Cartel of the Suns
Cartel of the Suns takes its name from the small sun emblems that Venezuelan generals wear on their uniforms. In Spanish those emblems are called soles. Journalists turned them into a nickname for officers accused of working with drug traffickers. The phrase has since appeared in US indictments, Treasury sanctions and a terrorism designation. Yet scholars who study the drug trade rarely treat it as a literal cartel with a boss and a chain of command. They read it as shorthand for a web of corruption, in which military and political figures profit from traffickers. So what does the name actually describe? Who has been accused of belonging to it? And how did a reporter's label end up at the center of a quarrel between governments?
In 1993, two National Guard generals of Venezuela's Anti-Drug National Command, Ramón Guillén Dávila and Orlando Hernández Villegas, came under investigation for alleged drug crimes. The case turned on a cocaine shipment from Venezuela to the United States. Guillén had approved it after demands from undercover CIA agents. Those agents were trying to infiltrate the Colombian gangs that moved cocaine north. Thor Halvorssen, Venezuela's anti-drug commissioner, defended Guillén's innocence. Out of this scandal came the first use of the phrase Cartel de los Soles.
Reports of military involvement in the trade surfaced again in 1998. Those early accounts described officers who took payments and looked away from traffickers. A separate allegation concerned Hugo Chávez's Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement-200, whose officers had planned the coup attempts of 1992. They were said to have formed a trafficking group called the Cartel Bolivariano, or Bolivarian Cartel. After those attempts, the Los Angeles Times suggested that officers may have wanted the government because there was "money to be made from corruption, particularly in drugs".
Héctor Landaeta, a journalist and author of Chavismo, Narco-trafficking and the Military, traces the problem to the border. In his account, Colombian drugs first entered Venezuela through corrupt border units. From there, the "rot moved its way up the ranks".
The name returned in 2004, when reporter and city council member Mauro Marcano used it to describe corruption in the Venezuelan government. Shortly before he was murdered, Marcano accused Alexis Maneiro of drug trafficking. Maneiro headed both the National Guard and the National Directorate of Intelligence and Prevention Services.
In 2005, Hugo Chávez expelled the US Drug Enforcement Administration from Venezuela, accusing it of espionage. He later claimed that his anti-drug effort worked better without American involvement, because drug seizures rose by 80% that year. They declined in later years.
Vice News described Chávez's government as expanding corruption to "unprecedented levels" inside a military that was already corrupt. According to that account, Chávez handed military officials millions of dollars for social programs, and the money allegedly disappeared. He also allegedly gave legal immunity to officials involved in trafficking, in order to keep their power and loyalty.
An arrested drug vigilante told Colombian intelligence that senior figures in Chávez's security forces arranged drug shipments through Venezuela. It has also been alleged that the National Guard worked with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC, to ease the trade. British officials went further and alleged that Venezuelan Air Force bases sheltered planes arriving from Colombia with drug cargoes.
In September 2013, authorities at Charles de Gaulle Airport found 31 suitcases holding 1.3 tons of cocaine on an Air France flight. Men from the Venezuelan National Guard were allegedly linked to the case. It astonished the airport authorities, because it was the largest cocaine seizure recorded in mainland France.
On the 15th of February 2014, a commander of the Venezuelan National Guard was arrested while driving to Valencia with his family. He had 554 kilos of cocaine in his possession.
On the 11th of November 2015, DEA agents in Haiti arrested two relatives of Cilia Flores, the first lady of Venezuela. They were an adopted son and a nephew, and they were trying to move 800 kilos of cocaine from Venezuela to the United States. A DEA source stated unofficially that the shipment was allowed through Venezuela because of government corruption. Robert E. Looney suggested that corrupt members of the Presidential Honor Guard may have made it possible.
