What is the Cartel de los Soles, listed as a terrorist organization by the United States?

The United States has designated the “Cartel of the Suns” (Spanish: Cartel of the Suns), said to be led by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and senior government officials, as a foreign terrorist organization.

Labeling an organization as a terrorist organization gives U.S. law enforcement and military agencies broader powers to target and disrupt the group.

The United States has stepped up pressure on Maduro in recent months, calling his government illegitimate following last year’s election, which was widely seen as fraudulent. The name gives it another way of heating.

But some people have questioned whether the “Solar Cartel” really exists, and Venezuela’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs “categorically, resolutely and absolutely rejects” the title and describes it as a “new and ridiculous lie.”

Not surprisingly, Diosdado Cabello, Venezuela’s minister of interior and justice, has long called it an “invention.”

Cabello, an alleged senior member of the cartel, accused U.S. officials of using it as an excuse to target people they dislike.

“Whenever someone bothers them, they call them the leader of Catal de los Sols,” he said in August.

Gustavo Petro, the left-wing president of Venezuela’s neighboring Colombia, also denies the cartel’s existence.

“This is a made-up excuse by the far right to overthrow a government that doesn’t obey them,” he wrote on X in August.

But the U.S. State Department insists that the Sun Group not only exists but has “corrupted Venezuela’s military, intelligence, legislative and judicial branches.”

Experts consulted by the BBC said the truth lies somewhere in between.

The term Cartel de los Soles first appeared in the early 1990s.

The term, coined by Venezuelan media after a National Guard general in charge of counternarcotics operations was accused of drug trafficking, refers to the sun-shaped insignia worn on the shoulder patches of generals to indicate their rank.

Mike LaSusa, an expert on organized crime in the Americas and deputy director of content for Insight Crime, said the moniker soon began to be applied to all Venezuelan officials suspected of having ties to drug trafficking, regardless of whether they were part of the same organization.

Raúl Benítez-Manau, an organized crime expert at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), said the group’s activities began in the late 1980s and early 1990s in response to developments in Colombia, the world’s largest producer of cocaine.

At the time, the powerful Medellín drug cartel based in the Colombian city of the same name was being dismantled and the country’s massive anti-drug offensive was bearing fruit.

Mr Benítez-Manao believes that as established smuggling routes came under pressure, Cartel de los Sols began to offer alternative ways of transporting cocaine from Colombia. He said this perception was reinforced during the first years of Hugo Chávez’s presidency. The leftist president led Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013.

“Chavez liked to challenge the United States and cut off all military cooperation between the Venezuelan military and the United States,” he explained.

Benitez-Manao said that without the supervision of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), “some (Venezuela) officers are free to do business with criminals.”

Chavez’s sympathy for Colombia’s left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia guerrillas – which are largely funded through cocaine smuggling – is another factor in the resmuggling of some drugs through Venezuela, Chavez said.

Faced with military pressure at home, the guerrillas shifted some of their operations to Venezuela because they knew the Venezuelan president “viewed them as a left-wing ideological ally,” Mr. Benítez-Manao explained.

Wesley Tabor, a former DEA agent who worked in Venezuela, said that not only did the FARC find a “safe haven” in Venezuela, but many government officials, “from street cops to military aviation personnel,” quickly became their drug-trafficking partners.

Together, he said, they “began flooding hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States.”

Mr. Lasusa said Cartel de los Sols differed from other drug networks in that it lacked a formal structure.

It was not a group per se but “a system of widespread corruption,” he said.

He added that the situation has been exacerbated by Venezuela’s economic crisis under President Chavez’s successor Nicolás Maduro.

“The Maduro regime is unable to provide decent wages to the security forces and, in order to maintain their loyalty, it allows them to accept bribes from drug traffickers,” Mr Lasusa explained.

Benítez-Manao said low- and mid-level officials who control Venezuela’s main entry and exit points, such as airports, form the “Group of the Sun” because they are in a prime position to facilitate the flow of drugs.

But U.S. officials insist that the Sun’s tentacles have reached the highest levels of Maduro’s government, including the president himself.

In 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice accused Maduro and 14 others of conspiring with Colombian armed groups to transport cocaine to the United States.

Senior officials named include Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino and former Venezuelan Supreme Court President Mike Moreno.

U.S. prosecutors also claimed in the indictment that since at least 1999, Groupe Sol was led and managed by Maduro, Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, former military intelligence chief Hugo Carvajal and former General Clive Alcala.

They said this was supported by information provided by former senior Venezuelan military officials, including Carvajal and Alcalá.

Leamsy Salazar, the late Hugo Chávez’s former security chief, provided information about Group Sol to U.S. officials as early as 2014.

Salazar, who left Venezuela with the help of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said Interior Secretary Cabello leads a “Group of the Sun.”

Cabello denied the accusation, saying it was part of an “international conspiracy.”

But the accusations from former Venezuelan officials continued.

In 2020, General Alcalá turned himself in to Drug Enforcement Agency agents after a falling out with Maduro’s government and admitted to supporting the FARC and its cocaine-trafficking operations.

Former Venezuelan spy chief Carvajal, who also fled Venezuela earlier this year after a disagreement with Maduro, also pleaded guilty in a U.S. court. Charged with drug trafficking and narco-terrorism.

“For years, he and other Sun officials used cocaine as a weapon to flood New York and other American cities with poison,” a federal prosecutor said during the trial of Carvajal, known as “El Pollo” (The Chicken).

Maduro and Interior Minister Cabello remain in Venezuela, but the United States recently increased the reward for information leading to their capture to $50m (£38m) and $25m respectively.

The BBC contacted the Venezuelan government for comment on the US accusations but did not receive a response before publication.

However, Maduro’s government has long denied the drug trafficking charges against it, viewing it as an attempt by the United States to justify overthrowing Maduro.

Venezuela’s foreign ministry said in a statement released on Monday that labeling the Sun Group a terrorist organization was a “ridiculous fabrication.”

It insisted that Sun Group “does not exist” and that the move was “a despicable lie aimed at justifying illegal intervention against Venezuela.”