Javier Milei conspired to preserve the non-existent Soles Cartel as a terrorist organization. (ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP)
(the English translation needs some cleanup, consider this a rush transcript for now) The much-vaunted Cartel of the Suns turned out to be non-existent. Since 2020, the United States has used it to accuse Venezuela's constitutional president, Nicolas Maduro, of being the ringleader. The creator of this fable was Trump himself during his first administration and last year he renewed his siege on the world's largest oil reserve. However, on Monday night, the U.S. Department of Justice had rewrite the indictment against Maduro, since the cartel was not listed in the US any longer. This change mattered little to Javier Milei, who still keeps the "Suns" in the Public Registry of Persons and Entities linked to Acts of Terrorism and their Financing.
Now the prosecution's accusation against Maduro is is limited to holding him responsible for driving an alleged client system and developing a "culture of corruption," nourished by drug money.
The origin
The Cartel of the Suns was a Venezuelan journalistic creation.
In 1993, there were two National Guard generals who called Ramón Dávila and Orlando Hernández, a namesake of the former Honduran president, serving 45 years in prison for drug trafficking in an American court and pardoned by Trump. Both were charged with drug trafficking.
There is a version that says Dávila and Hernandez had been left with a shipment of cocaine that the DEA had provided to advertise a successful operation.
The newspapers of the time then began to call the corruption that existed among the security forces as Suns. The name came from a feature that distinguished the uniforms of the National Guard: the ranks of the superior officers are expressed with sun-shaped gold buttons that go in the charreteras. From the simple Suns to the Cartel there was barely a step away.
This is what Trump's first administration took when in 2020 they pointed to Maduro as the head of an organization that traffics drugs and named her just as the Suns Cartel. Shortly afterwards they added to that payroll the Minister of the Interior, Justice and Peace, Diosdado Cabello, and the Minister of Defense, Vladimir Padrino López.
It is in that year that Maduro's first accusation and his link to the cartel that was drafted by the Department of Justice are made.
Beyond the accusation and media paraphernalia with which it was accompanied, the existence of this organization was never described in detail. There were no names of its members, of its intermediate chiefs, much less could be detailed, unlike the cartels of Mexico or Colombia, the transnational infrastructure and its operational capacity.
In January 2025, Trump took office second and immediately prepared to relaunch the United States as the gendarme of the world to the United States.
First, he dedicated himself to freeing his country from migrants. For that he dusted off the congressional files a 1789 law called "Exervailed Enemies." It is the one that authorizes him to suspend due process to accelerate mass deportations and which allows him to expel migrants. Even the Venezuelans who last Saturday went to celebrate the invasion and massacre in Venezuela and ended up in prisons from where they will be returned to Caracas.
Then began the world task that included attacks on Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Syria and Iran. The attack on several of these countries justified him by saying it was part of the fight against ISIS. In the Iranian case, he said he sought to delay the nuclear program.
This fast list was what allowed Trump to claim the Nobel Peace Prize because he considered all these facts guaranteed peace in the world. It could not be, they gave it to Venezuelan coup leader María Corina Machado and had to settle for the FIFA Peace Prize.
China's presence in Latin America, and perhaps the main buyer of Venezuelan crude, inexorably led Trump to focus on Maduro. The Soles Cartel was part of the list of reasons why more than a hundred military and civilians were murdered. Most Venezuelans and 32 Cubans.
Argentina
From the first day of government, Milei assured that his government would be the main ally of the United States in the south of the subcontinent.
In August last year MIlei's Minister of Security, Patricia Bullrich, incorporated the Soles Cartel into the Public Registry of Persons and Entities linked to Acts of Terrorism and Their Financing (RePET). It did so together with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Trade and Worship, and the Ministry of Justice.
It was the same procedure the Trump administration used.
At that time, the minister said that the incorporation into the RePET empowers Argentina to apply financial sanctions and operational restrictions that limit its capacity to act in illicit activities such as drug trafficking, smuggling, illegal exploitation of natural resources and its links with other criminal structures in the region.
The maneuver was publicized as a Milei achievement in the readjustment of Argentina in the world.
Once it was known that the Department of Justice modified the charge against Maduro, leaving the non-existent existence of the Suns, the Milei government decided not to remove this ghost organization at the RePET.
As a reward, Marco Rubio contacted Foreign Minister Pablo Quirno to thank him for the Argentine government's support for the U.S. attack on Venezuela. In fact, both at the UN and the OAS, Argentine representatives shamelessly supported the Trump administration's war and deadly action.
Rubio thanked Quirno for the "continuous cooperation to confront narcoterrorism and strengthen security in Latin America." The Argentine Foreign Minister returned the gentleness by publishing in X that the libertarian government trusts that these events represent a decisive advance against the narco-terrorism that affects the region.
Now, we need to remove our own disinformation: https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2026-01-05/fact-focus-fabricated-and-misrepresented-images-shared-widely-online-after-us-removal-of-maduro