Venezuela: Cartel of the Suns a Fictitious Excuse for Regime Change. Kurt Nimmo

By Kurt Nimmo Reposted with permission by Globalresearch.ca.

The seven US warships and a nuclear submarine sent to the waters off Venezuela have nothing to do with drugs or so-called “narcoterrorism.” The Cartel of the Suns, like Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, is a cynical ruse designed as a pretext to invade Venezuela, assassinate its elected leader, destroy the Bolivarian revolution, and steal the largest reserve of oil in the world. 

On August 25, the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, said the Cartel of the Suns does not exist and “denounced that this narrative, used by imperialism to criminalize Venezuela and carry out a military intervention to control its resources, is a fiction used by the far right to overthrow governments that do not obey Washington’s whims,” reports the Orinoco Tribune. 

Petro “pointed out that the flow of Colombian cocaine through Venezuela is controlled by what he calls the ‘drug-trafficking junta,’ whose bosses live in Europe and the Middle East.” The Colombian president added the “one who controls cocaine trafficking through Venezuela is not the ‘Cartel of the Suns,’ that is a lie like Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and it only serves to invade countries.”

The United Nations notes that a mere 5% of the illegal narcotics produced in Colombia pass through Venezuela. 87% of the drugs headed for US and European markets are produced in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. The UN reports that 60% to 70% of narcotics that traffickers attempt to move through Venezuela en route to the US and Europe is currently seized by Venezuelan law enforcement agencies. Moreover, the Drug Enforcement Agency in the US did not mention Venezuela in its 2024 and 2025 reports on drug trafficking. 

Fernando Casado, a Spanish journalist and international analyst, writing for El Perro y la Rana Publishing Foundation, also argues the Cartel of the Suns does not exist. The cartel is “a construction whose objective was and still is to portray Venezuela as a narco-State, that is, a rogue State with which nothing can or should be negotiated,” Casado writes. The objective is to demonize President Nicolás Maduro and portray him as a drug kingpin.

“Maduro would no longer be considered a dictator but rather a criminal who together with his gang of thugs is getting rich with the drug business. As a result, any intervention to overthrow a ruler turned drug-trafficker and put an end to the illegal organization ruling Venezuela would be justified.” 

According to a report released by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Venezuela spent 15 years eradicating coca leaf cultivation and marijuana and cocaine processing. As previously noted, the vast majority of production is attributed to Colombia (67% of the world’s coca leaf cultivation) with the remainder produced in the Andean countries of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. 

Beginning in 1999, when Hugo Chávez came to power, the US worked overtime to discredit and overthrow his popular socialist government. The late leader was insidiously linked to Colombian guerrillas, ETA, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas. US propaganda claimed the Chávez government was providing Iran with uranium for a nuclear weapon, in addition to “every fabrication brewed by right-wing media and intelligence laboratories,” writes Clodovaldo Hernández. The same treatment was applied to Maduro, who was Chávez’s foreign minister for six years. When Maduro was elected president, the Cartel of the Suns ruse was added to the mix. 

“As US officials did before with Chávez and continue to do with Maduro, what they aim to achieve is the political objective of legitimizing an assassination, an invasion, or any other violent means to overthrow Venezuela’s government. With their recycled accusations, they seek to manipulate international public opinion so that any such action against the Caribbean nation will be accepted as legitimate.”

Venezuela and Colombia announced they have deployed 25,000 troops to the border region of the two countries to combat drug trafficking. The Venezuelan troops patrol Zulia and Tachira, two states on the Venezuelan side of the border.

Image:  President Daniel Noboa (Public Domain)

“The military operations are part of a bilateral strategy to combat organized crime and stimulate the legal economy in the border region, which has historically suffered from state neglect and violence caused by illegal armed groups,” according to Colombia Reports. 

“Marco Rubio is warmongering against Venezuela while having friendly meetings with Ecuador President Daniel Noboa, the man who actually traffics 60% of Colombian cocaine into the United States and Europe,” Maduro tweeted on September 1.

Ecuadorian police documents reveal how a banana company, owned by Noboa’s family, has been involved in exporting over half a ton of cocaine to a number of European countries since 2020. Ecuadorian journalist Andrés Durán, who revealed the existence of the documents, left the country after death threats and legal harassment by the Ecuadorian ruling party Movimiento Acción Democrática Nacional (ADN).

“The Noboa family controls the entire chain of the banana export business, from planting and harvesting to transportation and private ports. There is no doubt that the death threats are closely linked to this investigation,” Durán said. 

Juan Pablo Escobar, the son of Pablo Escobar, the former leader of the now defunct Medellín Cartel, argues that his father worked for the CIA.

“My father worked for the CIA selling cocaine to finance the fight against Communism in Central America,” Escobar writes in his book, Pablo Escobar In Fraganti. “He did not make the money alone,” Escobar said during an interview, “but with US agencies that allowed him access to this money. He had direct relations with the CIA.”

Image: Pablo Escobar

The CIA, under the cover of Plan Colombia, eliminated the Medellín and other cartels and took over the cocaine business. The CIA convinced Congress to fund Plan Colombia, a supposed aid project for the Colombian poor, but in reality, it allowed CIA front companies to profit from counter-narcotics schemes. The CIA eventually took control of the cocaine trade by eliminating drug cartel leaders. Colombian politicians and government officials were bribed to overlook the CIA’s involvement.

The DEA was also involved in cocaine trafficking. US attorney Damian Williams published evidence that agents from the agency conspired to smuggle cocaine into the United States in 2017. Evidence “suggests that the DEA coordinated the export of cocaine it allegedly received from Colombia’s Prosecutor General’s Office,”  writes Adriaan Alsema for Colombia Reports. “DEA agent Brian Witek testified under oath that he coordinated the conspiracy to traffic the drugs” to allegedly frame FARC guerrilla leader Jesús Santrich, who was later assassinated. Moreover, according to the New York Times, DEA officials helped a Mexican drug trafficker and his Colombian suppliers launder and smuggle money as part of an alleged scheme to infiltrate Mexican drug cartels. 

Banks in the US were prosecuted for laundering drug money.

“In March 2010, Wachovia settled the biggest action brought under the US bank secrecy act, through the US district court in Miami,” The Guardian reported. Wachovia “paid federal authorities $110m in forfeiture, for allowing transactions later proved to be connected to drug smuggling, and incurred a $50m fine for failing to monitor cash used to ship 22 tons of cocaine.” 

In 2020, BuzzFeed News reported a

“huge trove of secret government documents reveals for the first time how the giants of Western banking move trillions of dollars in suspicious transactions, enriching themselves and their shareholders while facilitating the work of terrorists, kleptocrats, and drug kingpins.”

UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime) Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa said in 2009 illegal drug money in banks helped save the US during the financial crisis.

“In many instances, drug money is currently the only liquid investment capital,” Costa explained. “In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system’s main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor.” 

The Trump administration is flooding the media space with lies about Maduro and the Cartel of the Suns as part of a psychological operation to deflect from the real reason for confronting Venezuela—the removal of a socialist government and the seizure of Venezuela’s bounty of petroleum. If Trump was sincerely interested in ending the flow of drugs into the United States, he would dismantle the CIA, the DEA, throw bank presidents in prison, and end the disastrous war on drugs, in this case used as a cover to overthrow a democratically elected government and allow transnational corporations to pillage the country and further impoverish the Venezuelan people. 

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Kurt Nimmo is a journalist, author, and geopolitical analyst, New Mexico, United States. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).