The recent escalation of tensions between Washington and Caracas, which has led to the United States deploying at least seven warships to the southern Caribbean, can be traced back to a particular day.
On August 7, US Attorney General Pam Bondi announced a $50 million reward for information leading to the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who has been facing formal drug trafficking charges from the Justice Department since 2020.
Bondi declared that Maduro “is one of the most powerful drug traffickers in the world and a threat to the national security” of the United States.
Caracas has always denied these accusations, but within hours, more than 4,000 US military personnel were deployed to Caribbean waters. Days later, more ships, submarines and aerial intelligence units joined them.
The rapid escalation of the crisis – just days after the Maduro government and the Trump administration celebrated a prisoner exchange and the resumption of Venezuelan oil exports through Chevron – has surprised many and opened rifts within the White House itself, where a faction opposed to Chavismo for ideological reasons is balanced by those who would prefer to avoid dangerous confrontations.
“Donald Trump came to the White House as a president of peace, and the drumbeat from some sectors of the Venezuelan opposition and congressmen from South Florida doesn’t fit with the president’s message,” a US government official with knowledge of Venezuela told CNN, requesting anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the matter.
The US Navy guided missile destroyer USS Sampson near the entrance to the Panama Canal on August 31, amid a buildup of US naval forces around the Southern Caribbean. – Enea Lebrun/Reuters
But beyond the rhetoric, it is striking that the White House is confronting Maduro over alleged ties to drug trafficking, and not by demanding he restore democracy in Venezuela.
Allegations involving the Miraflores presidential palace in cocaine trafficking have existed for at least a decade. So why this new initiative in recent weeks?
What the data says
Bondi has not presented conclusive evidence of the Venezuelan leader’s alleged role in international drug trafficking. At the same time, Caracas has flatly rejected the claims.
“For there to be a drug cartel, either you produce (the drugs), you process it or you traffic it. And if there is no cultivation, production, or drug trafficking in Venezuela, how can there be a cartel? It’s unsustainable,” Venezuelan congresswoman Blanca Eekhout told CNN, referring to Cartel de los Soles, an alleged drug trafficking organization that the United States claims is led by Maduro and that the Trump administration declared a terrorist organization a few weeks ago.
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Venezuela is not a cocaine-producing country.
Almost all coca crops – the main ingredient of cocaine – are concentrated in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. Colombia in particular – has seen its cocaine production grow dramatically in recent years, due both to an increase in cultivation area (almost 100,000 hectares more since 2020) and, more significantly, because of higher yields in refining the product, according to UN researchers.
Soldiers patrol among coca plantations near El Plateado, Colombia, on March 8. – Joaquin Sarmiento/AFP/Getty Images
In other words, more coca leaves are being grown, and at the same time, each leaf produces more cocaine. Of the 3,700 tons of coca produced worldwide, more than 2,500 tons come from Colombia, while Venezuela does not appear on production maps, according to the latest UNODC report published in June.
Investigators from the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) reached similar conclusions, writing in their annual report published in March that 84% of the cocaine seized in the US comes from Colombia. In the four pages dedicated to cocaine trafficking, Venezuela is not mentioned. Colombia and Peru are primarily mentioned among producers, while Ecuador, Central America and Mexico are mentioned among transit countries.
Where does the cocaine flow through?
“The majority of Colombian cocaine is being trafficked north along the Pacific coast,” says UNODC.
Although transit through Venezuela is not ruled out, other countries are identified as emerging trends in international drug markets, such as Ecuador, where the sharp increase in homicides is linked to the rise in drug trafficking, according to the UN.
This is an analysis that the State Department does not dispute either – at least behind closed doors, suggesting that the resources deployed in the Caribbean could be more effective elsewhere. “It’s strange that we don’t see more boats heading to the Pacific, or the criminalization of (more Colombian groups),” a US diplomat told CNN, who also asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to discuss these issues.
Honduran criminal investigators with packages of cocaine seized from a plane coming from Venezuela, at the Hernan Acosta Mejia air base in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, in 2020. – Orlando Sierra/AFP/Getty Images
Former US Attorney General Bill Barr seemed to suggest the same thing when he revealed the first drug trafficking accusations against Maduro in 2020, pointing to the Venezuelan government as a facilitator in the transportation of “up to 250 tons of cocaine annually,” which represents a tiny amount in global drug volumes and less than 10% of production.
The Pacific route also dominates UNODC drug seizure statistics, with Colombia (37%), Ecuador (8.8%) and Panama (4.2%) as the countries in the region with the largest quantities of cocaine hydrochloride. Venezuela ranks sixth among Latin American countries in terms of seizures, with less than 2%.
