The Justice Department has backed off a dubious claim about President Nicolás Maduro that the Trump administration promoted last year in laying the groundwork to remove him from power in Venezuela: accusing him of leading a drug cartel called Cartel de los Soles.
That claim traces back to a 2020 grand jury indictment of Mr. Maduro drafted by the Justice Department. In July 2025, copying language from it, the Treasury Department designated Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organization. In November, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and President Trump’s national security adviser, ordered the State Department to do the same.
But experts in Latin American crime and narcotics issues have said it is actually a slang term, invented by the Venezuelan media in the 1990s, for officials who are corrupted by drug money. And on Saturday, after the administration captured Mr. Maduro, the Justice Department released a rewritten indictment that appeared to tacitly concede the point.
Prosecutors still accused Mr. Maduro of participating in a drug trafficking conspiracy but they abandoned the claim that Cartel de los Soles was an actual organization. Instead, the revised indictment states that it refers to a “patronage system” and a “culture of corruption” fueled by drug money.
Where the old indictment refers 32 times to Cartel de los Soles and describes Mr. Maduro as its leader, the new one mentions it twice and says that he, like his predecessor, President Hugo Chávez, participated in, perpetuated and protected this patronage system.
Profits from drug trafficking and the protection of drug trafficking partners “flow to corrupt rank-and-file civilian, military and intelligence officials, who operate in a patronage system run by those at the top — referred to as the Cartel de los Soles or Cartel of the Suns, a reference to the sun insignia affixed to the uniforms of high-ranking Venezuelan military officials,” the new indictment said.
The retreat calls into greater question the legitimacy of the Trump administration’s designation of Cartel de los Soles as a foreign terrorist organization last year. Spokespeople at the White House and the Justice, State and Treasury Departments did not respond to requests for comment.
Elizabeth Dickinson, the deputy director for Latin America at the International Crisis Group, said the new indictment’s portrayal of Cartel de los Soles was “exactly accurate to reality,” unlike the 2020 iteration.
“I think the new indictment gets it right, but the designations are still far from reality,” she said. “Designations don’t have to be proved in court, and that’s the difference. Clearly, they knew they could not prove it in court.”
Still, Mr. Rubio again referred to Cartel de los Soles as an actual cartel in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, a day after the revised indictment was unsealed.
“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 Cartel 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.”
The Drug Enforcement Administration’s annual National Drug Threat Assessment, which details major trafficking organizations, has never mentioned Cartel de los Soles. Nor has the annual World Drug Report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
But the 2020 indictment, which laid out a lengthy narrative about a yearslong conspiracy, portrayed Cartel de los Soles as a drug trafficking organization, led by Mr. Maduro. It said the group took actions like providing weapons to the FARC, a Marxist rebel group in Colombia that has funded its militant activities by drug trafficking, and trying to “flood” the United States with cocaine “as a weapon.”
The drafting of the 2020 indictment was overseen by Emil Bove III, then a terrorism and international narcotics unit prosecutor in New York. Mr. Bove ran the Justice Department in the opening months of the second Trump administration and had a turbulent tenure, which included firing dozens of officials and ordering the dismissal of bribery charges against Eric Adams, then the mayor of New York. Mr. Trump later appointed Mr. Bove to a lifetime position on a federal appeals court.
While the experts in Latin American crime and narcotics issues praised the corrective about Cartel de los Soles, some also criticized other aspects of the revised indictment.
For example, the indictment added as a defendant — and a supposed co-conspirator with Mr. Maduro — the head of a Venezuelan prison gang called Tren de Aragua. The connection described in the indictment is thin: It says only that the gang leader, in phone calls in 2019 with someone he thought was a Venezuelan official, offered escort services to protect drug shipments passing through Venezuela.
Last year, Mr. Trump declared that Mr. Maduro was directing the activities of Tren de Aragua, even though the U.S. intelligence community believes the opposite is true.
Jeremy McDermott, a co-founder of InSight Crime, a Latin America crime and security think tank, said the inclusion of the Tren de Aragua leader as an accused co-conspirator with Mr. Maduro in a drug trafficking conspiracy “reflects President Trump’s rhetoric” but was misleading. He pointed to his think tank’s analysis of Tren de Aragua that says the gang has no ownership of major cocaine shipments.
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