The U.S. government’s designation of the Venezuelan Cartel de los Soles as a foreign terrorist organization officially took effect Monday as part of President Trump’s aggressive campaign to combat drug trafficking into the United States. The U.S. identifies Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as the group’s leader — and he says the claims of narcoterrorism are actually part of a bid by Mr. Trump to force him from power.
The terrorist designation, which was announced last week, is designed to put more pressure on Maduro, even as U.S. warships and more than 10,000 American troops step up training exercises in the region. The U.S. military has also launched deadly strikes on boats it alleges were carrying drugs off Venezuela’s coast — many of them allegedly run by the Tren de Aragua gang, which the U.S. accuses of ties to the Maduro regime.
In a statement issued Monday, Maduro’s government said it “absolutely rejects the new and ridiculous fabrication” designating “the nonexistent Cartel of the Suns as a terrorist organization, thus repeating an infamous and vile lie to justify an illegitimate and illegal intervention against Venezuela, under the classic U.S. format of regime change.”
Pedro Rances Mattey/Anadolu/Getty
Ahead of the designation announcement, Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed the group was “responsible for terrorist violence … as well as for trafficking drugs into the United States and Europe.”
The Cartel de los Soles was also hit in July with U.S. economic sanctions, which Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said highlighted “the illegitimate Maduro regime’s facilitation of narco-terrorism through terrorist groups like Cartel de los Soles.”
What is — and what isn’t — the Cartel de los Soles?
But what is the so-called Cartel of the Suns? It is not, in the traditional sense, a Latin American drug cartel along the lines of the family-run Sinaloa or the Jalisco New Generation.
The “suns” in the name refers to the insignia used for decades to adorn the uniforms of high-ranking Venezuelan military officers.
Venezuelans, including prosecutors and other officials, started using the term colloquially in the 1990s to refer to the cadre of high-ranking military officers who’d grown rich from facilitating drug-running. As corruption expanded across the country, first under the late dictator Hugo Chávez and then under Maduro as his successor, analysts say the term came to encompass the loosely defined network of police and government officials that facilitated and profited off of activities ranging from illegal mining to fuel and drug trafficking.
File/AP/Miraflores Press Office, Marcelo Garcia 
The term was first elevated to define an alleged Maduro-led drug trafficking organization in 2020, when the U.S. Justice Department, during President Trump’s first administration, announced indictments of Venezuela’s leader and members of his inner circle on narcoterrorism and other charges. The Justice Department accused Maduro, through the Cartel de los Soles, of working directly with the Colombian rebel group FARC to traffic cocaine through Venezuela to the U.S.
The designation as a Foreign Terrorist Organization has generally been reserved for groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS, but the Trump administration has expanded its use to designate eight Latin American organizations accused of drug trafficking and people smuggling, calling it an effort to counter narcoterrorism.
Some analysts say it’s a stretch to even define the Cartel de los Soles as a single unified organization.
“It is not a group,” Adam Isaacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America think tank told The Associated Press. “It’s not like a group that people would ever identify themselves as members. They don’t have regular meetings. They don’t have a hierarchy.”
“It is not a hierarchical or ideological group,” agrees the InSight Crime outlet, which is run by two former journalists who covered Latin America extensively for decades. “Its structure consists of a diffuse network of cells embedded within Venezuela’s main military branches: the army, the navy, the air force, and the national guard, from the lowest to the highest ranks.”
“Although the concept is primarily associated with the military sector, other branches of the [Venezuelan] State embedded within the criminal ecosystem have also been identified, including police forces, the executive branch, and various public officials,” InSight Crime said in an analysis of the purported cartel published in September.
Terrorist designation comes amid U.S. military strikes and build-up
In recent weeks, the U.S. military has conducted at least 21 strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing dozens of people and sparking a debate in Washington about the legality of the extrajudicial attacks.
The Trump administration has carried out the strikes without providing evidence to support its assertions that the boats are carrying drugs and operated by criminal organizations. It says the attacks, which began in late September off the coast of Venezuela and expanded to the eastern Pacific, are meant to stop narcotics reaching American soil.
But Maduro, and some others, see the U.S. military operations and massive buildup of hardware in the region as an effort to precipitate his ouster — if not the prelude to an overt operation to topple his government.
Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Ridge Leoni/U.S. Navy via Getty Images 
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has said the formal designation of the Cartel de los Soles will give a “whole bunch of new options to the United States” to address Maduro’s alleged crimes.
But speaking in an interview with conservative news outlet OAN, he declined to give details on what those options included, or to say whether the U.S. military was planning to carry out strikes on targets inside Venezuela.
“Nothing is off the table, but nothing’s automatically on the table,” he said.
Since American troops and hardware — including the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s most advanced aircraft carrier — started pouring into the Caribbean earlier this year, Venezuela’s U.S.-backed political opposition has been more confidently voicing its perennial promise to see Maduro forced from office, fueling speculation over the real endgame of what the Trump administration says is a counterdrug operation.
Asked by CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell during an extensive interview for 60 Minutes just weeks ago whether the U.S. operations around Venezuela were about “getting rid of Maduro,” President Trump said they were “about many things,” but he said the Venezuelan leader’s days in office were likely numbered.