Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, escorted by DEA agents upon their arrival in New York. Photo: XNY/Star Max via Getty Images.
By Max Blumenthal · Jan 5, 2026
The US Department of Justice indictment of Venezuela’s kidnapped leader, Nicolas Maduro, is a political rant that relies heavily on coerced testimony from an unreliable witness. Despite DOJ edits, it could expose more Americans to the CIA’s own history of drug trafficking.
The January 3 US military raid on Venezuela to kidnap President Nicolas Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores was followed by the Department of Justice’s release of its superseding indictment of the two abductees as well as their son, Nicolasito Maduro, and two close political allies: former Minister of Justice Ramon Chacin and ex-Minister of Interior, Justice and Peace Diosdado Cabello. The DOJ has also thrown Tren De Aragua (TDA) cartel leader Hector “Niño” Guerrero into the mix of defendants, situating him at the heart of its narrative.
The indictment amounts to a 25 page rant accusing Maduro and Flores of a conspiracy to traffic “thousands of tons of cocaine to the United States,” relying heavily on testimony from coerced witnesses about alleged shipments that largely took place outside US jurisdiction. It accuses Maduro of “having partnered with narco-terrorists” like TDA, ignoring a recent US intelligence assessment that concluded he had no control over the Venezuelan gang. Finally, the prosecutors stacked the indictment by charging Maduro with “possession of machine guns,” a laughable offense which could easily be applied to hundreds of thousands of gun-loving Americans under an antiquated 1934 law.
DOJ prosecutors carefully avoid precise data on Venezuelan cocaine exports to the US. At one point, they describe “tons” of cocaine; at another, they refer to the shipment of “thousands of tons,” an astronomical figure that could hypothetically generate hundreds of billions in revenue. At no point did they mention fentanyl, the drug responsible for the overdose deaths of close to 50,000 Americans in 2024. In fact, the DEA National Drug Threat Assessment issued under Trump’s watch this year scarcely mentioned Venezuela.
By resorting to vague, deliberately expansive language larded with subjective terms like “corrupt” and “terrorism,” the DOJ has constructed a political narrative against Maduro in place of a concrete legal case. While repeatedly referring to Maduro as the “de facto… illegitimate ruler of the country,” the DOJ fails to demonstrate that he is de jure illegitimate under Venezuelan law, and will therefore be unable to bypass established international legal precedent granting immunity to heads of state.
Further, the indictment relies on transparently unreliable, coerced witnesses like Hugo “Pollo” Carvajal, a former Venezuelan general who has cut a secret plea deal to reduce his sentence for drug trafficking by supplying dirt on Maduro. Carvajal was said to be a key figure in the so-called “Cartel of the Suns” drug network which the DOJ claims was run by Maduro. If and when he appears to testify against the abducted Venezuelan leader, the American public could learn that the “cartel” was founded not by the deposed Venezuelan president or one of his allies, but by the CIA to traffic drugs into US cities.
As sloppy and politicized as the DOJ’s indictment might be, it has enabled Trump to frame his lawless “Donroe Doctrine” as an aggressive policy of legal enforcement, emboldening the US president to levy further threats to abduct or bump off heads of state who stand in the way of his resource rampage. This appears to be the real purpose of the imperial courtroom spectacle to come.
Weaponizing the “narco-terror” hoax
The bulk of the case against Maduro rests on the accusation that the defendants “engaged in… drug trafficking, including in partnership with narco-terrorist groups.” According to the DOJ, Maduro conspired with TDA, as well as the Mexican Sinaloa and Los Zetas cartels to traffic drugs between 2003 and 2011. However, these cartels were not designated by the Trump administration as Foreign Terrorist Organizations until February 2025, a move obviously designed to justify Maduro’s kidnapping and juice up his indictment.
In its bid to convict Maduro, the DOJ will undoubtedly struggle to overcome the conclusion reached in an April 7, 2025 memo by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) that the Venezuelan leader did not control TDA, which he effectively dismantled through a massive 2023 military-police raid on the Tocorón prison that served as the gang’s base of operations. A report in the State Department-funded outlet InSight Crime also complicates the DOJ’s case, finding that “the few crimes attributed to alleged Tren de Aragua members in the United States appear to have no connection with the larger group or its leadership in Venezuela.”
In fact, many of the supposed crimes for which Maduro is charged took place outside the borders and jurisdiction of the United States. The DOJ alleges, for instance, that in September 2013, “Venezuelan officials dispatched approximately 1.3 tons of cocaine on a commercial flight from the Maiquetia Airport to Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport.”
In 2018, five British citizens were convicted in a French court for orchestrating the drug shipment with help from gang members from Colombia and Italy – but not Venezuela. At the time of the incident, Maduro’s government acknowledged corrupt lower level Venezuelan officials had allowed the drugs to pass through airport security. Caracas ultimately arrested 25 people, including members of the military and an Air France manager – a salient fact omitted from the DOJ indictment.
