On Monday, November 24, the US government officially designated the Cartel of the Suns as a “foreign terrorist organization.” We’ve written a lot about these designations this year, but this one is different.
Contrary to the US narrative, the Cartel of the Suns is not a drug-trafficking organization but a blanket term for factions within Venezuela’s armed forces linked to smuggling, corruption, and cocaine trafficking.
And its designation represents the merging of two wars, the drug war and that against terrorism.
Since January, the Trump administration has designated over a dozen Latin American criminal groups as foreign terrorist organizations (FTO) — the biggest addition since the list was created in 1997.
To use counterterrorism resources against criminal organizations marks a major policy change in Washington. While politically-motivated armed groups and profit-driven criminal organizations may cooperate and rely on similar illicit tactics, their core motivations differ — and so should the responses to them.
The Trump administration appears keen to challenge established strategy in the fight against transnational organized crime and political opponents alike in the region. Fusing the wars on drugs and terror provides a deeper toolbox, one now employed alongside the economic pressure of tariffs and sanctions.
Venezuela is currently the litmus test for Washington’s new toolbox. Unprecedented naval and military resources are drifting off the coast of Venezuela, and maximum pressure is being applied. President Trump has described Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro as "one of the largest narco-traffickers in the world" and offered an unprecedented $50 million reward for his capture.
Time may well be on Maduro’s side. Trump may threaten military action, but there is little appetite in the United States for another war or a prolonged state-building endeavor. We’ll be analyzing the effectiveness of this new crime-terror strategy in Venezuela in the coming weeks and months, and reporting back with more.