Yazenky Lamas, a former pilot to Flores, was extradited from Colombia to the United States. He allegedly supplied air traffic codes that let planes carrying cocaine pose as commercial flights. Maduro reportedly asked Colombian Defense Minister Luis Carlos Villegas Echeverri to reject the extradition request. Lamas was linked to hundreds of drug flights operated in Venezuela.
On the 13th of January 2026, a federal court in New York sentenced Carlos Orense Azocar, nicknamed "El Gordo", to life imprisonment plus 30 additional years. The charges were drug trafficking and weapons-related crimes. US investigators called him one of the oldest operators linked to the so-called Cartel de los Soles. His operations began around 2003 and grew gradually, using a network of air and sea routes. A single shipment could range from hundreds to thousands of kilograms of cocaine. The court found that he operated with near impunity inside Venezuela by bribing senior military and intelligence officials. Italy arrested him in 2021, and he was extradited to the United States in 2022. According to Infobae, he also worked with corrupt Colombian military officials and with oil-industry executives, including a former Citgo Petroleum executive.
In 2008, the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, known as OFAC, sanctioned General Henry Rangel Silva and two other current or former officials. It said evidence showed they had materially helped the FARC in the drug trade. The others were General Hugo Carvajal, former director of military intelligence, and Navy Captain Ramón Rodríguez Chacín, a former interior minister. The order froze any assets they held under US jurisdiction. In November 2010, Rangel Silva declared that the military forces were "married to the political, socialist project" led by Chávez. Voters elected him governor of Trujillo state in 2012 with 82.30% of the vote. They re-elected him in 2017 with 59.75%.
On the 22nd of July 2014, Carvajal was detained in Aruba. He had entered on a diplomatic passport and had been named consul general to Aruba that January. The arrest followed a formal US request, which accused him of ties to drug trafficking and the FARC. On the 27th, authorities released him after deciding he held diplomatic immunity, though he was then considered persona non grata. Carvajal defected from the Venezuelan government in 2017. He now contends that top leaders of Maduro's administration run the Cartel of the Suns "to weaponize drugs against the United States".
In January 2015, Leamsy Salazar, the former security chief of both Chávez and Diosdado Cabello, accused Cabello of heading the Cartel of the Suns. Salazar fled to the United States with help from the DEA's Special Operations Division and entered witness protection. He said he had watched Cabello order tons of cocaine moved out of Venezuela. The shipments reportedly traveled through the FARC to the United States and Europe, with possible help from Cuba. Salazar named other senior figures as involved, including Tarek El Aissami and José David Cabello, Diosdado's brother.
On the 18th of May 2018, OFAC sanctioned Cabello, his wife, his brother and his frontman Rafael Sarria. OFAC said Cabello used his power in the government to profit from extortion, money laundering and embezzlement. It alleged that he coordinated drug trafficking with Vice President Tareck El Aissami and split profits with President Maduro. It also alleged that Cabello used public information to track wealthy traffickers, then stole their drugs and property to eliminate competition.
In August 2016, the United States indicted Néstor Reverol, head of the Bolivarian National Guard, for assisting drug trafficking. He allegedly tipped off traffickers, cancelled investigations and released people involved in drug shipments. On the 13th of February 2017, the Treasury sanctioned Tareck El Aissami under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act. He was accused of facilitating drug shipments from Venezuela to Mexico and the United States, and the order froze tens of millions of dollars in assets.
Nicolás Maduro, the president, has personally promoted individuals accused of drug trafficking to high positions. After his inauguration for a third term on the 10th of January 2025, the US State Department under the Biden administration raised the bounty on him from $15 million to $25 million. Under the Trump administration, the bounty doubled to $50 million on the 7th of August 2025.
In December 2025, former General Clíver Alcalá Cordones made a different claim. He said Vice President Delcy Rodríguez and her brother Jorge Rodríguez were the true heads of the Cartel of the Suns. In his telling, Maduro was only a figurehead.
