The United States Uses a Fabricated Drug Charge for a Potential Strike on Venezuela

US ships deployed towards Venezuela -- image via Al Jazeera news video screenshot

By Vijay Prashad

Suddenly, out of nowhere, the United States government agencies began to repeat the name “Tren de Aragu”’ as if it were the new al-Qaeda. In January 2025, the White House designated Tren de Aragua as a “foreign terrorist organisation”, and in March, the administration of US President Donald Trump evoked the Alien Enemies Act (1789) to warn against the ‘invasion of the United States by Tren de Aragua’. The US State Department, in February 2025, had declared that Tren de Aragua was an international drug cartel on par with such already recognised cartels as the Mexican Las Zetas (now Cártel del Noreste), Sinaloa, and Jalisco cartels as well as the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) that was formed in Los Angeles (US) and has now taken root in El Salvador thanks to a decade-long US deportation policy. Unlike Tren de Aragua, these other cartels are well-known, and their work has been frequently documented by the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).

The most recent DEA report for 2025 confirms several facts about the drug cartels that traffic vast amounts of drugs (from cocaine to fentanyl) into the United States. It certainly has long sections on the Mexican and Salvadorian gangs, which have deep roots in the drug trade. Since 2019, the DEA and other agencies have tracked the movement of lethal drugs from being carted via the Caribbean and the Central American landline to the Pacific Ocean route. Drugs leave the ports of Guayaquil (Peru), Esmeraldas (Ecuador), and Buenaventura (Colombia) for the ports such as Puerto Escondido (Mexico) before they are carted into the US market. Over 80 percent of the lethal drugs go along this Pacific coastline, according to the United Nations World Drug Report 2025, while only just above 10 percent go across the Caribbean Sea. For a very long time now, the DEA has made the accurate assessment that most of the drugs entering the United States come from the Andes, from Central America, and from Mexico.

So, what does Tren de Aragua have to do with any of this, since it is a prison gang created inside the Tocorón prison in central Venezuela (about 150 kilometres away from Caracas)? The gang was created in 2012 by Héctor Rushtenford “Niño” Guerrero Flores (a convicted criminal who escaped from the prison in 2023 and has not been seen since then). Niño Guerrero’s gang, Tren de Aragua, is accused of taking advantage of the migration out of Venezuela to build its network in the United States and elsewhere across Latin America and to expand his trafficking opportunities through this migration web. However, it is more than likely that the actual network does not exist, but that former Tren de Aragua members have consolidated themselves as nodes for criminal activity in different places. Guerrero is wanted in Venezuela and has a migration alert from Chile, where he is believed to have taken refuge amongst the half million Venezuelans in this southern cone country. The United States government has targeted Tren de Aragua and Guerrero, offering a $12 million reward for his arrest. But Guerrero is nowhere to be found.

A Fabricated Cartel

How does the United States government go from a legitimate concern for the entry of drugs into the country to sending seven US warships and one nuclear-power submarine, to encircle Venezuela for an “enhanced counter-narcotics operation”? How will these warships, which are just outside the Venezuelan sea boundary, do anything to either catch Guerrero, stop the Tren de Aragua, or prevent the cartels from carrying drugs to the United States? Guerrero is most likely not in Venezuela, his gang operates across Latin America and in the United States, and most of the drugs are carted through the Pacific Ocean and not the Caribbean Sea. So, what are these warships doing off Venezuela’s coastline, even though the US says that they are on an ‘anti-cartel mission’?

In April 2025, the United States increased its reward for the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro Moros from $25 million to $50 million. The reason given for this increased bounty is that the US accuses Maduro of being the leader of the Cartel of the Suns (Cartel de los Soles). The term Cartel of the Suns was first used in 1993 to describe the activity of some senior military officers and anti-narcotics officials in the drug trade. This was long before the entry of Hugo Chávez into the presidential palace in 1999. The term was used because of the solar symbol on the uniforms of high-ranking Venezuelan army officers.

There was no actual cartel. After the death of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez in 2013, several exiled Venezuelan journalists wrote books picking up on Marcano’s observation about the ‘suns’ but now arguing that there was an organised cartel and not just some corrupt officers. Central amongst these books is Héctor Landaeta’s Chavismo, Narcotráfico y Militares (2014) and Emili J. Blasco’s Bumerán Chávez: Los fraudes que llevaron al colapso de Venezuela (2015). But Landaeta told the Miami Herald in 2015 that “the Cartel de los Soles is more of a phenomenon than an organised group”. Nonetheless, in July 2025 the US Treasury Department designated the group as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist”. Between Landaesta’s admission in 2015 and the present, there was almost silence in the US public documents about the fabricated Cartel de los Soles (although the use of a false drug charge against Maduro was used by Trump in 2020). There is no indication at all of any connection between this “cartel” and the Tren de Aragua, which is itself more a loose term that is nothing like the major Colombian and Mexican cartels that have vertical lines of organisation.

The massive military build-up along Venezuela’s coastline, the increased reward for the arrest of Maduro, and the accusation that the Venezuelan government is linked to the Tren de Aragua provides the foundation for a classic military intervention against Venezuela in the name of the War on Drugs. The idea of the Cartel de los Soles is operating like the Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq in 2002-03, with the US administration desperate to find the casus belli (cause for war) that otherwise simply does not exist.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are On Cuba: Reflections on 70 Years of Revolution and Struggle (with Noam Chomsky), Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism, and (also with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of US Power.

This article was produced by Globetrotter