The US Justice Department has quietly scaled back its indictment of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, retreating from a central Trump-era claim that he led a drug cartel.

The original accusation, included in a 2020 grand jury indictment, portrayed the Cartel de los Soles as an organized criminal group allegedly led by Maduro and engaged in large-scale cocaine trafficking.

The claim became a central pillar of Washington’s pressure campaign against Caracas and was repeatedly cited to justify escalating sanctions and military operations.

Yet specialists in Latin American crime and narcotics have long noted that the “Cartel de los Soles” is not a verifiable organization but a slang term coined by Venezuelan media in the 1990s to describe corruption among individual military officials — not a structured cartel.

That distinction is now reflected in the revised indictment, released after Maduro was kidnapped by US forces. While it still accuses him of participating in a drug-trafficking conspiracy, it drops the claim that the Cartel de los Soles exists as an actual cartel, redefining it instead as a “patronage system” and a “culture of corruption” allegedly fueled by drug profits.