In 2005, every branch of Venezuela's armed forces was ordered to fight drug trafficking. That gave the army, navy and air force data once held only by the National Guard. Mildred Camero, a former anti-drug official under Chávez, said the shared data set off competition. Officers fought to strike deals with the FARC and join the trade themselves.
Colombian authorities said laptops seized in a 2007 raid against Raul Reyes held documents showing Chávez offering the FARC as much as $300 million. The files also purportedly showed rebels seeking Venezuelan help to acquire surface-to-air missiles, and Chávez meeting rebel leaders personally. Interpol considered the files authentic. Some US academics and journalists accused Colombia of exaggerating their contents. In 2008, Organization of American States Secretary General José Miguel Insulza told the US Congress that "there are no evidences" of Venezuelan support for terrorist groups, including the FARC. In 2011, the International Institute for Strategic Studies concluded that Chávez's government funded the FARC's Caracas office and gave it access to intelligence services. Venezuelan diplomats said those findings had "basic inaccuracies". After the FARC disbanded in 2017, dissidents who left the group kept operating in Venezuela with virtual impunity. Their armed personnel number up to 2,500, and they allegedly still cooperate with the Cartel of the Suns.
The National Liberation Army, or ELN, is a Colombian Marxist guerrilla group. According to InSight Crime, it took over the role of supplier and overseer inside Venezuela once the FARC dissolved. It also consolidated control along the Colombian-Venezuelan border. The US government accused Maduro's administration of giving the ELN a "permissive environment". CTC Sentinel reports that the government shields the ELN from Colombian security forces and lets it run financial and recruitment operations. In exchange, the ELN declared that it would defend Venezuela from foreign intervention.
The ELN is present in up to 13 Venezuelan states and employs about 15,000 Venezuelans along the Colombian border. It has reportedly taken over illegal mining operations from other criminal groups, including those in the Orinoco Mining Arc. It recruits impoverished Venezuelans and has set up five radio stations to spread its ideology. In some areas it has assumed state functions, taxing local businesses and residents. It supplies communities with food, weapons, military training and ideological education. In 39 municipalities it distributes food from the government's Local Committees for Supply and Production. It enforces its own rules in territory it controls, reportedly including executions for petty crime and for drug or alcohol use.
Political scientists Juan Antonio Blanco and Emilio Morales argue that Cuba supports the Cartel of the Suns with financial, logistical and intelligence help. They say this gives it international protection and a way around sanctions on Venezuela. They also claim Cuba convinced Chávez that he could stay in power by letting Cuban intelligence inspect and monitor the Venezuelan armed forces. For that reason they call the Cartel of the Suns a "two-headed mafia state". Cuba denies the accusations, saying it is "not a producer of drugs or a drug transit country."
Hugo Carvajal goes further and calls Cuba the mastermind. He says Cuba suggested weaponized drug trafficking to Chávez in the mid-2000s and helped Venezuela organize the Cartel of the Suns. American diplomat Roger Noriega names Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja, son-in-law of Raul Castro, as involved. The Center for a Free Cuba claims that the alliance with the FARC and the ELN was forged "under Cuba's direction". It also names Germán Sánchez Otero, a former Cuban ambassador to Venezuela, among the participants.
Blanco and Morales also place Nicaragua inside the Cartel of the Suns' "criminal ecosystem". Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo are alleged to have links to it, and Nicaragua is described as a place where cocaine is stored before moving north to Mexico and the United States. Mario Zamora Cordero, Costa Rica's security minister, said the group might be present in the Crucitas area of Cutris, where Nicaraguan miners operate illegally. Donald Trump has called Ortega a "narco-terrorist", while Ortega has expressed solidarity with Venezuela and Maduro.
Roberto Samcam, a former Sandinista official turned critic of Ortega, claimed that the Nicaraguan government runs its own network, the "El Carmen Cartel". He said the two groups have a very close relationship. Samcam was assassinated in 2025 while in exile in Costa Rica. El País attributed the killing to Sandinista cells there. It noted that Rodolfo Rojas was killed in June 2022 and Jaime Luis Ortega Chavarría in October 2024, both critics of the Ortega regime.