So, is Venezuela free of drug trafficking?
Although United Nations data appears to contradict the White House narrative, the reality is more complex.
The movement of 250 tons of cocaine annually, which Barr accused the Venezuelan government of facilitating, is minor compared to global trafficking (3,700 tons, according to the UNODC). But it is still a significant amount of illicit trade that allegedly generates multimillion-dollar profits for Maduro. At the time, Barr also failed to provide evidence of the illegal trafficking he was alleging.
The Venezuelan government coalition admits that drug trafficking exists in the country, but not that it promotes it. Eekhout, for example, told CNN that in the past year, Maduro’s security forces have seized 490 aircraft and 94 vessels used to transport cocaine, data that CNN cannot independently verify.
And while Caracas claims to be waging war on drugs, there is also evidence of direct involvement in drug trafficking from the highest levels of government.
In November 2016, a federal court in New York found two members of the presidential family – nephews of Venezuelan First Lady Cilia Flores – guilty of conspiring to traffic cocaine to the United States after they were arrested by the DEA in Haiti. Both were later returned to Venezuela in a prisoner exchange.
But even more striking is the role of Hugo “El Pollo” Carvajal, a former high-ranking Venezuelan official who, on June 25, pleaded guilty to conspiring to import cocaine into the United States and to narco-terrorism charges. This came after a lengthy trial in which US prosecutors accused him of exchanging firearms for cocaine shipments with the now-defunct FARC guerrillas, whose dissidents in Colombia control some of the key regions for narcotics production.
Former Venezuelan intelligence chief Hugo Carvajal stands during his extradition hearing to the US, at the High Court in Madrid, Spain, on September 12, 2019. – Emilio Naranjo/Pool/Reuters
The deal was reached after a lengthy extradition process from Spain and just days before his trial was to begin in New York.
At the time, the Miami Herald reported that Carvajal, who was also accused of being part of Cartel de los Soles, was cooperating with US prosecutors, providing evidence against Maduro in exchange for a reduced sentence, something CNN has not been able to independently corroborate.
Exactly one month later, the Treasury Department designated Cartel de los Soles as a foreign terrorist organization, allowing US forces greater freedom of action against suspected members of the organization.
Other South American countries such as Argentina, Ecuador and Paraguay issued similar designations in the following days.
Does Cartel de los Soles exist?
“Cartel de los Soles, per se, doesn’t exist. It’s a journalistic expression created to refer to the involvement of Venezuelan authorities in drug trafficking,” Phil Gunson, a researcher with the International Crisis Group based in Caracas for more than a decade, told CNN.
This doesn’t mean that there aren’t military personnel or government officials involved in drug trafficking. “The cartels are here, the Colombians and the Mexicans, too. There are drug shipments via the Orinoco River and by air through clandestine airstrips, flights from Apure to Central America, and so on. All of this wouldn’t be possible without direct involvement from above,” the expert said.
For Gunson, Maduro’s role is reminiscent of that of former Panamanian President Manuel Noriega, who was sentenced to decades in prison in various jurisdictions for his association with the Medellín cartel in 1992: an external partner who, while not directly part of a cartel, still benefited from drug trafficking routes under his protection.
Other independent analysts from the intelligence website InsightCrime share the same analysis. “Cartel de los Soles is the term used to describe the shadowy groups within the Venezuelan Army involved in a wide range of criminal activities … It is not a hierarchical group, but rather a loose network of cells … that operate as drug trafficking organizations,” a report from the site states.
The organization’s very name is a nod to the military, with the “Soles” (Suns) being a reference to the insignia worn by Venezuelan generals on their shoulder straps.
From hiding, opposition leader María Corina Machado applauded the recent statements against the cartel. Other sectors of the opposition were more skeptical. Former opposition presidential candidate Henrique Capriles told CNN that the Trump administration must “present the evidence” of the existence of Cartel de los Soles, having previously accused Maduro of involvement in drug trafficking.
For his part, the Venezuelan president has always denied any personal involvement in drug trafficking and will continue to do so, at least until US prosecutors present indisputable evidence of similar significance to that which led to the conviction of his wife’s nephews nine years ago – a conviction that Maduro, conspicuously, has said little about.
In this, Carvajal’s role is once again key, and so is another date: October 29. That day, the retired Venezuelan general and former intelligence chief will be sentenced on drug trafficking and terrorism charges, and it will likely be easier to clarify whether he collaborated with the White House in formulating the charges against his former commander-in-chief.
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