Placard held demanding that US military stop interfering in Venezuela. Source: AP Photo.
An official shift in criminalization: from Tren de Aragua to the “Cartel de los Soles.”
On Monday, November 24, the Trump administration took an unprecedented leap by designating the so-called “Cartel de los Soles” as a foreign terrorist organization—a category nominally reserved for only the gravest threats to US national security.
The decision opened the door to new pressure tools for use against the Venezuelan government, though legal experts agree it does not explicitly authorize the use of lethal force without additional approval. What is paradigmatic about the announcement is the very construction of the target: an entity that does not exist as a structured criminal organization but, rather, as political rhetoric conveniently elevated to legal status.
The term “Cartel de los Soles” does not describe a traditional criminal organization with a command structure, transnational infrastructure, and operational capacity comparable to Mexican or Colombian cartels. According to multiple analyses, it is a label appropriated by the White House to refer to an alleged nationwide illicit network supposedly led by President Nicolás Maduro himself.
In reality, the expression originated in the 1990s to identify specific cases of military corruption. In 1993, two National Guard generals—Ramón Guillén Dávila and Orlando Hernández Villegas—were accused of facilitating cocaine trafficking. The nickname, alluding to the sun insignias on military uniforms, became a journalistic shorthand for institutional corruption, not the name of any cohesive group.
The qualitative leap occurred when that internal rhetoric was adopted by Washington. In March 2020, the Department of Justice filed formal indictments against high Venezuelan officials—President Maduro; the sectoral vice-president for Citizen Security, Justice, and Peace, Diosdado Cabello; and the minister of defense, Vladimir Padrino López—all under the “Cartel de los Soles” label.
In 2025, the revival of this narrative coincided first with the invocation of the obsolete 1798 Alien Enemies Act—an instrument that suspends due process to accelerate mass deportations—and later with an unprecedented military deployment in the Caribbean.
The sequence reveals a pattern: whenever the “maximum pressure” strategy requires a new narrative boost, the phantom criminalization of the Venezuelan state resurfaces with renewed vigor.
Tren De Aragua: the rise and decline of a criminalization pretext
The ascent of the Tren de Aragua (TdA) from media obscurity to the status of “global terrorist threat” is one of the clearest examples of enemy-making in the new Trump era. Until 2022, the gang was virtually absent from US headlines. Although Insight Crime—directly funded by the US State Department—had been covering it since 2019, its presence in US public debate was marginal until the political and migration context made it convenient.
The turning point came in August 2023, when Jason Owens, then head of the US Border Patrol, posted the first official claim on Twitter that alleged TdA members were trying to enter the United States. CNN amplified the statement, establishing the pattern for the months ahead: accusations based on suspicion, immediate media validation, and little to no forensic evidence.
In September 2023, the Cacique Guaicaipuro Liberation Operation in the Tocorón prison—where the gang operated—generated simultaneous mass coverage in The Washington Post, The Economist, Insight Crime, and OCCRP, another investigative outlet funded by the US and focused on Washington’s geopolitical adversaries.
Criminalization of migrants reached its peak in February 2024 with the murder of nursing student Laken Riley in Georgia. The accused, José Ibarra, is Venezuelan, and his brother Diego was linked to the TdA “based solely on tattoos,” according to Venezuela’s Public Prosecutor’s Office.
Pressure escalated. In July 2024, the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated the group as a transnational criminal organization, and on January 20 of this year, in his first set of executive orders, Trump elevated it to a global terrorist organization. The cited homicide became a legislative catalyst, leading Trump to sign the Laken Riley Act on January 29.
The criminalization mechanism operated on three fronts:
Media: the gang went from being a local prison-based phenomenon to a “mega-gang” with presence in 16 states, as claimed by the neoconservative New York Post in November 2024.
Political: US lawmakers such as María Elvira Salazar and Mario Díaz-Balart, strongly tied to the Cuban-US lobby, framed Venezuelan migration as a “criminal invasion.”
Military: the deployment of warships in the Caribbean was justified as an “anti-narcotics” manoeuver to combat the TdA, though experts like retired Colonel Mark Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies admitted it was “a matter of political signaling,” without real authority for interdiction operations.
The Venezuelan government effectively dismantled the organization. In September 2023, Operation Cacique Guaicaipuro resulted in 44 arrests and warrants for 102 others, including leader Héctor Guerrero Flores. In 2024, official figures showed reductions since 2019 of 93% in vehicle theft, 87% in aggravated homicide, and 77% in aggravated robbery. Nevertheless, Venezuela’s actual effectiveness was consistently ignored, while unverified accusations against Venezuelans abroad multiplied.
Recycling and shift toward the “Cartel de los Soles” myth
If the TdA served to criminalize migration, the “Cartel de los Soles” now operates as a tool of high-level political justification for financial and military encirclement. The recent designation introduces no new evidence; instead, it recycles an accusation lacking support even in US intelligence reports.