Timothy Shea, a former acting DEA Administrator, and Geoffrey Berman, a former US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, made a further accusation. They said Hamas and Hezbollah took part in weapons-for-cocaine deals, supplying FARC members and Venezuelan officials with anti-tank rocket launchers. They also alleged that the Cartel of the Suns recruited members of both groups to help plan attacks on US interests. In their account, Adel el Zabayar, a PSUV member who presides over the Federation of Arab Associations and Entities of Venezuela, served as the middleman.
InSight Crime describes the Cartel of the Suns as a "loose network of cells" inside Venezuela's armed forces that "operate essentially as drug trafficking organizations." The cells allegedly run through the army, navy, air force and National Guard, from the lowest ranks to the highest. At the bottom, lower-ranking National Guardsmen reportedly compete for posts at border checkpoints, where bribes for "illicit trade" are paid. A large share of those bribes goes up to their superiors. Corrupt officials then move drugs from Colombia into Venezuela, where they are shipped abroad. Members of the armed forces have also been linked to illegal mining, money laundering and the smuggling of raw materials such as oil and gold.
In the Routledge Handbook of Caribbean Economies, Robert E. Looney calls the group a "loose assembly of high-ranking retired military men". He argues that it does not produce drugs, set prices or restrict competition. Its job is transport, moving shipments through Venezuela to hubs in Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Suriname and Europe via Africa.
The numbers frame its role. About 400 tonnes of cocaine are estimated to pass through Venezuela each year, most of it bound for Europe. Colombia produces about 2660 tonnes annually. The main drug sources for the United States are fentanyl from Mexico and cocaine from Colombia, and Venezuela does not produce or ship fentanyl. Former US officials nonetheless say Venezuela is unique for "the degree of state control and involvement in the drugs trade."
An InSight Crime report from 2022 argues that the group's nature changed after 2017. Venezuela's severe economic crisis left the state unable to pay soldiers and police properly. By the mid-2010s, the report says, the loose network had become an elaborate patronage system. Its main purpose was to keep drug wealth in the hands of well-placed officers, so that they stayed loyal to the regime and to Maduro personally. The report says leaders such as Maduro, Diosdado Cabello, Tareck El Aissami and Néstor Reverol appear to keep a "safe distance" from the drug operations. Opaque business and housing registries make it hard to verify claims that they profit indirectly. They look more like "power brokers" over a web of criminal patronage than managers of trafficking groups.
Phil Gunson of the International Crisis Group sees "abundant evidence of links between several Armed Forces commanders and drug trafficking". He says clear evidence of central coordination by the government has never been presented. A 2016 report by the Christian Michelsen Institute said that few if any details are known about the structure and scope of military control. It noted that the Venezuelan government dismisses such claims as a "US-orchestrated smear campaign", and that reports of officer corruption have grown since Chávez's death. Philip Johnson of Flinders University, writing in 2020 and 2025, calls it a fragmented set of competing networks inside state institutions. He argues that the charge of central coordination by Maduro reflects US efforts to delegitimize the Venezuelan government.
John Polga-Hecimovich of the United States Naval Academy examined the narcoterrorism charge. The Justice Department alleged such crimes "since at least 1999", yet US Southern Command documents mentioned narcoterrorism only 7 times. Each mention concerned Peru or Colombia. The State Department's March 2025 report on global anti-drug operations also never mentioned the Cartel of the Suns, four months before the US claimed in July 2025 that it supported the Sinaloa Cartel and Tren de Aragua.
