The Justice Department has quietly narrowed one of the most consequential allegations used by the Trump administration against Nicolás Maduro, retreating from its earlier claim that he led a drug cartel known as Cartel de los Soles. In a revised indictment unsealed on Jan. 4, 2026, prosecutors reframed the term not as a discrete criminal organization but as shorthand for a patronage system and culture of corruption inside Venezuela’s civilian, military, and intelligence services.

The change marks a significant legal recalibration. The original 2020 indictment referenced Cartel de los Soles 32 times and cast it as a structured drug trafficking organization under Maduro’s command. The rewritten version mentions the term only twice. It no longer describes Maduro as a cartel leader, instead alleging that he participated in and protected a system in which drug trafficking profits flowed upward through corrupt networks.

“A Patronage System,” Not a Cartel

According to the new indictment, profits from cocaine trafficking moved through a hierarchy of officials “referred to as the Cartel de los Soles,” a phrase linked to the sun insignia worn by senior Venezuelan officers. Experts in Latin American crime have long described the term as media slang dating to the 1990s, not the name of an operational group.

The Justice Department’s retreat places new pressure on U.S. policy decisions taken in 2025. In July of that year, the Treasury Department designated Cartel de los Soles as a foreign terrorist organization, a step echoed by the State Department in November at the direction of Marco Rubio. Those designations relied heavily on the earlier indictment’s framing.

Designations Without Proof

Unlike criminal charges, terrorism designations do not require courtroom proof. That distinction now looms large. The Drug Enforcement Administration’s annual National Drug Threat Assessment has never identified Cartel de los Soles as a trafficking organization, nor has the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in its yearly World Drug Report. The Justice Department’s revised filing implicitly acknowledges those gaps.