The US is recycling an old, failed dish: Nicolás Maduro as a drug lord, a story that clashes with all official data on this crime in the continent. It seasons this already rotten stew with another failed storyline: the “Tren de Aragua” as a terrorist organization. (The Simpsons)
The US narratives about the Cartel of the Suns and the alleged connection of President Nicolás Maduro with drug trafficking are nothing more than a reheated dish that was never edible, not even when it was first cooked.
However, the poor quality of this stew does not make it any less dangerous. The imperial power has used even more rotten pots as excuses to invade countries, bomb cities, and exterminate entire pueblos.
In fact, just days after US Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the doubling of the reward Washington is offering for Maduro’s capture, military forces were deployed in the Caribbean under the pretext of repressing drug trafficking by “Latin American cartels.”
The Venezuelan government and the Bolivarian National Armed Force (FANB), with their long experience confronting all kinds of aggressions—military, paramilitary, mercenary—from abroad, have remained on high alert.
It is obvious that a new offensive is underway to destabilize the country politically, after the constitutional cycle of elections concluded with the municipal contests this past July, which produced very favorable results for Chavismo at all levels (national, regional, and local).
These new US schemes have their internal counterpart in the explosive attack plots revealed by Diosdado Cabello, Minister of Interior, Justice and Peace. The initial investigations point toward the far right, whose leader, María Corina Machado, has gone underground, though she still gives interviews to international media or social media statements almost daily.
Paradoxically, the Trump administration appears to have eased economic pressure by partially renewing Chevron’s license to operate in Venezuela.
An old and overused recipe
What is being applied today against Venezuela is nothing new. It is the same concoction the US have been cooking since 1999, when Hugo Chávez came to power through an overwhelming avalanche of votes. The purpose has always been the same, in Venezuela as elsewhere with leftist or socially oriented governments: to criminalize popular movements and demonize their leaders.
Chávez was linked to every group and movement already demonized: Colombian guerrillas, ETA, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas. His government was accused of supplying uranium for the “Iranian atomic bomb” and of every fabrication brewed by right-wing media and intelligence laboratories.
With Maduro—who had been Chávez’s foreign minister for six years—the same treatment continued. However, there has been an aggravating factor: in 2015, the “Cartel of the Suns” narrative was set in motion, as a drug operation supposedly directed by his government.
In the most recent iteration led by prosecutor Bondi, Maduro is presented to the world as a mix of Ivan the Terrible, Al Capone, Osama bin Laden, and Pablo Escobar. A higher bounty is offered for information leading to his capture, in a kind of Western scenario where Bondi plays the sheriff looking for a Clint Eastwood 2.0, willing “for a fistful of dollars” (well… not a fistful, but 50 million) to take on the adventure of capturing or assassinating a head of state.
As US officials did before with Chávez and continue to do with Maduro, what they aim to achieve is the political objective of legitimizing an assassination, an invasion, or any other violent means to overthrow Venezuela’s government. With their recycled accusations, they seek to manipulate international public opinion so that any such action against the Caribbean nation will be accepted as legitimate.
In today’s climate of dominant hegemonic narratives and post-truth situations, this accusation is simmering in a broth that has long been on the stove: the demonization of Venezuela as a rogue state and of its government as a “narco-dictatorship.”
A lie with a faithful audience
One of the reasons the US elite is happy to recycle discredited narratives as the Cartel of the Suns is the existence of a significant audience ready to swallow garbage in an obvious state of decomposition.
There are people willing to accept and defend any post-truth, fake news, plain lie, slander, irresponsibility, or even outright stupidity, as long as it feeds their desire, their illusion, their delirium of seeing the Bolivarian government fall, and above all, to quench their unbearable thirst for revenge.
“To sustain the already old and worn-out allegation of the Cartel of the Suns, not even the slightest real evidence has been presented. Everything is limited to falsehoods circulated by intelligence agencies and spread, without ethics or responsibility, by the international press,” says Fernando Casado, Spanish lawyer and journalist, who has investigated the issue thoroughly.
His research gave rise to the book El mito del cartel de los soles, narcotráfico, crimen organizado y política en Venezuela [The Myth of the Cartel of the Suns: Drug Trafficking, Organized Crime, and Politics in Venezuela], published in 2020, after the first wave of this story of reckless accusations.