In March 2020, the US Department of Justice indicted Maduro and 14 other Venezuelan officials on charges of narco-terrorism, conspiracy to import cocaine and drug trafficking. The indictment alleged that since at least 1999 they had acted as leaders and managers of the Cartel of the Suns. It also alleged that Maduro coordinated with the FARC, negotiating multi-ton cocaine shipments and providing weapons. Two of the indicted officials have pleaded guilty in US federal courts. Retired General Clíver Alcalá Cordones pleaded guilty in June 2023 to giving material support and firearms to the FARC. In April 2024 he was sentenced to 21 years and 6 months in prison. Hugo Carvajal, extradited from Spain in 2023, pleaded guilty in June 2025 to all four charges, including narco-terrorism.
In July 2025, the US Treasury Department designated the Cartel of the Suns a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. On the 16th of November 2025, the State Department designated it a Foreign Terrorist Organization, effective the 24th of November. The department called its members "narco-terrorists" and called Maduro's government "illegitimate".
As of November 2025, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Paraguay and Peru had issued their own terrorist designations. Others pushed back. Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum said it was the first time she had heard of the accusations and asked the United States to produce evidence. Colombian president Gustavo Petro dismissed the allegations as a fabricated pretext for regime change. The Colombian Senate defied him, voting 33 to 20 to declare the group a transnational criminal and terrorist organization.
In August 2025, the United States had already sent 4,500 troops and several Navy warships to the southern Caribbean for a counter-narcotics operation. Experts who doubt that the group is a real drug organization led by Maduro criticized the terrorist designation. They described it as a legal rationale for possible military action and regime change.
On the 3rd of January 2026, US forces captured Maduro during strikes in Venezuela, known as Operation Absolute Resolve, and flew him to the United States. He faced charges in the Southern District of New York. Prosecutors accused him of leading the Cartel of the Suns and of "using cocaine to deliberately flood America with drugs". They also accused him of working with the Sinaloa, Zeta and Tren de Aragua cartels. Yet the revised indictment no longer described a formal group. It described his place atop a "patronage system" and a "culture of corruption" funded by drug trafficking.
The New York Times wrote that the new indictment "appeared to tacitly concede the point" made by experts. Secretary of state Marco Rubio nonetheless kept calling the Cartel of the Suns a drug cartel. Jeremy McDermott of InSight Crime said the charge linking Maduro to Tren de Aragua lacks evidence. Elizabeth Dickinson of the International Crisis Group said that "the new indictment gets it right, but the designations are still far from reality".
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Common questions
What is the Cartel of the Suns?
The Cartel of the Suns is an umbrella term for an alleged drug trafficking network involving members of Venezuela's Armed Forces and Bolivarian National Intelligence Service. Experts treat it as journalistic shorthand for a system of corruption in which officials profit from traffickers, not as a single hierarchical organization.
Why is it called the Cartel of the Suns?
The name comes from the sun emblems, called soles, on the uniforms of Venezuelan generals. It was first used in 1993 as a journalistic label after two National Guard generals were investigated over a cocaine shipment to the United States.
Who has been accused of leading the Cartel of the Suns?
Accusations have named Nicolás Maduro, Diosdado Cabello, Hugo Carvajal, Tareck El Aissami and Néstor Reverol, among others. In December 2025, former General Clíver Alcalá Cordones claimed Delcy Rodríguez and Jorge Rodríguez were the true heads, not Maduro.
When did the United States designate the Cartel of the Suns as a terrorist organization?
The US Treasury Department designated it a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in July 2025. The State Department designated it a Foreign Terrorist Organization on the 16th of November 2025, effective the 24th of November 2025.
Is the Cartel of the Suns a real cartel according to experts?
Most independent experts say there is no evidence of a unified cartel, though corruption and drug trafficking by Venezuelan officers is well documented. InSight Crime describes a loose network of cells and, later, a patronage system meant to keep officers loyal to the regime.
What happened to the Cartel of the Suns charge after Maduro was captured?
After US forces captured Maduro on the 3rd of January 2026, the revised indictment dropped the claim that the Cartel of the Suns was an actual organization. It described a drug-trafficking-backed patronage system and culture of corruption instead, though Marco Rubio kept calling it a drug cartel.
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