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The US Justice Department has quietly scaled back its indictment of Venezuelan President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, retreating from a central Trump-era claim that he led a drug cartel.<\/strong><\/p>\n The original accusation, included in a 2020 grand jury indictment, portrayed the\u00a0Cartel de los Soles<\/em>\u00a0as an organized criminal group allegedly led by Maduro and engaged in large-scale cocaine trafficking.<\/p>\n The claim became a central pillar of Washington\u2019s pressure campaign against Caracas and was repeatedly cited to justify escalating sanctions and military operations.<\/p>\n 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\u2019Brien.<\/p>\n Yet specialists in Latin American crime and narcotics have long noted that the \u201cCartel de los Soles\u201d is not a verifiable organization but a slang term coined by Venezuelan media in the 1990s to describe corruption among individual military officials \u2014 not a structured cartel.<\/p>\n That distinction is now reflected in the revised indictment, released after Maduro was kidnapped by US forces. While it still accuses him of participating in a drug-trafficking conspiracy, it drops the claim that the\u00a0Cartel de los Soles<\/em>\u00a0exists as an actual cartel, redefining it instead as a \u201cpatronage system\u201d and a \u201cculture of corruption\u201d allegedly fueled by drug profits.<\/p>\n
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