In 1993, 60 Minutes aired a report detailing how the CIA recruited Venezuelan military officer Gen. Ramón Guillén Dávila, enabling the shipment of roughly 22 tons of cocaine into U.S. cities under the guise of an intelligence operation. Once the so-called “Cartel of the Suns” outlived its usefulness to U.S. intelligence, it quietly vanished—only to be revived years later by the U.S. government as a political weapon in its campaign against Venezuela.
Here's the 1993 60 Minutes report on how the CIA recruited a Venezuelan military officer, General Ramón Guillén Davila, to help them ship 22 tons of cocaine into American cities
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) September 10, 2025
The Cartel of the Suns disappeared once it lost its utility to the CIA, and was resurrected by the… https://t.co/sLou9YUA1I pic.twitter.com/XW69D6MK17
From the Grayzone
The Trump administration has accused Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro of leading the long-defunct “Cartel of the Suns.” But as journalist Diego Sequera explains, the cartel’s origins trace back to the early 1990s, when the CIA allegedly directed one of its top Venezuelan military assets to facilitate the shipment of tons of cocaine into U.S. cities. That same asset, according to contemporaneous reporting, was widely identified at the time as the leader of what became known as the “Cartel of the Suns.”
The Trump admin accuses Nicolas Maduro of leading the now-defunct Cartel of the Suns
— The Grayzone (@TheGrayzoneNews) September 10, 2025
Diego Sequera explains how the CIA directed its top Venezuelan asset to ship tons of cocaine into US cities during the early 1990's
The CIA asset was known as leader of "Cartel of the Suns" pic.twitter.com/aWlfhyr22i
About the cartel CNN reported that “They’re designating a non-thing that is not a terror organization as a terrorist organization,” said Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who specializes in war powers issues.
Adding that “another former senior US government official said Cartel de los Soles was “a made-up name used to describe an ad hoc group of Venezuelan officials involved in the trafficking of drugs through Venezuela. It doesn’t have the hierarchy or command-and-control structure of a traditional cartel.”
Reporting from late August from Venezuelanalysis and CNN confirms that Venezuela is not a producer of cocaine. As journalist Clodovaldo Hernández notes, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reports that only about 5 percent of narcotics produced in Colombia transit through Venezuelan territory, and that the country is free of both coca cultivation and drug laboratories. The notion of a powerful drug cartel operating without plantations or processing facilities is, on its face, absurd.
Adding “Only far-right fanatics are capable of repeating such a slander—just as they did in 2024 with María Corina Machado’s “denunciation”/”claim” before US congressmen. According to her, Venezuela was then the world’s fourth-largest producer of cocaine, a cosmic-scale lie that fed into the already worn-out hoax of the Cartel of the Suns and the so-called narco-regime.”
Recent reporting drawing on United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime data undercuts claims that Venezuela is a cocaine-producing country. UN researchers show that coca cultivation—the raw material for cocaine—is overwhelmingly concentrated in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, with Colombia alone accounting for the vast majority of global production. UNODC estimates indicate that more than two-thirds of the world’s cocaine now originates in Colombia, driven both by expanded cultivation since 2020 and higher yields in processing, while Venezuela does not appear at all on UN cocaine production maps. U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration findings align with this assessment: its most recent annual report attributes 84 percent of cocaine seized in the United States to Colombian sources and makes no reference to Venezuela as either a producer or a significant transit point, noting instead that most Colombian cocaine moves north along Pacific trafficking routes through Ecuador, Central America, and Mexico.
Taken together, the record shows that the “Cartel of the Suns” functions less as a criminal organization than as a political fiction—one born from a U.S. intelligence operation, buried when it became inconvenient, and resurrected decades later to justify coercive measures against a government Washington seeks to remove. What remains consistent is not the evidence, but the utility of the accusation. And in the end, the “Cartel of the Suns” tells us far less about Venezuela than it does about U.S. power: how an intelligence-linked drug operation can be erased from history when it implicates Washington, then revived as propaganda when regime change again becomes the goal. The cartel never needed to exist—only the narrative did.
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