This Saturday (3), US President Donald Trump announced in the early hours of the morning that US forces carried out a large-scale surprise attack against Venezuela and that dictator Nicolás Maduro was captured along with his wife. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio stated that Nicolás Maduro was arrested by the US and will face a criminal trial to be carried out by the US courts. The main accusation is narcoterrorism.
The target of this military offensive, the Nicolás Maduro regime has been targeted by American justice since at least 2020. The pressure exerted by the USA gained a new chapter at the end of July 2025, when the Treasury Department, together with the Department of Justice, sanctioned the so-called The Suns Posterclassifying it as a “specially designated global terrorist entity.”
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According to Washington, the group, based in Venezuela, is commanded by Maduro and by senior Chavismo officials. The cartel operates in drug trafficking in alliance with other criminal organizations, such as the Aragua Trainwho is also from Venezuela, and the feared Mexican Sinaloa poster.
“Today’s measure further highlights the facilitation of narco-terrorism by the illegitimate Maduro regime through terrorist groups such as the Los Soles cartel,” declared US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in July.
What is the Los Soles Cartel
According to the organization InSight Crime, the term Los Soles was first used in 1993, when two generals of the Venezuelan National Guard were investigated for drug trafficking. The sun-shaped insignia worn on these officers’ uniforms gave the network its name. Since then, the expression has been used to identify military personnel who were accused of facilitating the transport of drugs cross country.
According to InSight Crime, the Los Soles Cartel is not a structured criminal group like those in Mexico or Colombia, but “a loose network of cells within the main branches of the Venezuelan Armed Forces — Army, Navy, Air Force and National Guard — involved in illegal activities ranging from drug trafficking to illegal gold mining.”
How the cartel expanded
The growth of the Los Soles Cartel took place in the 2000s, after the launch of the so-called Plan Colombia – a US-funded security program that put pressure on the Colombian guerrillas FARC and ELN. With the military advance into Colombian territorythese organizations began to operate increasingly on the Venezuelan border, where they found connivance from sectors of the Armed Forces.
According to a survey by InSight Crime, during this period the Venezuelan military stopped just charging bribes to release shipments of drugs and began to directly control export routesclandestine runways and airports.
Cases that occurred in the not-so-distant past confirm the current involvement of Chavista forces and authorities in criminal activity. In 2013, InSight Crime reported that an Air France flight left Caracas with 1.3 tons of cocaine. In 2015, Leamsy Salazar, former head of security for dictator Hugo Chávez, accused the current Minister of Justice and number 2 of Chavismo, Diosdado Cabello, of heading the cartel.
In 2020, in President Donald Trump’s first term, the US Department of Justice denounced Maduro and his leadership for narcoterrorismstating that they “abused the Venezuelan people and corrupted Venezuela’s legitimate institutions – including parts of the army, the intelligence apparatus, the legislature and the justice system – to favor the importation of tons of cocaine into the United States.”
For opponents, there is no doubt that the Chavista regime, which was led by the dictator Maduro, was at the center of this criminal mechanism. Former Venezuelan prosecutor Zair Mundaray, now in exile in the USA, classified the network as “one of the greatest perversities created by Chavismo”.
Mundaray added that the absence of violent factional disputes in Venezuela – common in countries like Colombia and Mexico, where rival cartels fight bloody wars for territorial control – is due to the fact that the Chavista State itself centralizes the command of trafficking routes.
“There is no need for this here, because you have an armed force that does it, and anyone who acts outside of this control is reached by the hand of the State”, he stated.
Why the US wants to destroy the cartel
In Washington’s assessment, the Los Soles Cartel has become a financing and political support mechanism for the Chavista regimein addition to being a link between Caracas and international drug trafficking, which also affects American territory. To combat the criminal group, the Trump administration reinforced the US military presence in the Caribbean with warships and raised the reward to US$50 million for information leading to Maduro’s capture.
The American siege currently has the support of countries such as Argentina, Paraguay, Ecuador and Peru, which have also started to classify the Los Soles Cartel as terrorists. Colombia, under the leftist government of Gustavo Petro, denies the existence of the cartel and sees the US accusations as a “political instrument” to overthrow Maduro.
