The Trump administration is increasingly resembling a government previously abominated by the current US president as entangling, bumbling, and prone to fantasies. President George W. Bush was well versed in baseless existential threats stemming from Mesopotamia, supposedly directed by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. There was a critical problem in this assessment: in his dry drunk state, Bush was criminally wrong, proposing a doctrine in response to the attack by al-Qaeda on the United States on September 11, 2001 heavy on violence and slim on evidence.
The patchy formulation came to be known as the Bush Doctrine, permitting the United States to unilaterally and pre-emptively attack any country allegedly posing a threat to its security despite never evincing any genuine means of doing so. There would also be, Bush stated in his address to the nation, “no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts [of 9/11] and those who harbor them.”
Such streaky reasoning eventually fastened upon Iraq’s alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs), apparently at the ready to strike the US and its allies. If not Baghdad, then certainly an opportunistic terrorist proxy would be more than willing to deploy them. In his 2003 State of the Union Address, Bush solemnly stated that “the gravest danger facing America and the world, is outlaw regimes that seek and possess nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.” Such weapons might be used “for blackmail, terror, and mass murder” or provided or sold “to terrorist allies, who would use them without the least hesitation.”
As the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq proceeded with its increasingly bloody bill of sale, there were no WMDs to be found. Saddam, foolishly as things would have it, destroyed or disarmed those weapons he had made free use of in the Iran-Iraq War. This hardly mattered. There was shoddy intelligence aplenty, including false claims that Iraq had tried to purchase 500 tons of yellowcake uranium powder from Niger, and cloudy lines of cooperation between Baghdad and al-Qaeda. With school boyish enthusiasm being shown by the evangelical UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, the Saddam threat ballooned for Bush. Neoconservatives rejoiced at this chance of cratering, erasing and reforming the Middle East.
The Donroe Doctrine, childishly envisaged and clumsily applied, has an unmistakable analogue with that of Bush. In repurposing the Monroe Doctrine for the Western Hemisphere, excluding threatening foreign interests in Latin America and extinguishing governments adversarial or unsympathetic to the United States, Trump scorns the evidence. A fundamental reason for abducting President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, by way of example, was accusing him of being a narco-terrorist amenable to nasty foreign interests. Elevating his stature as a threat, he was accused of being a figure of the Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns).
This pattern stretches back to the first Trump administration, when a grand jury indictment alleged that Maduro, along with other officials, “participated in a corrupt and violent narco-terrorism conspiracy between the Venezuelan Cártel de Los Soles and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia”. Five years later, when the Treasury Department retrieved the initial text, the Cartel was designated a “terrorist organization”. Come November 2025, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio directed the State Department to do the same.
With an eerie sense of the past cantering into the present, we find the US Justice Department conceding that there was no link between Maduro and this sinister cartel. This stands to reason, given that the group does not exist as a tangible organisation. The allegation has long been contentious, but those close to Trump were not willing to be swayed by that dullest compendium of subject matter unfashionably called “the facts”.
Believers in virgin births, tooth fairies and Sky Gods sometimes intrude into the making of American foreign policy, and Rubio, in justifying extrajudicial killings of those on board alleged narco-vessels in the Caribbean Sea by US military forces had this to say: “We will continue to reserve the right to take strikes against drug boats that are bringing drugs toward the United States that are being operated by transnational criminal organisations, including the Cartel de los Soles.”
The 2020 indictment mentioned the cartel no fewer than 32 times. The new indictment makes a mere two references to a term that has ceased to be an entity and become a concept, revised as a “patronage system run by those at the top.” It does not feature as an organisation along with the list of alleged “narco-terrorists” outlined in the fourth paragraph.
Those versed in the slippery argot of drug trafficking in Latin America have concluded that the Cartel de los Soles is a colloquialism minted by Venezuelan media to out despoiled officials sporting the sun insignia on their uniforms. It became a matter of usage in the 1990s, making it less a description of organisational reality than identifying a broader system of corruption.
From the outset, Venezuelan figures such as interior and justice minister Diosdado Cabello dismissed the cartel as the product of a fevered imagination. In August last year, he coolly remarked that US officials, when bothered, would name the target of their indignation “the head of the Cartel de los Soles”. The organisation makes no appearance in the United Nations’ annual World Drug Report, preferring to reference Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, and Brazil’s Primeiro Comando Capital (PPC) and Comando Vermelho (CV). The US Drug Enforcement Agency’s annual National Drug Threat Assessment makes reference to the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua, “a violent criminal organization founded between 2012 and 2013” that “mainly operates within Venezuelan migrant communities” in the United States. No favours are done naming the Cartel de los Soles, however.
The rewritten indictment against Maduro reveals how presidential doctrines can be used to force evidence upon a Procrustean bed, sawing or extending it to fit the set dimensions of a dogma. The crime of aggression against Iraq in 2003 was based upon forged evidence, implausible links and flimsy assumptions. The crime of aggression against Venezuela on January 3 reprised the performance. Instead of a uranium hoax, we got the Cartel of the Suns.
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