The DEA’s 2024 National Drug Threat Assessment is explicit: the groups with greatest control are the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Neither Venezuela nor any “Cartel de los Soles” appears as a structural threat.
But data dismantles the narrative. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), 61% of the world’s cocaine comes from Colombia, 26% from Peru, and 13% from Bolivia. Venezuela is not a significant producer. In terms of trafficking routes, 87% of cocaine exits via the Pacific; only 8% travels through the Eastern Caribbean, where Venezuela’s coast lies. Of that small fraction, Venezuelan authorities seize and destroy 70%, according to official data. The geography of the drug trade does not cooperate with US accusations.
The recycling of the myth follows a geopolitical false-flag logic. In March 2020, when “maximum pressure” showed signs of exhaustion, Attorney General William Barr convinced Trump to pivot toward an anti-drug narrative. Naval and aerial deployments in the Caribbean under the pretext of anti-narcotics operations generated headlines of toughness without committing resources to direct conflict. As journalist Elías Ferrer documented for Guacamaya, the intent was to “begin an orderly withdrawal” from regime-change efforts without appearing weak.
Five years later, the script is revived with adjustments. The joint designation of TdA and the “Cartel de los Soles” allows the US to apply anti-terror laws against Venezuela while safeguarding corporate interests: OFAC sanctioned the “cartel” as a global terrorist entity but did not identify specific individuals, allowing corporations like Chevron to continue operating without violating regulations. Marco Rubio, Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, has been the chief architect of this narrative, aligning the Venezuela discourse with the “America First” agenda and the Cuban-US lobby of South Florida.
The media campaign clearly aims at psychological pressure. By saturating the information space with stories about criminal infiltration in the highest levels of government and the Armed Forces (FANB), the objective is to sow distrust, demoralization, and chaos. The implicit message to Venezuelan military officers is: “Your superiors are narco-terrorists—side with us.” It is a classic psychological warfare strategy designed to fracture institutional loyalty and create conditions for the dismantling of institutions and society—an essential element for any scenario of forced regime change.
The military deployment in the Caribbean, including armed incursions into international waters near Venezuela, is not a response to any real drug-trafficking threat. As Cancian explained, “the ships have no law-enforcement authority, unlike the Coast Guard.” Their function is to signal military readiness, not interdict drugs. The Paria Peninsula—framed as a supposed trafficking corridor—has seen a marked decline in illicit activity since 2020, with seizures such as the 790 kilos of cocaine destroyed in Macuro in February 2025.
Psychological pressure on Venezuelans operates on two fronts:
Externally: migrants face mass criminalization—or ‘crimmigration‘—exemplified by the 238 Venezuelans deported by the US to El Salvador’s maximum-security CECOT prison in March 2025, without trial, under the previously defunct Alien Enemies Act.
Internally: the campaign seeks to erode the morale of the FANB and the broader population to generate institutional breakdown and social chaos.
Last Thursday, Vice President Delcy Rodríguez noted that the US strategy reflects a historical interest in controlling Venezuelan territory—not only for its natural resources and strategic location but also for its “anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist strategic political vision.”
In response to the designation of the alleged “Cartel de los Soles,” she stated: “We are not a military power, nor are we the ones who kill millions around the world to steal their resources.”
Notably, the US financial system absorbs 85% of global drug-trafficking profits—roughly 2.7% of its GDP.
The strategy seeks for sanctions, blockades, and military threats to generate fractures within military leadership, reproducing the model of “hybrid warfare” used elsewhere. This is combined with new technologies—through Operation Southern Spear—in which Trump’s key allies, the Big Tech companies, play a central role.
Washington has fabricated an enemy that fits with its narrative, regardless of evidence. While the US financial system absorbs 85% of global drug-trade profits and while Ecuador—according to the World Customs Organization—has become the world’s main cocaine exporter, the spotlight remains fixed on Venezuela.
In summary, the designations of Tren de Aragua and the “Cartel of the Soles” are rhetorical wild-cards used to violate international law, justify military and financial siege. They aim to create the internal chaos required for a regime-change operation aimed at seizing Venezuela’s strategic resources and eliminating a political project that challenges Washington’s declining unipolar vision.
Featured image: The criminalization strategy seeks to ensure that sanctions, blockades, and military threats generate institutional and social fractures, thereby replicating the model of “hybrid warfare” carried out in other contexts. Source: AP Photo.
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
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Cameron Baillie is an award-winning journalist, editor, and researcher. He won and was shortlisted for awards across Britain and Ireland. He is Editor-in-Chief of New Sociological Perspectives graduate journal and Commissioning Editor at The Student Intifada newsletter. He spent the first half of 2025 living, working, and writing in Ecuador. He does news translation and proofreading work with The Orinoco Tribune.
