Trump’s shifting case against Maduro: From drug trafficking to oil

BUENOS AIRES (CN) — When President Donald Trump announced the U.S. had bombed Venezuela and captured its president, he didn’t claim it was in the name of human rights or democracy, two of the biggest controversies surrounding Nicolás Maduro.

​Instead, according to Trump, it was a fight against narcoterrorism.

Following Maduro’s capture during the night of Jan. 3, he and his wife, Cilia Flores, were taken to New York, where U.S. prosecutors unsealed a superseding indictment against them on Monday, accusing them of an international cocaine trafficking conspiracy that involved terrorist groups armed with machine guns.

“Nicolás Maduro Moros, the defendant, now sits atop a corrupt, illegitimate government that for decades has leveraged government power to protect and promote illegal activity, including drug trafficking,” prosecutors said. “That drug trafficking has enriched and entrenched Venezuela’s political and military elite."

The Maduros denied those claims. “I’m innocent,” said the Venezuelan strongman. “I’m a decent man.”

Trump has pushed the narrative that Maduro is leading a criminal organization funneling drugs into the U.S. since his first term, well before the beginning of naval strikes last September.

The first time the U.S. government linked Maduro to Cartel de los Soles, or Cartel of the Suns, was in a 2020 complaint against him and some of his closest officials, claiming the then-president was leading a powerful transnational drug trafficking organization. And during the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump insisted on that accusation, connecting the outreach of the cartel with Colombian guerrillas and some of the biggest Mexican cartels.

But the indictments quickly turned into national security designations. And last July, Trump’s government labeled Cartel de los Soles as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist,” intensifying the ongoing blockade against Venezuela. Shortly after, pointing at Maduro as the leader of the group, he increased his bounty to $50 million.

What is known as Cartel de los Soles emerged in the early 1990s, when two members of the Bolivarian National Guard were investigated for drug crimes. They wore a single sun insignia. The name evolved into a plural form when division commanders pinned double suns to their uniforms.

But although “there is no doubt” that top military officials from the country are involved in corruption and trafficking crimes, said Victor Aguilar Pereira, an officer for Latin America and the Caribbean in Crisis Group, “there is little evidence that any sort of stable, organized cartel exists.”

Insight Crime, one of the region’s leading think tanks analyzing organized crime, characterized Cartel de los Soles as a “loose network of cells” within the different branches of the Venezuelan armed forces, rather than a hierarchical organization.

The charges, which fuse drug trafficking with the premise that the profits are being used to attack the United States, are hard to prove but highly malleable, said Jenaro Abraham, a Latin America expert from Gonzaga University.

“But it is an easy way to create an enemy — to construct a story in which he becomes the most vile person imaginable,” Abraham said. Still, after Jan. 3, the Trump administration sharply reduced its references to Cartel de los Soles, cutting mentions in the indictment from more than 30 to just two in the last week, as its public messaging shifted toward Venezuela’s oil.

Proving those ties, added Abraham, could be challenging for the prosecution.

“But it’s also a highly malleable legal situation, where they can give shape to the outcome they want for Maduro,” he said. “They’re trying to use a legal framework that was built in the ’90s, which fuses narco charges with the premise that those profits are being used to attack the U.S.”

But, while the world debates the legitimacy of the U.S. actions in Venezuela, the narrative has proved politically useful for the Trump administration, which found little support in military interventions: a September YouGov poll said only 16% of Americans supported a U.S. invasion of Venezuela, with 62% opposing it explicitly.

“Some in the Trump administration and the Venezuelan opposition used this narrative to reframe pressure on Maduro as a fight against drug trafficking rather than a push for regime change or a defense of democracy and human rights,” Aguilar Pereira said.

Jake Johnston, director at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, noted the drop in mentions to the Cartel de los Soles isn’t arbitrary.

“What this administration has shown is that it’s willing to use propaganda to do what they want. No pushback, they just do it; no one is stopping them,” said Johnston, who is leading the coverage of the events from a U.S. policy perspective for the center. “They’re scaling back in the allegations [of drug trafficking] because they would need to prove that in court."

But as the narcoterrorism case began to fade from official statements, another justification quietly took its place. In the days following Maduro’s capture, references to drug trafficking dropped from the administration’s public language, while references to Venezuela’s oil resources increased.

The country has the largest oil reserves in the world, and much of them have been poorly managed in the context of successive political and economic crises, many of which are derived from the U.S. sanctions against the country.

The Trump administration framed its campaign against Venezuela as a response to what senior aides describe as the theft of U.S. oil interests after decades of nationalization under Maduro and former President Hugo Chávez, arguing Venezuela’s expropriation of assets once operated by American companies amounted to an unlawful seizure of economic value that must be rectified.

Trump himself has publicly insisted Venezuelan oil rights and other assets “were taken from us illegally” and should be returned.

In an interview with The New York Times on Wednesday, Trump said he wasn’t going to rush the political transition for Venezuela, nor mentioned an ongoing fight against organized crime in the country. Instead, he said, “We’re going to be using oil, and we’re going to be taking oil. We’re getting oil prices down, and we’re going to be giving money to Venezuela, which they desperately need.”

Whether Cartel de los Soles remains central to Washington’s national security framing is now an open question. With Maduro removed from power and U.S. control over Venezuelan oil effectively consolidated, the original justification for intervention appears less urgent than the outcome it produced.

“Now Maduro is gone, they’re keeping the oil,” Johnston said. “They don’t need the justification anymore.”

Lucía Cholakian Herrera is a Courthouse News correspondent based in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Follow @luciacholakian