Una curiosidad empirica: se me ocurrió ver qué decía Google buscando "año de creación del Cártel de los Soles". En su respuesta, el oráculo-voz de su amo del fundamentalismo tecnocapitalista gringosionista nos dice, en el apartado "líder" (dirigente, caudillo, jefe, etc.): "Diosdado Cabello Nicolás Maduro"
Max Blumenthal on the real roots of Venezuela’s crisis
THE GRAYZONE on Substack
DEC 16, 2025
Trump’s Venezuela gambit leans on a manufactured “Cartel of the Suns” scare story, cooked up by U.S. intelligence when the CIA and DEA turned the country into a cocaine corridor under Reagan. Max Blumenthal, who has tracked Washington’s regime-change ops [recuento del Cline Center desde 1945] across Latin America for years, shows how a covert drug ratline was later repackaged as proof that Caracas is a cartel state, paving the way for sanctions, asset grabs, and military threats. Even many anti-Maduro Venezuelans reject this siege, knowing a U.S.-backed power play risks civil war, mass flight, and economic blowback in the U.S. itself [“oil prices will surge”]—so the endgame is more likely a dirty deal than a glorious war.
La estrategia de Trump contra Venezuela se basa en una historia de miedo inventada, la del "Cártel de los Soles", cocinada por la inteligencia estadounidense cuando la CIA y la DEA convirtieron el país en un corredor de cocaína durante el mandato de Ronald Reagan [fue doble, de 20.01.1981-20.01.1989].
Max Blumenthal, que ha rastreado las operaciones de cambio de régimen orquestadas por Washington en la América no anglosajona durante años, muestra —invitado por Mario Nawfal— cómo una línea de alerta encubierta contra el narcotráfico fue posteriormente reestructurada como prueba de que Caracas es un estado cártel, allanando el camino para sanciones, confiscación de activos y amenazas militares. Incluso muchos venezolanos anti-Maduro rechazan este asedio, conscientes de que una maniobra de poder respaldada por Estados Unidos expone al país a una guerra civil, éxodos masivos y repercusiones económicas negativas en el propio EEUU [los precios del crudo se van a disparar]; por lo que el final del juego probablemente tenga más que ver con un negocio sucio que con una guerra gloriosa.
Extracto de la intervención inicial de Blumenthal sobre el Cártel de los Soles [The Cartel of Suns; cf. "Terrorist Designation of Cartel de los Soles", nota de prensa de Marco Rubio, Secretario de Estado de EEUU, del 16.11.2025] y otras fabricaciones imperiales de Nobela. Las acotaciones entre corchetes, los colores y los enlaces son de mi cosecha:
Max Blumenthal: Well, the Cartel of Suns was completely unknown to Americans until the designation by former Attorney General. He was Attorney General in the first Trump term, William Barr, who happens to have been a CIA officer, CIA kind of legal advisor, who wrote the pardons for the Iran-Contra felons.
And Barr finessed a bounty for Nicolás Maduro and several other figures associated with his government, Diosdado Cabello, forced drug trafficking. And this is part of a wider agenda to reshape the regime change program under the auspices of the familiar war on drugs, which has always been cover for US imperial control, particularly in the Western Hemisphere.
So, the bounty started out on Maduro, I think, at 20 or 25 million dollars. And it said… he was the head of something called the Cartel of the Suns. And what they did at the DOJ [United States Department of Justice], working with US Intelligence, was just dust off the name of an old cartel that US Intelligence had actually created.
The CIA created the Cartel of the Suns during the Reagan administration, alongside the DEA, in order to supposedly allow the DEA to monitor drug trafficking routes and identify major drug traffickers inside the United States by, in their words, “letting the dope walk”.
So, that meant going to Venezuela, tapping two of the main contacts from inside the Venezuelan National Guard, one of them named Ramón Guillén Dávila; he was sort of the whistleblower on this.
