The Trump administration is expected to designate Venezuela’s "Cartel de los Soles" or Cartel of the Suns as a foreign terrorist organisation on Monday, in a move that will put further pressure on the South American country’s President Nicolás Maduro.
The designation comes after a large US military build-up near the Venezuelan coast, and amid ongoing strikes against alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, which to date have killed more than 80 people.
Speaking the week before the likely move on Monday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the Cartel of the Suns, which Washington accuses Maduro of leading, as being “responsible for terrorist violence”.
Venezuela’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has condemned Washington's claim, calling it a “ridiculous lie” that could be used as the pretext for a potential invasion. Caracas has suggested that the US aims to depose Maduro, an authoritarian leader who has been in power since 2013.
The Cartel of the Suns is not actually a cartel. Instead, the name is used to refer to corrupt high-level Venezuelan officials.
The term was first used in the 1990s with reference to corrupt senior military officers who had enriched themselves through drug-running, and who, owing to their official positions, wore “suns” attached to their uniforms.
It later became a phrase that also encompassed other figures including police and government officials.
In 2020, near the end of US President Donald Trump’s first term, Washington sanctioned Maduro and others over alleged "narco-terrorism", saying that he had been the co-leader of the Cartel of the Suns since at least 1999. He has denied the charges.
Adam Isaacson, director for defence oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), said it was not an organisation per se.
“It is not a group,” he said. “It’s not like a group where people would ever identify themselves as members. They don’t have regular meetings. They don’t have a hierarchy.”
Up until this year, the US only deemed organisations such as Al-Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State to be foreign terrorist groups.
However, in February, Washington applied the label to eight Latin American criminal organisations involved in activities including drug trafficking and people smuggling.
The US Treasury Department announced sanctions against the Cartel of the Suns in July.
