The obfuscation from the Trump administration hinged on a July 2025 decision by the Treasury Department to designate “the Cartel de los Soles (a.k.a. Cartel of the Suns) as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist,” adopting language from a 2020 indictment of Maduro. The State Department made the same determination of the group “as a Foreign Terrorist Organization” in November 2025 at the direction of Secretary Marco Rubio, who has been leading the administration’s efforts to remove Maduro from power.

Following the Trump administration’s capture of Maduro on January 3 and subsequent rendition to New York City to face trial, prosecutors “abandoned the claim that Cartel de los Soles was an actual organization,” according to The New York Times. The paper noted that “experts in Latin American crime and narcotics issues have said it is actually a slang term, invented by the Venezuelan media in the 1990s, for officials who are corrupted by drug money.” The Times added that the updated indictment instead “states that it refers to a ‘patronage system’ and a ‘culture of corruption’ fueled by drug money,” and the name is actually “a reference to the sun insignia affixed to the uniforms of high-ranking Venezuelan military officials.” The indictment also attempts to link Maduro to Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua using evidence the Times characterizes as “thin."

The conservative media campaign treated a figure of speech as though it were real in a move roughly analogous to walking around Washington, D.C., searching for a literal revolving door between Capitol Hill and K Street lobbying operations. Right-wing pundits have been making that error for nearly the entirety of Trump’s second term in office.

In March 2025, former Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Victor Avila appeared on Fox News’ The Story with Martha MacCallum. 

“Remember, the Tren de Aragua is backed up by Cartel de los Soles — you probably haven’t heard this before — is the Cartel of the Sun, which is the biggest, biggest cartel there out of Venezuela that is run by Maduro, and this is how they get their financing, this is how they get their organization throughout the United States,” Avila said. “We have to combat them at the source — obviously get them from our country — but also get after them from where they come from."

Days before the interview, the administration had deported 238 Venezuelans to a prison camp in El Salvador under dubious and almost entirely false claims that they were members of Tren de Aragua, which the State Department labeled a Foreign Terrorist Organization in February 2025. The White House has also accused Maduro of running TdA, an assessment contradicted by the U.S. intelligence community and outside experts.

By August, right-wing media outlets were calling for military escalation against Venezuela, and on September 2, 2025, the Trump administration blew up a boat in the Caribbean Sea it claimed was involved in the drug trade.

On September 8, Donald Trump Jr. — a Venezuela hawk — said that “the Cartel de la Soles, the Cartel of the Suns, aren't just drug dealers” but in fact “are terrorists as designated by both the State and Treasury Departments” who are “working directly at the direction of Nicolás Maduro's regime in Venezuela."

The Trump administration continued to carry out extrajudicial boat attacks, which to date have killed at least 115 people across 35 strikes.

As that campaign accelerated, former CIA officer Mike Baker appeared on Fox News’ The Story with Martha MacCallum in October 2025 and claimed “there is a book of evidence that points to he [Maduro] and his cronies running what they call the Cartel of the Suns."

Conservative media continued to beat the drums of war, sometimes by arguing that toppling the Venezuelan government would be straightforward and have few negative consequences, and sometimes by suggesting opposition figure María Corina Machado could — and should — easily replace Maduro.

In December, Derek Maltz, Trump’s former acting head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, went on Fox & Friends to agitate for waging a war on Venezuela.

“Look, Venezuela has evolved into a command and control hub of massive drug trafficking around the world, not just to the U.S.,” Maltz said. “The dictators, the corrupt leadership — the Cartel de la Soles is one of the most dangerous terrorist organizations in the world right now impacting America."

A day before the U.S. detained Maduro, Fox News’ Sean Hannity interviewed Machado on his radio show, providing her a platform to call for Maduro’s ouster.

“The head of this criminal structure, narco-terrorist structure, is Nicolás Maduro,” Machado said. “And, you know, they formed the Tren de Aragua, they created Cartel de los Soles to destabilize the region and the United States."

On January 3, hours after news of the operation broke, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon interviewed Oscar Ramirez, a correspondent for Real America’s Voice, who argued for further U.S. military action in Venezuela.

“They need to capture the other two that they're basically destabilizing and they are, you know, the accomplices of Nicolás Maduro, that is Diosdado Cabello and Padrino Lopez,” Ramirez said, naming Venezuela’s ministers of interior and defense. “Those are the two individuals and the two fractions that they are part, also, of the Cartel de los Soles and also Tren de Aragua."

Trump’s military campaign against Venezuela is about oil, regional dominance, Rubio’s longstanding desire to topple Cuba’s government, facilitating mass deportations, and countering China’s influence in the Western Hemisphere. It is not about drugs and never has been.

And, as the administration has finally admitted — contra to its media surrogates — this campaign isn’t about the Cartel de los Soles because no such group exists. The fiction was a useful pretext for Trump’s attacks on Venezuela and provided easy content for his supporters in right-wing media.

There have been periods in the United States’ history when manufacturing a false pretense for large-scale military operations registered as a real scandal. Now is not one of them. But for all the absurdity of right-wing media’s fearmongering about the made-up threat of a misunderstood term, the results of Trump’s military campaign are no less deadly.