The sick farce of Donald Trump’s illegal assault on Venezuela and abduction of its president and his wife has been even further exposed, after Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) admitted that the cartel Trump claimed was run by Nicolas Maduro doesn’t exist.

When is a ‘cartel’ not a cartel? When Trump has anything to do with it

Trump used Maduro’s supposed ‘cartel’ as the whole basis for his escalating and wholly criminal aggression against Venezuela. From declaring Venezuela bombing innocent fishermen into oblivion, to seizing oil tankers and closing Venezuela’s airspace, to declaring the Maduro government a terrorist organisation, to last week’s night attack that murdered dozens of civilians – all of it was based on claims that fentanyl and other illegal drugs were being shipped en masse from Venezuela into the US.

And all of it supposedly through Maduro’s ‘Cartel de los Soles’ (cartel of the suns) ‘organisation’. But now the DOJ has dropped its claim that the Cartel de los Soles even exists at all.

Typically lazy, Trump and his cronies had copied and pasted the term in July 2025 from a 2020 Grand Jury indictment, apparently without bothering with even basic fact-checking. According to Latin American experts, the term is actually slang that was invented by Venezuelan media thirty years ago to refer to officials who are corrupted by bribes from drug dealers; the ‘Soles’ is a reference to the suns worn on Venezuelan officials’ uniforms.

Despite this nonsense, the US Treasury Department designated the ‘cartel’ as a terrorist organisation – in the same way Trump has labelled the non-existent ‘Antifa’ organisation as a terror group. In November 2025 Trump’s secretary of state Marco Rubio ordered his department to do the same.

Nearly all dropped

Now, the DOJ has quietly [replaced its sick, shoddy joke of an indictment](http://it/ is actually a slang term, invented by the Venezuelan media in the 1990s, for officials who are corrupted by drug money.) of Maduro with a new version that drops 30 of 32 mentions of the cartel and instead accuses him of a “patronage system” and drug-funded “culture of corruption”. In the two remaining instances, ‘Cartel de los Soles’ is now used in the informal sense of the original slang meaning. No notice of correction is provided, of course – and the regime is still planning a show-trial of Venezuela’s elected president.

The US is a rogue state.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

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