Amid all of the spectacle that has come with the U.S. capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, federal prosecutors have quietly amended a key claim they leveled against the South American leader last year. They no longer assert that the drug-trafficking organization he allegedly led—“Cartel de los Soles”—really exists. 

Fresh reporting by The New York Times outlines how the U.S. Justice Department has excised all references to Cartel de los Soles as an actual, structured organization in amendments to its 2020 indictment accusing Maduro of trafficking narcotics. Last year, the Trump administration took the allegations a step further, designating Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organization responsible for “violence throughout our hemisphere as well as for trafficking drugs into the United States and Europe.” 

But “Cartel de los Soles” is not the name of a specific organization. Rather, it is a slang term created by Venezuelan media in the 1990s to refer to corrupt officials who take drug money, according to experts cited by the Times. 

On Saturday, the Justice Department “appeared to tacitly concede the point” by abandoning the claim that the phrase refers to a specific group and instead using it in reference to a “patronage system” and a general “culture of corruption” linked to drug proceeds, according to the report.

Elizabeth Dickinson, deputy director for Latin America at the International Crisis Group, told the Times that the revised portrayal is “exactly accurate to reality,” unlike the earlier 2020 version. 

“I think the new indictment gets it right, but the [terrorism] designations are still far from reality,” she told the newspaper. “Designations don’t have to be proved in court, and that’s the difference. Clearly, they knew they could not prove it in court.” 

In contrast to the amended charges, the 2020 indictment set out an extended narrative about Cartel de los Soles, claiming that it was a group not only deeply engaged in trafficking cocaine to the United States “as a weapon” but also funneling arms to the FARC rebel group in Colombia, the Times said. 

Yet neither the Drug Enforcement Administration’s annual National Drug Threat Assessment nor the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s annual World Drug Report cite Cartel de los Soles, according to the newspaper. 

In an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio portrayed Cartel de los Soles as a real group headed by Maduro. 

“We will continue to reserve the right to take strikes against drug boats that are bringing drugs toward the United States that are being operated by transnational criminal organizations including the Cartel de los Soles,” he said, in comments cited by the Times. “Of course, their leader, the leader of that cartel, is now in U.S. custody and facing U.S. justice in the Southern District of New York. And that’s Nicolás Maduro.”

Read more at The New York Times

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