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On No­vem­ber 24, 2025, the US State De­part­ment moved to des­ig­nate the so-called Car­tel de los Soles (Car­tel of the Suns) as a For­eign Ter­ror­ist Or­gan­i­sa­tion, a ma­jor es­ca­la­tion that treats the group not sim­ply as a crim­i­nal net­work but as a nar­co-ter­ror­ist threat. The des­ig­na­tion builds on years of US in­dict­ments and sanc­tions al­leg­ing that parts of the Venezue­lan mil­i­tary and po­lit­i­cal elite have been im­pli­cat­ed in large-scale drug traf­fick­ing and oth­er crimes.

What is the Car­tel de los Soles?

The la­bel start­ed as a jour­nal­is­tic and pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al short­hand for drug traf­fick­ing net­works tied to Venezue­lan mil­i­tary of­fi­cers, the “suns” re­fer­ring to sun-shaped in­signia on gen­er­als’ uni­forms. An­a­lysts now use the term to de­scribe state-em­bed­ded crim­i­nal­i­ty: frag­ment­ed but pow­er­ful cells of mil­i­tary and se­cu­ri­ty ac­tors who fa­cil­i­tate traf­fick­ing, mon­ey-laun­der­ing, and the il­lic­it ex­trac­tion of gold and oth­er re­sources. It is not nec­es­sar­i­ly a sin­gle, tight­ly com­mand­ed car­tel in the Mex­i­can-style sense; many ex­perts say it is bet­ter un­der­stood as a loose, pa­tron­age-based set of net­works en­abled by cor­rup­tion and im­puni­ty.