The narrative falls apart: the US admits that the “Cartel of the Suns” does not exist after kidnapping President Maduro

The Department of Justice of the United States (USA) published a revised formal accusation against President Nicolás Maduro in which it eliminates the existence of the Cartel of the Suns as an alleged terrorist and hierarchical organization, which further dismisses the narrative they used to kidnap the Venezuelan president.

After years of using this pretext to justify sanctions, pressure operations and the appointment of the Head of State of the Bolivarian nation as the leader of a foreign terrorist organization, the new drafting of the prosecution now admits that such a group does not exist as a real entity, international media report.

What was once presented as a “drug cartel”, as led by the Venezuelan dignitary, is now described simply as a “client system” and a supposed “culture of corruption” among officials, confirming the warnings that narcotics experts have held for decades.

In 2020, the indictment drafted under the supervision of Emil Bove III, a faithful ally of the Donald Trump administration, mentioned the Cartel of the Suns 32 times as a transnational criminal organization. Now, after the kidnapping of President Maduro and his wife, First Lady Cilia Flores, on January 3, the new accusation reduces the mentions to only two, downgrading the concept of “terrorist organization” to a colloquial Venezuelan term, which, according to him, is to refer to officials corrupted by drug trafficking money.

International organizations such as the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and regional experts have never included the Cartel of the Suns in their annual global threat reports, stressing that the designation was a political construct designed to lay the foundations for regime change.