Discussions are being had about a supposed drug cartel you likely never heard of until it was recently put out there by Donald Trump. It’s called the Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns), and yes, it does exist, but it’s not what the White House is claiming it is. The administration is simply echoing a largely baseless story that has been building for more than two decades, much of it hinging on speculation.
A recent report from InSight Crime discusses the cartel. While InSight Crime has a long history of reports on the group, the reporting is based on postulations that draw on loose conclusions and pass them off as evidence. One can infer the outlet’s bias by its funding, which comes from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the U.S. Department of State, the British Embassy in Colombia, and many other Western institutions linked to governments.
Some of what has been reported in the past is true. However, finding facts amid so much propaganda can be difficult. Recently, the former Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations and Executive Director of UNODC, the UN’s anti-drug and anti-crime program, Pino Arlicchi, penned an article for L’AntiDiplomatico, a newspaper in Rome. In it, he made myriad declarations challenging the propaganda we’ve heard in the U.S. about the cartel.
Arlicchi contends, as most of the world outside the U.S. does, that the Venezuelan government’s cooperation against drug trafficking was among the best, rivaled only by Cuba’s. He also stated unequivocally that the 2025 UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime) report listed Venezuela as a marginal country on its drug trafficking map.
“Venezuela, according to the UN, has consolidated its position as a territory free from the cultivation of coca leaf, marijuana, and similar products, as well as from the presence of international criminal cartels,” writes Arlicchi.
Trump invoked the cartel based on little factual data, bringing up allegations that have long been dismissed. By reviving the idea of the cartel, which is actually a “hodgepodge of small local networks,” according to Arlacchi and many others, it again highlights how the group is more of a network that peddles in small-time criminality found in every country in the world. Even InSight Crime admits the cartel “has no defined command structure,” signaling a lack of organization.
Instead, Cartel de los Soles has served as a placeholder for corrupt officials in Venezuela and Colombia who were apprehended as part of smuggling operations. There are signs on Cuban social media, a precursor to incoming propaganda, that the U.S. is about to declare Cuban leaders as part of the cartel, again signaling just how loosely they associate any Latin American leaders they want out of the way with a cartel that isn’t quite a cartel.
An independent media outlet in Spain that does deep analysis on issues facing Latin America described Cartel de los Soles as “not a drug cartel, but rather a corruption network within the Venezuelan armed forces that facilitates it, but it lacks the organization, hierarchy, or strategy of such criminal structures,” further challenging narratives driven by the U.S. government and found throughout U.S. news media.
“Despite its name, the Cartel of the Suns does not operate as a cartel, which are relatively centralized criminal organizations with a single or collective leadership and a common strategy… Therefore, it lacks a defined command structure and is not motivated by a common ideology,” reads the report from El Orde Mundial (The World Order). “Rather, it is a profit-driven system where public officials seek to benefit from their positions by collaborating or allowing the passage of drugs through the country.”
The so-called “cartel” could be described in the same terms as the Dixie Mafia in the United States. Neither is an organized crime syndicate like the mafia, but instead a collection of groups that often work together across regions, state lines, and territories. In the U.S., these smaller groups exist all over the country, particularly in rural America. This is not any different than their existence in Venezuela or any other country where similar black market networks exist.
Government officials involved with similar groups exist all over the world. For Venezuela, much of the criminal activity can be attributed to sanctions, forcing the smuggling of fuel and precious resources, along with illegal mining activity and drug smuggling. However, Cartel de los Soles existed as early as 1993, six years before Hugo Chavez was elected president. The idea that the corruption in upper levels of the Venezuelan government didn’t exist before Chavez is another attempt at villainizing the current Venezuelan government with yet another lie.
As the U.S. continues to murder people in international waters and uses drug smuggling out of Venezuela to justify it, it helps to inform the public of the facts and document the truth for the whole world to see. This is but one step in holding the powerful to account, and when looking at how many billionaires are in the White House, it’s clear who’s pulling Trump’s strings, especially when discussing foreign policy, resource theft, and U.S. corporate greed.
When it comes to Trump, he has done more to expose how U.S. foreign policy operates than any other president in recent memory. The corruption in the White House makes them blind to how much they’re exposing how military interventions are not about bringing democracy anywhere, but to enrich those who benefit from forcing U.S. corporate interests down the throats of other countries for access to their resources under the guise of bringing them “freedom.”
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