this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2026
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Chapotraphouse

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In latest indictment, DoJ has dropped its claim that Venezuela’s "Cartel de los Soles" is an actual group. (Bonus: that name originated from one of the CIA's cocaine smuggling operations in the 90s) (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 week ago by cypherpunks@lemmy.ml to c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net
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screenshot of text in NYT: The Justice Department has backed off a dubious claim about President Nicolás Maduro that the Trump administration promoted last year in laying the groundwork to remove him from power in Venezuela: accusing him of leading a drug cartel called Cartel de los Soles.That claim traces back to a 2020 grand jury indictment of Mr. Maduro drafted by the Justice Department. In July 2025, copying language from it, the Treasury Department designated Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organization. In November, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and President Trump’s national security adviser, ordered the State Department to do the same.But experts in Latin American crime and narcotics issues have said it is actually a slang term, invented by the Venezuelan media in the 1990s, for officials who are corrupted by drug money. And on Saturday, after the administration captured Mr. Maduro, the Justice Department released a rewritten indictment that appeared to tacitly concede the point.

source: gift link to NYT live blog (here is an archive.is link for later when the unlocked_article_code expires)

Where did this term come from? The Cartel of the Suns wikipedia article explains:

screenshot of wikipedia text: The term Cartel of the Suns was first used in 1993 as a journalistic label following a political scandal involving Venezuelan military officials who were implicated in a CIA plot to smuggle cocaine into the United States in order to infiltrate Colombian cartels.[13] The term was inspired by the "soles" (sun emblems) on Venezuelan generals' uniforms.[1] Apart from drug trafficking,

(reference [13] points to this article about it from 1993: Anti-Drug Unit of C.I.A. Sent Ton of Cocaine to U.S. in 1990)

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[–] SkingradGuard@hexbear.net 29 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Keep using the lathe, comrade. We need it more than ever.

[–] Beaver@hexbear.net 16 points 1 week ago

It's the funniest possible outcome, so it has to happen

timmy-pray lathe-of-heaven