Narco-Terrorism, Fentanyl, and a False Narrative
Let’s Kill All the Lawyers (Part 4): The Cartel Myth and Its Consequences
Parts 1, 2 and 3 addressed the lawfulness of US military air attacks against alleged narcotrafficker “go-fast” boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean. It is concluded that the strikes are not lawful.
Trump’s administration argues that the lethal strikes will save lives by cutting off the flow of drugs killing Americans.
But, according to the Government Accountability Project on 20 November, it is not cocaine coming on boats from Venezuela that is to blame, and nearly 70 percent of US overdose deaths involve fentanyl from Asia that comes into the US through Mexico by land.
Fentanyl is said to be a highly potent synthetic opioid that is used primarily as pain medication and is 30 to 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine.
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, fentanyl is now responsible for most drug overdose deaths in the US, causing over 71,238 deaths in 2021. It is said that Fentanyl’s ease of manufacture and high potency makes it easier to produce and smuggle than other drugs.
Be all this as it may, U.S. prosecutors contended in 2020 that Venezuela’s President, Nicolás Maduro, was the leader of a powerful transnational drug-trafficking organisation called “Cártel de los Soles” (cartel of the suns).
In July 2025, the U.S. Treasury classified Cártel de los Soles as a “specially designated global terrorist” for facilitating narco-terrorism by aiding, so the Treasury contended, certain other foreign terrorist organisations which threaten the peace and security of the United States.
However, Latin American commentators say that Cártel de los Soles is not an organised cartel but is at most a loose network of cells within the Venezuelan armed forces. According to the New York Times, the expression “Cártel de los Soles” was coined by Venezuelan media in the ’90s as slang for officials corrupted by drug money.
The New York Times states that neither the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s annual National Drug Threat Assessment which details major trafficking organisations, nor the annual World Drug Report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, has ever mentioned Cártel de los Soles.
Nevertheless, on Saturday 3 January 2026, U.S. personnel abducted Maduro and his wife from Venezuela and took them to the United States to answer charges contained in a “superseding” indictment that was opened that day.
This indictment does not allege that Maduro was the leader of a powerful transnational drug-trafficking organisation called Cártel de los Soles.
The indictment alleges merely that Maduro participates in and protects “a culture of corruption” in which powerful elites enrich themselves through drug trafficking the profits of which flow to corrupt officials who operate in a “patronage system run by those at the top” referred to as the Cártel de Los Soles, a reference to the sun insignia on the uniforms of high-ranking Venezuelan military officers.
The indictment alleges that, in recorded meetings in October 2015 with confidential sources of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (the DEA), two nephews of Maduro’s wife had described the Cártel de Los Soles and agreed to dispatch over 800 kg of cocaine from Caracas International Airport’s Terminal 4 (Maduro’s so-called “presidential hangar”) to the U.S.
(These two “narcosobrinos” (drug-trafficker nephews) were abducted by the DEA from Port-au-Prince in Haiti in November 2015 as they were finalising the shipping of the cocaine. They were taken to the U.S. and tried by jury in the Manhattan federal district court of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States. They were convicted in November 2017, and the judge sentenced them to 18 years’ imprisonment. In September 2022 they were released in exchange for the release by Venezuela of seven Americans convicted and imprisoned there in 2017 for terrorism.)
The indictment opened on 3 January 2026 contains four charges: First, it charges Maduro with distributing cocaine with intent to provide pecuniary benefits to persons or bodies that engage in terrorist activity; second, it charges Maduro and his wife with importing cocaine into the United States or manufacturing and distributing cocaine knowing or reasonably believing that it would be imported into the United States; third, it charges Maduro and his wife with possessing and aiding and abetting the possession of machine-guns and destructive devices in furtherance of the offences mentioned in the first and second charges; fourth, it charges Maduro and his wife with conspiring to possess machine-guns and destructive devices in furtherance of those offences.
On Monday 5 January, the Maduro couple were brought before the Manhattan federal district court to answer these charges. They pleaded not guilty.
Despite Attorney General Pam Bondi’s mild description (in this superseding indictment opened on Saturday 3 January) of the Cártel de Los Soles as merely a system of enriching corrupt senior officials through drug trafficking, other American cabinet members continue to hew to the opinion that the Cártel de Los Soles is an organised cartel and that Maduro is its leader.
And, despite the unlawfulness of the U.S. military air attacks against alleged narcotrafficker go-fast boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, and even though Secretary for War Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump have now apparently distanced themselves from the operation (see Part 3), other American cabinet members appear to persist with the policy that the U.S. may continue to attack alleged narcotrafficker boats.
Thus, on Sunday 4 January on both these points, Secretary of State Marco Rubio reportedly told NBC that “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 Cártel de los Soles,” he said. “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.”
Gary Moore, a practising attorney for 30 years, is a Senior Associate at the Free Market Foundation.
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