The Venezuelan Cartel Targeted By The U.S. Simply Does Not Exist"Cartel de los Soles" is a figure of speech, not an organization
November 20, 2025 It would hardly be the first time the U.S. goes to war under false pretenses, predicated by a lie, if the attack on Venezuela goes ahead. We backed a war against Nicaragua when Ronald Reagan claimed the new Sandinista leadership — with no money and a small army — could bring armed conflict right up to the border of Texas. Little could he guess that 40 years later the same Sandinistas would still be in power running one of the most reactionary regimes in the hemisphere. The old Gipper also manufactured the Salvadoran insurgency at the same time as being a threat to U.S. national security. A laughable notion, but a lie that cost us a couple of billion dollars and almost 100,000 dead Salvadorans. Again, nobody in the Reagan claque imagined that after the war was negotiated to a draw in the early, the insurgent FMLN (our sworn enemy inte 80’s) would be peacefully elected to power, twice, with both administrations having done nothing revolutionary and marred by corruption. Nothing more than a hiccup in Salvadoran history. And then there was the granddaddy of them all: the multi-billion-dollar train wreck in Iraq predicated on imaginary weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. That stupidity cost several thousand American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and the end result? Instead of the Jeffersonian Democracy promised by Bush/Cheney, we turned Iraq into a staunch ally of our arch-enemy, Iran. Currently, the U.S. is building up a massive armada of heavy war ships and troops off the coast of Venezuela. It’s an effort led and championed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio (probably because Donald Trump couldn’t as much find Venezuela on a map). Indeed, when asked a few days ago if he knew what he was going to do in or to Venezuela, Trump’s jaw-dropping answer was “sorta.” Rubio, on the other hand, is thirsting for blood. Last week he announced our principal goal in Venezuela was to annihilate something called El Cartel de los Soles. He declared it a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), a brand that formally takes effect three days from now. Naming an enemy an FTO loosens the U.S. military’s rules of engagement, lowering them to a point competitive with a Turkey Shoot. Just kill and let God sort them out. There’s one little problem with naming Los Soles as a demonic drug-smuggling organization worthy of destruction by the most lethal military force on earth: the Cartel de Los Soles simply does not exist. Instead, it is a figure of speech, ambiguous street slang for any and all military officers involved in the drug trade. It refers in no manner to any organization. It has no structure, no central command, no affiliates, no specific membership, no nothing. It’s a term that arose in the early 1990s birthed by a few Venezuelan journalists broadly referring to the corruption of military officers who, indeed, had a hand in the drug business. Targeting this imaginary cartel is like seeking to identify the Beltway Swamp as a centralized organization that has planted crocs and alligators in the D.C. National Mall and all corseted with a mammoth cordon that holds it together. The Venezuelan military suffers from deep corruption, as does much of the entire state now founded on a patronage system that predates the pseudo-revolutionary regimes of Hugo Chávez and President Nicolás Maduro but has further rotted under their rule. There’s certainly fragmentary evidence that Maduro and his family profit from drug trafficking, but the U.S. propaganda painting Maduro as some great mastermind of a gigantic operation a la Pablo Escobar is not to be trusted in the least. It’s also a fact that numerous Venezuelan military commanders also continue a sideline in drug trafficking — rather a natural pastime for a deeply corrupted institution. But they do NOT constitute anything near a cartel. Phil Gunson, a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group and who lives in Venezuela, told The New York Times: “There is no such thing as a board meeting of the ‘Cartel de los Soles.’ There is no such animal. The organization simply does not exist as such.” The Times also reports: …{T]he D.E.A.’s annual National Drug Threat Assessment, which describes major trafficking organizations in detail, has never mentioned Cartel de los Soles. Nor has the annual “World Drug Report” by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.” The phrase itself entered the popular vernacular because military rank in Venezuela is demonstrated not by bars or stars on uniforms but rather by suns — or “soles” in Spanish. And the Venezuelan populace knows very well the level of corruption inside the military, including some connections with the drug trade. And the phrase Cartel de los Soles became popular shorthand for dissing the corrupt Venezuelan state. Be advised, this is not just a semantic dispute over the dictionary definition of a cartel. It’s deployment now by the U.S. is rather sinister mendacity by Rubio and the Trump administration to give cover to its real objective: the overthrow of the Maduro regime. (Sorry, but I am compelled here to express my disgust with the media’s universal adoption of the threadbare euphemism “regime change.” Regime change means only one thing: overthrowing a government, period). While he has recently tempered his rhetoric, the barely literate Maduro followed in the footsteps of his mentor Hugo Chávez by roasting the Yankees with red-hot revolutionary condemnation. They claimed to be building “21st Century Socialism” but, in fact, bankrupted the