Casado, professor at the Technical University of Manabí in Ecuador and at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, does not hesitate to describe the Cartel of the Suns as “a fantasy that makes Narnia look real.”
It was never edible and it gets worse
From its hatching, the Cartel of the Suns accusation has been a toxic mash. It was cooked up through a classic procedure of the slander factories involving US imperial power, its allies, international organizations, US- and European-funded NGOs, and, playing a starring role, media outlets, journalists, and influencers.
It is a genuine information centrifuge. The false news originates in Venezuela as just another rumor, spread by a small outlet or a social media influencer; though completely lacking in evidence or credibility, it is picked up by a so-called “global and prestigious” media outlet in Europe or the US (in this case, The Wall Street Journal); then it is echoed by a chorus of media aligned with the anti-Venezuela strategy; and finally, it bounces back into the country of origin already endowed with a label of truth because it appeared in that “global and prestigious” outlet.
Once that cycle is completed—which Casado calls “information laundering”—the story has enough weight for US politicians hostile to Venezuela to take it up; intelligence agencies investigate it (or claim to); and, after enough slow cooking, the then-attorney general William Barr could announce the first bounty for Maduro’s capture: $15 million.
Just days before leaving office, Joe Biden raised the reward to $25 million, emphasizing the far-right narrative of alleged electoral fraud.
At the time of the original “movie,” the reality of drug trafficking from Colombia to the US made the supposed importance of a Venezuelan cartel ridiculous: only 7% of Colombia’s total drug output passed through Venezuelan territory. The remaining 93% reached the US consumer market through Pacific routes or Colombia’s Caribbean coasts.
Today, as the sequel to this bad movie rolls out, the data regarding drug transit through Venezuela have actually dropped. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, only 5% of narcotics produced in Colombia go through Venezuela.
That same report declares Venezuela free of both drug crop cultivation and drug labs. The idea of a drug cartel without plantations or laboratories is, frankly, absurd.
Only far-right fanatics are capable of repeating such a slander—just as they did in 2024 with María Corina Machado’s “denunciation”/”claim” before US congressmen. According to her, Venezuela was then the world’s fourth-largest producer of cocaine, a cosmic-scale lie that fed into the already worn-out hoax of the Cartel of the Suns and the so-called narco-regime.
And now, enriched with terrorism
Before recycling the Cartel of the Suns narrative, the Trump administration had placed its bets on accusing Venezuela of the high crime rates in several of its main [US] cities.
This was based on another far-fetched premise: that the criminal gang known as the “Tren de Aragua” had the organization and capacity to threaten the national security of the US superpower.
Additionally—as expected—they linked that gang to the Venezuelan government, claiming it operated under Maduro’s direct orders.
The tale did not gain much traction, first, because US intelligence agencies themselves denied that the Tren de Aragua had the strength attributed to it, and refuted the claim that it was led by the Venezuelan president.
It became then clear that none of the 252 Venezuelans who were kidnapped and sent to El Salvador were members of the Tren de Aragua, contrary to what was claimed during the media spectacle staged alongside Nayib Bukele.
Despite being thoroughly discredited by the repatriation of the kidnapped migrants, the Tren de Aragua hoax is now being used as yet another ingredient in the poisonous dish served up by Bondi.
In the “new” accusation against Maduro, he is not only charged with drug trafficking but also with terrorism, since Washington has classified the Tren de Aragua as a terrorist organization.
Terrorism experts consider this decision one of the most absurd and nonsensical ever made by US authorities. At its peak, the Tren de Aragua was just a criminal gang dedicated to drug trafficking, extortion, and kidnapping in a small area of north-central Venezuela. It was neutralized, and most of its leaders were taken down in clashes with security forces.
Elevating it to the status of a multinational terrorist group is a grotesque exaggeration.
But we already know that no matter how absurd the lie, if there is a geopolitical pretext to use it, it will be done—just like the case of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, where all it took was Colin Powell (a general with a sinister soul) waving a vial, and the whole world, literally, swallowed the tale that allowed the US to kill a million Iraqis and later execute Saddam Hussein for “war crimes.”
These waves of manipulated or false news, rumors, gossip, and fabrications all point in the same direction: to stigmatize Venezuela as a threat to the national security of the US superpower and its neighbors, and thereby justify military, paramilitary, mercenary, or any other form of imperial aggression.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Venezuelan editorial staff.
Translated by Venezuelanalysis.
