Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced this week his intention to declare the so-called Cártel de los Soles a foreign terrorist organization, ratcheting up the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against Venezuela.
In a statement Sunday, Rubio described an organized cabal of Venezuelan military officers and politicians working hand in glove with drug traffickers to oversee the shipment of massive quantities of cocaine to American shores, all overseen and managed by President Nicolás Maduro.
“Based in Venezuela, the Cartel de los Soles is headed by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking individuals of the illegitimate Maduro regime who have corrupted Venezuela’s military, intelligence, legislature, and judiciary,” Rubio said.
The announcement came months after the Treasury Department issued its own sanctions against the group, known in English as the Cartel of the Suns, which it accused in July of “using the flood of illegal narcotics as a weapon against the United States.”
It’s a troubling image: a state captured by ideologically motivated drug lords hell-bent on the destruction of the American way of life.
Rubio’s push to label Maduro and his allies as terrorists, though, is just the latest escalation in the Trump administration’s fusion of America’s two forever wars: the war on drugs and the war on terror.
Since February, the State Department has slapped the foreign terror organization label on more nearly a dozen street gangs and drug-trafficking networks across Latin America, and Trump has used the highly fungible phrase “narcoterrorists” to justify a series of dubiously legal strikes on boats off the coast of Venezuela.
There’s just one giant problem: There is little evidence that Cartel of the Suns exists. The organized communist plot to poison Americans with drugs doesn’t remotely resemble the reality of Venezuelan corruption or the country’s drug trade.
“The idea that this is a narcoterrorist cartel, and that Maduro is directing the traffic and sending drugs and dangerous criminals to the U.S. to undermine the U.S. government — that’s really wide of the mark,” said Phil Gunson, a Caracas-based analyst with the International Crisis Group.
“The war on drugs is not really about drugs.”
To critics of American drug policy abroad, the move against Cartel of the Suns is the latest display of how the U.S. uses anti-drug policies as a smokescreen to bully its neighbors.
“The war on drugs is not really about drugs,” said Alexander Aviña, a professor of Latin American history at Arizona State University. “It’s a way of extending the U.S.’s geopolitical interests and a way to hit at governments deemed to be antithetical to imperial designs.”
How Corruption Works
References to the Cártel de los Soles date back to the 1990s, when local reporters used the term to refer to a handful of generals in the Venezuelan National Guard accused of collusion in the drug trade, according to Gunson, who has lived and worked in the country since 1999.