country, suppressed the opposition, rigged elections, set off a dizzying inflationary spiral, and motivated 8 million Venezuelans to leave the country. So, unlike some of my fellow leftists, I offer no brief for a failed and ugly regime. I equally oppose the United States intervening militarily to “make things better” because it is not only illegal and immoral but also because it never works. If the U.S. should decide to capture or remove Maduro and parade his head around as a trophy in the miserably failed War on Drugs, who exactly is going to run Venezuela in the aftermath? The drug-dealing military? A corps fiercely loyal to Maduro as they owe their status and power directly to a corrupt patronage machine run from the presidential office? Indeed, the Venezuelan government right down to the provincial level is essentially a military government populated by officers handpicked by Maduro, so beheading Maduro would almost inevitably lead to overt military rule and would do nothing to staunch whatever drug trade there is from Venezuela. One alternative is the Iraqi Solution. Remember when the geniuses Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld disarmed and disbanded the Iraqi Army after disposing of Saddam and plunged the country into a miasma of chaos, looting, sectarian killing, and spawned a putrid bouquet of sectarian militias honor-bound to kill each other? The U.S. could, then, simply replace the Venezuelan military with an American Occupation of 20 years or so, for which absolutely nobody has any appetite. Especially, the U.S. military. There is, of course, Venezuela’s rich oil reserves about which Trump has expressed his desire “to just take them over.” I honestly don’t know how much the oil really figures into whatever hare-brained plan the Trump Junta is coming up with. But it’s easier said than done. The U.S. seizure of the Venezuelan oil fields would imply a major war on the scale of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Alas, there is one scenario currently gaining some traction and one clearly favored by Comandante Trump. How about confronting Venezuela with such an enormous and ominous military threat that Maduro is convinced to surrender without a fight? That would be a big PR win for Trump, but a meaningless one as the core structure of Maduro’s state and military would remain in place, and the imaginary Cartel de los Soles would continue doing whatever it does. The American people might be briefly pleased when shown the iconography of a bound and chained Nicolás Maduro, but I doubt it would have much impact. Frankly, the U.S. propaganda war against Venezuela has been rather anemic and greatly overshadowed by a half dozen other Trump fiascos, from ICE raids to Epstein, to health care costs, to splits in MAGA, and so on. Selling Venezuela to the American people as some sort of pending and dire threat just has not happened, and public opinion most likely doesn’t give one flying fug about Maduro, let alone even know who he is. The one thing we can be sure of is that Trump and Little Marco are incapable of backing down. They cannot deploy 25% of the U.S. Navy and tens of thousands of troops off the coast of Venezuela without doing something, whether or not a sufficient blast of propaganda has been previously established. Americans today care more about the release of the Epstein files than the composition of the ruling cabinet in Caracas. Problem is, whatever our wise leaders wind up doing will generate needless catastrophe and at best will give MAGA a 2 percent temporary bump in the polls at a very high cost only to watch our engagement n Venezuela turn into a net negative for Trump. You’d think the twin debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan (not to mention Vietnam) would sink in as cautionary warnings to our masters of war, but you would be dead wrong. Especially when those masters are brain dead. +++ |
In Afghanistan:
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Live From Kabul — The World’s First Capital Facing Total Water Collapse
If present trends continue, the capital of Afghanistan could run completely dry in the next five years
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Kabul is running out of water. If present trends continue, the capital of Afghanistan could run completely dry by 2030. There are several reasons for this. The first is climate change: there is less snowmelt to feed the city’s aquifers. The second is aging infrastructure: pipelines are decrepit or, in some cases, non-existent. The third is management: in a city reeling from water shortages, people are drilling their own wells in yards and basements, with no regulation from the de facto Taliban government. The fourth is population pressure: the city has grown sixfold in the last twenty years. And over the last year alone, millions of Afghans who had fled to neighboring Iran and Pakistan have been forcibly returned, adding to already substantial resource pressures.
This is causing extreme stress on the people of Kabul, who, according to my guest today Marianna von Zahn, are now spending about 30% of their income on water. Marianna von Zahn is the Afghanistan Country Representative and Director of Programs for Mercy Corps, which recently released a report on the dire water crisis in Kabul and will soon release a similar report on water shortages in other parts of the country.
We kick off by discussing the scale and impact of the crisis in Kabul before having a longer conversation about what can be done to mitigate it. This includes exploring ways the international community can work with Taliban authorities to stave off an impending humanitarian catastrophe.
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