This Tuesday (06), the Trump administration, in a reformulated version of the legal action presented by the United States Department of Justice, stopped attributing to the former president of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro the leadership of the so-called Los Soles Cartel and also began to minimize the very existence of the group, retreating in relation to previous accusations.
In August 2025, the US government offered US$50 million to obtain any information related to Nicolas Maduro. Furthermore, in the same month, they accused Maduro of leading the Cartel.
According to a new version of the document released by the United States Department of Justice on the same day, Maduro is no longer described as “head of a drug trafficking terrorist organization”. Instead, he was accused of “participating in, protecting and maintaining a culture of corruption based on enrichment through drug trafficking”, in addition to making a profit from these activities. Even so, he will continue to face four charges linked to narcoterrorism.
The escalation reached its peak last Saturday (3), when a military operation was carried out in Caracas aiming to arrest Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. The action, considered unprecedented in recent decades in Latin America, provoked a strong international reaction and was widely repudiated by the global community.
The Los Soles Cartel, classified by the State Department as an international terrorist organization in November, appears only twice in the new court document. In the reformulated document, the group is no longer treated centrally and is now described only as a generic term that encompasses drug trafficking activities conducted by sectors of the Venezuelan elite.
