Cartel De Los Soles, the ‘cartel of the suns’, is now on the US foreign terror organisation (FTO) list. The problem is that this cartel – which the US claims is run by senior Venezuela politicians – may not even exist. It was already subject to lesser sanctions. As one thinktanker explained:
There is no such thing, so Maduro can hardly be its boss.
There are other alarm bells too. Despite how forcefully this (possibly fictional) cartel is spoken about by US leaders, the organisation wasn’t even mentioned in the US’s latest major drug report released in January 2025.
The US claims to be fighting a war against ‘narcoterrorists’. Since September, that war has claimed at least 82 lives in at-sea air strikes. Evidence to support the strikes is scarce. And even US military judges insist there is an extremely thin legal basis for them. One even said:
there is no world where this is legal.
Critics says the FTO classification is just one step on the road to regime change. And that that is what the entire operation, now called Southern Spear, is about. One commentator framed the mission as:
an escalating regime-change offensive, combining open military violence with an economic siege that has quietly claimed far more lives.
For emphasis, the FTO list includes ISIS and Al Qaeda.
At times, the shifting US narrative lingers on the danger of fentanyl, a synthetic heroin. But this is a drug which Venezuela reportedly does not produce to any significant degree. What Venezuela certainly does have is oil. In fact, it has more proven oil reserve than Saudi Arabia: 303 billion barrels.
Certainly, FTO status opens up a whole range of military options for the US. With a large chunk of the navy now assigned to the Caribbean, the US is well positioned to exercise them.
Covert operations underway
On 22 November, unnamed officials told the press the US would start with covert operations. Mass leaflet drops were reportedly being planned for president Nicolas Maduro’s birthday – 23 November. These never materialised. Yet the announcement of war was hardly new. Trump had already taken the surely self-defeating decision to announce covert CIA action in October.
Journalist and Latin America expert Belen Fernandez called it:
a rather unique approach since one does not normally broadcast actions that are supposed to be, um, secret.
And the massive military build-up is hardly subtle either, Fernandez pointed out. And it would be remiss to ignore the historical and social context, and internal political dimensions, of Southern Spear:
To be sure, the US has never met a “war on drugs” it didn’t love, given the convenient opportunities the whole drug-war narrative offers for wreaking havoc worldwide, militarising the Western Hemisphere, criminalising poor Americans and all sorts of other good stuff.
This would all align with the forthcoming US National Security Strategy (NSS). The document is expected to bind together all Trumpian urges, hatreds and anxieties into one package: ‘homeland’ security, the wars on migration and drugs, internal enemies, control of the Western hemisphere and so on.
China and Iran are expect to be downgraded as threats.
Preparing for war
Maduro, one of the few political leaders who can match Trump for chaotic on-camera energy, took to the stage to argue for peace on 21 November:
Venezuelan President Maduro:
The people in the United States, listen to me.
Dialogue? Yes!
Peace? Yes!
Respect? Yes.
War? Listen to me, war no, never never war! pic.twitter.com/tEUTNbrisB
— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) November 23, 2025
Also on 21 November, the US aviation authority issued a NOTAM (notice to airmen) which covered large parts of Venezuela and the Caribbean:
BREAKING: The United States has issued a new NOTAM covering the entirety of the Venezuelan Flight Information Region (FIR). The advisory cites a potentially hazardous security environment due to a deteriorating situation and increased military activity in and around Venezuela. pic.twitter.com/78OQU5Jif2
— Faytuks Network (@FaytuksNetwork) November 21, 2025
The NOTAM, which you can read here, warned aircraft and operators in no uncertain terms:
TO EXERCISE CAUTION WHEN OPERATING IN THE MAIQUETIA FLIGHT INFORMATION REGION (SVZM FIR) AT ALL ALTITUDES DUE TO THE WORSENING SECURITY SITUATION AND HEIGHTENED MILITARY ACTIVITY IN OR AROUND VENEZUELA.
Some operators canceled flights. The notice seemed like a precursor to airstrikes. Yet, like the leaflet drops, they never came.
And there are other holes in the US narrative too. In an extended study of satellite imagery, The New York Times found that US warships weren’t even patrolling established Caribbean drug routes.
Rather, the Navy has been:
positioning warships near Venezuela’s coast in locations far from the Caribbean’s main drug-smuggling routes.
This, the NYT said, suggested:
that the buildup is focused more on a pressure campaign against Venezuela than on the counternarcotics operation the Trump administration says it’s waging.
The complexities of a shadow war
Maduro and Trump have said they are open to talks, yet other parts of the Trump regime have compared the ‘narcoterrorist’ threat to Al Qaeda. Certainly, Maduro is subject to criticism. His government is under investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity related to the detention and disappearance of political dissidents. Trump had previously tried to link Maduro with Tren de Aragau, an actually existing Venezuelan cartel. However, in May a leaked internal intelligence memo contradicted Trump’s claims. After that it appears that a choice as made to build a narratives around the Cartel de Los Soles instead.
And, it would be impossible to ignore that Israel, key US ally and genocidal arms recipient, is too. In fact the US has repeatedly attacked and sanctioned the court in defence of Israel. And the history is clear: the US is no stranger to Latin American drug smuggling. As far back as 1993, allegations were being made that the “CIA drug connection is as old as the agency” itself. To its credit, unlike Israel and the US, the Maduro government has pledged cooperation with the ICC.
Groping for a narrative
But the question is about more than just the behavior of leaders. Venezuela is a country of over 28 million people. US policy in the last 25 years has shown a willingness to engage in wars and a habit of getting bogged down in them at vast expense to the ordinary citizens in the target countries. We’d do well to recall the power vacuums left in Iraq and Libya. And indeed Afghanistan, where for years the US essentially backed and supported a government with profound links to a global heroin empire.
There are also 15,000 US military personnel in the Caribbean now. They’re there as part of the largest military build-up since the Haiti intervention in the early 1990s. They’re spoiling for a fight. And they are overseen by Donald Trump, a president groping for a narrative, well aware from his first term that military action can offset internal crises. Crises like, to take just one example, the fallout of the Epstein disclosures.
One does not have to descend into puerile campism to see that what could follow from airstrikes, destabilisation operations or, god forbid, a ground invasion could swallow up millions of lives and set half a continent alight.
Featured image via the Canary
