For years, Washington repeated the same phrase until it became common knowledge: “Venezuela is the epicenter of a narco-state governed from on high by a criminal organization called the ‘Cartel of the Suns.'” However, in a turn that contradicts this narrative, the Trump administration removed Venezuela from the list of countries that “demonstrably fail” in their anti-drug commitments this week. The US president attributed this change to the “positive advances” achieved under the interim administration of Delcy Rodríguez. Thus, with a simple strike-through on a list, decades of accusations about Venezuela’s supposed narco-state were, de facto, called into question by the very government that had upheld them.
If Venezuela now “demonstrably” meets its drug control commitments, as Trump claims, one must ask: On what basis has the country been characterized as a hub of state narco-activity for years? The answer is simple. There was never a solid foundation, only a political narrative constructed to fit each moment’s objectives. This leads us to question several things.
Did the Cartel of the Suns ever exist?
No, not as Washington described it for two decades. It was described as “a hierarchical criminal organization with a single command, controlled by the Venezuelan state, and the hemispheric epicenter of drug trafficking.” This entity does not appear in United Nations world drug reports. Nor does it appear in the DEA’s annual reports on major trafficking organizations. When US justice was required to provide evidence in court supporting that accusation, it could not do so. In January 2026, the Department of Justice presented a revised indictment that abandoned the idea of a specific cartel, replacing it with the vague formulations of a “patronage system” and a “culture of corruption.” An organization that no anti-drug agency can document and that the prosecution itself removed from its judicial record is not a cartel. It was a political fiction that served its purpose while convenient but dissolved as soon as it ceased to be useful.
Has Venezuela ever been an epicenter of drug trafficking?
The most recent World Drug Report confirms what an atlas already shows: coca cultivation is concentrated in the Andean region, with Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia being the main producers.
Venezuela does not top that list. However, it shares a very long border with Colombia, making it a transit territory, like many other neighboring countries of producing areas. However, attributing blame based on geography is a political operation. The US State Department has clarified that the “transit country” designation does not necessarily mean that a government does not combat drug trafficking and may simply respond to geographic, commercial, and economic factors.
Has Venezuela ever fought drug trafficking?
Washington rarely mentions the significant figures from Venezuelan interdiction when deploying the narco-state argument: 8,223 anti-drug operations in 2022; over 32 tons of cocaine seized that year, according to the International Narcotics Control Board; 52 tons reported in 2023; and an additional 25 tons in the first half of 2024.
Similar seizure figures have been recorded by independent organizations like InSight Crime, which have no interest in doing favors for Chavismo. However, there are the usual reservations about the transparency of official statistics. This reasonable doubt about the numbers, rather than denying the existence of real operations, is precisely the kind of nuance that the label “narcoterrorism” is designed to erase.
Once again, the United States demonstrates that the term “narcoterrorist” and anti-drug certification lists are not technical instruments updated by a committee of experts based on available evidence. Rather, they are foreign policy tools activated and deactivated according to Washington’s geopolitical interests.
The Cartel of the Suns was a useful narrative for justifying sanctions, diplomatically isolating Caracas, and criminalizing its leadership. More recently, it was used to prepare the legal groundwork for a forceful operation that ended in the kidnapping of a head of state. Now that Washington has negotiated a transition to a government it favors, the same rhetorical machinery that portrayed Venezuela as an irredeemable narco-state must show that cooperation “works.”
Far from being an objective measure of international compliance, US anti-drug lists confirm once again that they are a tool of power that measures the degree of political obedience of those who govern a country more than the amount of drugs crossing its borders.
Source: Diario Red
Translated from Spanish by The Assembly Media team.