The evidence of Maduro’s involvement in the scandal, according to the DOJ, was that the drug shipment took place “mere months after [Maduro] succeeded to the Venezuelan presidency.” No other proof is offered to demonstrate his culpability.
The indictment goes on to allege Maduro “facilitated the movement of private planes under diplomatic cover” to avoid law enforcement scrutiny as they landed in Mexico. Citing coerced testimony from a Venezuelan government defector, it accuses Diosdado Cabello of coordinating a shipment of 5.5 tons of cocaine on a DC-9 jet to Mexico. None of these claims should hold water in a US court.
As public defender and legal analyst Eliza Orlins explained, “Flights that occur wholly within Venezuela do not cross U.S. airspace, do not implicate U.S. customs territory, and do not, standing alone, violate U.S. law. The indictment attempts to bootstrap these domestic movements into U.S. criminal jurisdiction by asserting that the cocaine involved was ultimately destined for the United States. Intent does almost all the work here.”
Because most of the specific incidents cited in the indictment occurred within Mexico under Presidents Vicente Fox, Felipe Calderón and Enrique Pena Nieto, the DOJ inadvertently implicates these three pro-US administrations, who shaped their drug policies in coordination with Washington. In fact, the top cop during the first two of these governments, former Federal Intelligence Agency chief Genaro García Luna, was convicted in a US federal court in 2023 for presiding over a multi-million dollar conspiracy with the Sinaloa cartel. Former US ambassador to Mexico Robert Jacobson acknowledged that the US knew all about Garcia Luna’s cartel ties, but insisted, “we had to work with him.”
The Honduran double standard
The DOJ also implicates the pro-US government of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, referring to Honduras as a “transshipment” point “in which cocaine traffickers operating in those countries paid a portion of their own profits to politicians who protected and aided them.” Hernandez was convicted in a US federal court in 2023 of trafficking over 400 tons of drugs to the US, but received a pardon this December from President Donald Trump following a lobbying campaign by top Trump donors seeking to maintain the deregulated crypto haven of Próspera off the coast of Honduras.
During his January 3 press conference announcing the abduction of Maduro and his wife, Trump aggressively defended his decision to pardon Hernandez, claiming he’d been “persecuted very unfairly.” Yet the same DOJ prosecutor who authored the original 2020 indictment of Maduro, Trump loyalist Emil Bove, was responsible for the indictment of Hernandez. In contrast to the case against Maduro, the Hernandez indictment contained concrete evidence of his collaboration with major transnational cartels, including video and photographic exhibits, as Anya Parampil and Alexander Rubinstein detailed for The Grayzone.
Hernandez pleaded his case to Trump in a 2025 letter claiming he’d been subjected to a “rigged trial” and convicted “based on the uncorroborated statements of convicted drug traffickers.”
His questionable claim could also apply to the DOJ’s prosecution of Maduro, as many of the most dramatic allegations contained in his indictment are sourced to a convicted drug trafficker who struck a secret deal with US prosecutors to reduce his own sentence in exchange for testimony against Maduro: former Venezuelan Gen. Hugo “El Pollo” Carvajal.
Coerced “star witness” strikes secret deal with US prosecutors
The head of military intelligence under the government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez from 2004 to 2011, Carvajal is cited seven times in the January 3 DOJ indictment as a witness to alleged criminal acts by Maduro and his inner circle. Carvajal was first arrested in 2014 in Aruba on drug running charges, but was returned to Venezuela to the chagrin of US authorities. In 2017, as he faced a pair of indictments in the US, the general suddenly turned on Maduro, who he denounced as a dictator. Carvajal went on to openly endorse the regime change project of US-controlled “interim president” Juan Guaido in 2019, fashioning himself as a courageous defector while proffering his supposed knowledge of the Venezuelan deep state to Washington.
That same year, as Carvajal sought asylum in Spain, the US formally demanded that Madrid hand him over. Now facing the prospect of extradition, he delivered a series of tell-all interviews to legacy outlets like the New York Times, doing his best to legitimize virtually every charge the Trump administration sought to weaponize against Maduro.
Then-Senator Marco Rubio could barely contain his excitement about the prospect of squeezing the Chavista insider for testimony in a future case against Maduro. Carvajal “will soon be coming to the US to provide important information about the #MaduroRegime,” Rubio tweeted on April 12, 2019. “Bad day for the #MaduroCrimeFamily.”
Hugo Carvajal former military intelligence director of #Venezuela is safe & in custody in #Spain.
He will soon be coming to the U.S. to provide important information about #MaduroRegime.
