, retreating from a central Trump-era claim that he led a drug cartel.
The original accusation, included in a 2020 grand jury indictment, portrayed the Cartel de los Soles as an organized criminal group allegedly led by Maduro and engaged in large-scale cocaine trafficking.
The claim became a central pillar of Washington's pressure campaign against Caracas and was repeatedly cited to justify escalating sanctions and military operations.
In July 2025, the US Treasury Department designated the so-called cartel as a terrorist organization, a move later backed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and former National Security Adviser Robert C. O'Brien.
Yet specialists in Latin American crime and narcotics have long noted that the "Cartel de los Soles" is not a verifiable organization but a slang term coined by Venezuelan media in the 1990s to describe corruption among individual military officials - not a structured cartel.
Behind the DOJ's politicized indictment of Maduro: a CIA-created 'network' and coerced star witness - The Grayzone
The US Department of Justice indictment of Venezuela's kidnapped leader, Nicolas Maduro, is a political rant that relies heavily on coerced testimony from an unreliable witness. Despite DOJ edits, it could expose more Americans to the CIA's own history of drug trafficking.
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