The US Justice Department has quietly scaled back its indictment of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, retreating from a central Trump-era claim that he led a drug cartel.
The original accusation, included in a 2020 grand jury indictment, portrayed the Cartel de los Soles as an organized criminal group allegedly led by Maduro and engaged in large-scale cocaine trafficking.
The claim became a central pillar of Washington’s pressure campaign against Caracas and was repeatedly cited to justify escalating sanctions and military operations.
Yet specialists in Latin American crime and narcotics have long noted that the “Cartel de los Soles” is not a verifiable organization but a slang term coined by Venezuelan media in the 1990s to describe corruption among individual military officials — not a structured cartel.
That distinction is now reflected in the revised indictment, released after Maduro was kidnapped by US forces. While it still accuses him of participating in a drug-trafficking conspiracy, it drops the claim that the Cartel de los Soles exists as an actual cartel, redefining it instead as a “patronage system” and a “culture of corruption” allegedly fueled by drug profits.
“Cartel de los Soles” is not a verifiable organization but a slang term coined by Venezuelan media in the 1990s to describe corruption among individual military officials — not a structured cartel.
Same approach as they have done with Antifa - the notion that a descriptive term can be repurposed as a (non-existant) oppositional entity is perfect for people who want to scare their followers with bogeymen.
See also the absurd misusage of “woke” to encompass anything that isn’t hateful sexism, racism, etc.
We should arrest Trump for being part of the Y’allqaeda Islamist terror group then.
Oil Qaeda
I heard he is considering the presidential immunity defense that Trump used, wouldn’t that be ironic.
That only works if your initials are D.T.
Tusk is safe at least.
All drugs should be legal and regulated.
Regulated all the way to perscription/purchase or just regulated in manufacturing?
Hello, I would like a prescription for bath salts, please.
won’t stop nazi chuds from still saying it forever now.
They aren’t going to remember that many Mexican words in a row.
The Cartel le of the uhhhh cartel.
They’ll definitely keep saying it until they’re fed their new talking point. At that point they’ll immediately switch over to repeating those fed lines without any additional thought
When this is all done they’ll have him on a misdemeanour and he’ll do 6 weeks of community service.
I am guessing that (aside from getting rights to oil) the plan originally was for right-wing leaders, groups, and citizens to rise up and overthrow “the oppressive dictatorship.” Then to “work with the new legitimate government” and send him back to Venezuela to be tried for “treason.” Which I am sure would be execution, or have a big show about the lead-up before finding him have “killed himself to escape justice.”
They’ll charge him with littering, give him the death penalty, and use that as precedent that any crime is punishable by death.
