The Cartel of the Suns is now officially a US-designated terrorist organization, but is it a cartel?

The U.S. government’s designation of the Venezuelan Cartel of the Suns as a foreign terrorist organization officially took effect Monday as part of President Trump’s aggressive campaign to combat drug trafficking into the United States. The United States identifies Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as the leader of the group, and says the narcoterrorism accusations are actually part of an attempt by Trump to force him from power.

The terrorist designation, which was announced last week, is designed to put more pressure on Maduro, even as U.S. warships and more than 10,000 U.S. troops step up training exercises in the region. The US military has also launched deadly ship strikes alleges they were transporting drugs off the coast of Venezuela, many of them allegedly run by the Tren de Aragua gang, which the United States accuses of having ties to the Maduro regime.

In a statement issued on Monday, the Maduro government said it “absolutely rejects the new and ridiculous lie” that designates “the non-existent Cartel of the Suns as a terrorist organization, thus repeating an infamous and vile lie to justify an illegitimate and illegal intervention against Venezuela, under the classic US format of regime change.”

Before the designation was announced, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated that the group was “responsible for terrorist violence… as well as drug trafficking to the United States and Europe.”

The Cartel of the Suns was also hit in July by U.S. economic sanctions, which Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said highlighted “the facilitation of narcoterrorism by the illegitimate Maduro regime through terrorist groups such as the Cartel of the Suns.”

What is (and what is not) the Cartel of the Suns?

But what is the so-called Cartel of the Suns? It is not, in the traditional sense, a Latin American drug cartel like the familiar Sinaloa or the Jalisco Nueva Generación.

The “suns” in the name refer to the insignia used for decades to adorn the uniforms of high-ranking Venezuelan military personnel.

Venezuelans, including prosecutors and other officials, began using the term colloquially in the 1990s to refer to the cadre of high-ranking military officers who had enriched themselves by facilitating drug trafficking. As corruption spread across the country, first under the late dictator Hugo Chavez and then under Maduro as his successor, analysts say the term came to encompass the loosely defined network of police and government officials who facilitated and profited from activities ranging from illegal mining to fuel and drug trafficking.

The term was first raised to define an alleged drug trafficking organization led by Maduro in 2020, when the United States Department of Justice, during President Trump’s first administration, announced accusations against the leader of Venezuela and members of his inner circle for narcoterrorism and other charges. The Justice Department accused Maduro, through the Cartel of the Suns, of working directly with the Colombian rebel group. FARC to traffic cocaine through Venezuela to the US.

Foreign Terrorist Organization designation has generally been reserved for groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS, but the Trump administration has expanded its use to designate eight Latin American organizations accused of drug trafficking and human trafficking, calling it an effort to counter narcoterrorism.

Some analysts say it is a stretch to even define the Cartel of the Suns as a single unified organization.

“It’s not a group,” Adam Isaacson, director of defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America think tank, told The News. “It’s not like a group that people would ever identify themselves as members of. They don’t have regular meetings. They don’t have a hierarchy.”

“It is not a hierarchical or ideological group,” agrees the InSight Crime outlet, run by two former journalists who extensively covered Latin America for decades. “Its structure consists of a diffuse network of cells embedded within Venezuela’s main military branches: the army, navy, air force and national guard, from the lowest to the highest ranks.”

“Although the concept is mainly associated with the military sector, other branches of the [Venezuelan] States embedded in the criminal ecosystem have also been identified, including police forces, the executive branch and various public officials,” InSight Crime said in an analysis of the alleged cartel published in September.

The terrorist designation comes amid US military attacks and weapons buildup.

In recent weeks, the US military has carried out at least 21 attacks against suspected drug trafficking ships in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing dozens of people and sparking a debate in Washington about the legality of extrajudicial attacks.

The Trump administration has carried out the attacks without providing evidence to support its claims that the ships transport drugs and are operated by criminal organizations. It says the attacks, which began in late September off the coast of Venezuela and expanded to the eastern Pacific, are aimed at preventing narcotics from reaching U.S. soil.

But Maduro, and some others, see US military operations and the massive buildup of equipment in the region as an effort to precipitate his overthrow, if not the prelude to an open operation to overthrow his government.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said the formal designation of the Cartel of the Suns will provide “a lot of new options for the United States” to address Maduro’s alleged crimes.

But in an interview with the conservative media outlet OAN, he declined to give details about what those options included, or to say whether the US military was planning to carry out attacks against targets inside Venezuela.

“Nothing is off the table, but nothing is automatically on the table,” he said.

Since American troops and hardware (including USS Gerald R. Fordthe world’s most advanced aircraft carrier, began arriving in the Caribbean earlier this year, Venezuela’s U.S.-backed political opposition has more confidently expressed its eternal promise to see Maduro forced to resign, fueling speculation about the true end of what the Trump administration says is an anti-drug operation.

Asked by News themezone’ Norah O’Donnell during a extensive interview for 60 Minutes Just a few weeks ago, if US operations in Venezuela were aimed at “getting rid of Maduro,” President Trump said they meant “a lot of things” but said the Venezuelan leader’s days in office were probably numbered.