Bad day for the #MaduroCrimeFamily
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) April 12, 2019
It was not until 2023 that Carvajal was finally extradited and placed on trial in the Southern District court of New York. After he pleaded guilty to “narco-terrorism” this June, the Miami Herald reported that he had struck a plea deal which would grant him “a considerable sentence reduction if he provides ‘substantial assistance’ to US investigations.”
Carvajal’s still-secret plea deal gives away the game he’d played since he first emerged as a defector. His allegations against Maduro had been delivered under duress, all designed to satisfy his would-be jailers in the US. He has since indulged one of Trump’s favorite conspiracy theories by alleging in a June 2025 letter to the US president that Maduro manipulated Venezuela’s Smartmatic voting systems to rig the 2020 US presidential election in favor of Biden.
Carvajal’s shameless pandering to Trump and secret plea deal should obliterate his credibility as a witness against Maduro.
In its January 3 indictment of Maduro, the DOJ claimed Carvajal and Diosdado Cabello “worked with other members of the Venezuelan regime” to “coordinate the shipment” of 5.5 tons of cocaine from Simon Bolivar International Airport to Campeche, Mexico in a private jet in 2006. This incident remains the source of intense intrigue, as the ownership of the DC-9 jet by two shadowy American companies points in the direction of US intelligence.
While details of potential covert US government involvement in the 2006 drug shipment remain murky, it is an established fact that the CIA founded and operated the “Cartel of the Suns” which the DOJ now accuses Maduro, Cabello and other top Venezuelan officials of controlling.
Cartel of the Suns: created by the CIA, weaponized by the DOJ
In the original indictment of Maduro, the DOJ explicitly accused Maduro of leading a narco-trafficking cartel called “Cartel of the Suns,” referencing it over 30 times.
The revised DOJ indictment of Maduro unsealed on January 3 states, “Starting in or about 1999, Venezuela became a safe haven for drug traffickers willing to pay for protection and support corrupt Venezuelan civilian and military officials, who operated outside the reach of Colombian law enforcement and armed forces bolstered by United States anti-narcotics assistance.”
It continues: “The profits of that illegal activity flow to corrupt rank-and-file civilian, military, and intelligence officials, who operate in a patronage system run by those at the top-referred to as the Cartel de Los Soles or Cartel of the Suns.”
The informal network of corrupt military officials was in fact established by the CIA under pro-US Venezuelan governments during the 1980’s and ’90’s. Americans were introduced to this inconvenient truth not by some dissident muckraker, but by the New York Times, and by Mike Wallace in a 60 Minutes exposé broadcast in 1993.
Three years earlier, US Customs officials in Miami had intercepted a shipment of 1000 pounds of pure cocaine from Venezuela. But they were soon told by higher-ups in the US government the shipments had been approved by Langley. According to the Times, the CIA sought to allow the cocaine to “enter the United States without being seized, so as to allay all suspicion. The idea was to gather as much intelligence as possible on members of the drug gangs.”
“I really take great exception to the fact that 1000 kilos came in, funded by US taxpayer money,” then-DEA attache to Venezuela Annabelle Grimm remarked to 60 Minutes. “I found that particularly appalling.”
To organize the shipments from Venezuela, the CIA recruited generals from the Venezuelan National Guard who were trained by the US. Because officers in the National Guard wore patches on their uniforms bearing the symbol of a sun, the informal drug network was branded as “The Cartel of the Suns.”
In the years after the CIA-run cartel was exposed in US media, it disappeared from public view entirely, only to be revived when the US government began hounding Gen. Carvajal, who may soon appear as its key witness against Maduro. While corruption is still present in the Venezuelan military, there is little evidence of anything resembling a Cartel of the Suns in its ranks.
As Phil Gunson, a Caracas-based analyst for the International Crisis Group, told CNN, “Cartel de los Soles, per se, doesn’t exist. It’s a journalistic expression created to refer to the involvement of Venezuelan authorities in drug trafficking.”
A former senior US official echoed Gunson, describing Cartel of the Suns as “a made-up name used to describe an ad hoc group of Venezuelan officials involved in the trafficking of drugs through Venezuela. It doesn’t have the hierarchy or command-and-control structure of a traditional cartel.”
The official told CNN that the DEA or Defense Intelligence Agency had supplied Trump with a “purely political” assessment of the cartel to support his assault on Venezuela.
Discovery granted to the defense in the trial of Maduro and Flores risks severely embarrassing the US government by extracting further evidence of CIA drug running. This may be why the DOJ softened its language about the Cartel of the Suns, referring to it in the January 3 indictment as a mere “patronage network” rather than as a cohesive criminal syndicate, and mentioning it only twice.
During his first appearance in court earlier that day, the kidnapped Venezuelan leader was only able to speak for a brief moment. “I am innocent. I am a decent man. I am President…” Maduro pleaded before being cut off by his lawyer.
Max Blumenthal
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath,The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.