And this was before Chávez was elected President. This was under the old kind of Punto Fijo [el periodo del “Pacto de Punto Fijo”, 1958-1998, tras el régimen militar de Pérez Jiménez (1948–1958)] pro US government.
And they asked them to allow shipments of cocaine to pass through Venezuela in order to reach the United States.
This is something the DEA and CIA were doing throughout Latin America. But this got exposed. Two CIA officers were fired. Tim Weiner, who’s now sort of the preeminent historian of the CIA, exposed this in 1990 at The New York Times.
Then, three years later, Mike Wallace did a special on it for 60 minutes, featuring General Guillén speaking on camera about how they shipped actually much more cocaine into the US than was previously thought, over 20 tons. So, this actually had an effect on the drug market in the United States and on the population of the US.
And then, the Cartel of the Suns sort of slipped away and disappeared out of the public’s attention. Venezuela had not been thought of as a major drug trafficking route, or it’s certainly not a producer of cocaine like Colombia, and definitely not a place where fentanyl is produced or trafficked. The base level ingredients come —according to the official story— from China, and they’re trafficked through the US-Mexico border.
But Hugo Chávez, when he was President of Venezuela, he had a discussion program every week, sometimes more than a week, called Aló Presidente, where he would just address the nation through fireside chats. And in, I think it was 2007, he mentioned in one of these broadcasts that he had learned of a Pentagon proposal to label Venezuela as a major narco-trafficking entity in order to promote regime change [en la más acendrada tradición estadounidense].
That didn’t happen at the time, but it was prescient, because after the failure of the 2019 scheme to install Juan Guaidó as president, and the failure of the military coup that Guaidó and his mentor, Leopoldo López, staged in Caracas in April…
Mario Nawfal: I don’t want you to skim through… A lot of people don’t know what happened in 2019, the attempted uprising with barely two dozen soldiers that defected, so, it wasn’t really an uprising… Can you break it down to the audience of the regime change attempt by the US in 2019?
Max Blumenthal: Well, I’ll quickly go back further. Chávez was elected in 1998. He was extremely popular. He was responding to conditions which I can address later, where close to 70 percent of the population was in poverty, and much of the population was disenfranchised.
Four years later, the same forces, including Maria Corina Machado, that are being weaponized by the US to do regime change in Venezuela, staged a military coup, removed Chávez briefly, took him out to an island. They signed something called the Carmona Decree [Decreto Carmona o ‘Carmonazo’, abril 2002, para hacer a Pedro Carmona Estanga mamporrero mayor imperial con el grado de presidente de Venezuela], named after the person who was supposed to be the new President, who was just a Venezuelan business executive with no popular base, Pedro Carmona. And then, the population marched on Miraflores Palace and, basically, surrounded the palace, demanding Chávez return, and he was brought back, and that was the end of that.
After that, there were a series of regime change attempts [Entre 1945 y 2024, Venezuela ha sufrido en total, según el Cline Center for Advanced Social Research de la Universidad de Illinois Urbana-Champaign, un mínimo de 4 conspiraciones, 14 intentonas golpistas y 6 golpes de estado concluidos con éxito, todos promovidos por EEUU]. La Salida was a major attempt, starting with Maria Corina Machado’s party, Súmate, which was funded entirely by the United States government through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), to depose Hugo Chávez through a popular voter referendum. That failed.
(…)
Max Blumenthal menciona un artículo muy relevante de Tim Weiner para poner todos sus datos y afirmaciones en contexto:
Anti-Drug Unit of C.I.A. Sent Ton of Cocaine to U.S. in 1990Hay mucho material que desempolvar de las hemerotecas sobre el golpismo, el acoso, las difamaciones, el boicot y las sanciones, el intervencionismo o el aislamiento internacional a Venezuela que llevan practicando los EEUU y sus aliados contra el país de Simón Bolívar. Propongo la lectura de un artículo de William Blum de hace más de doce años que recuerda cómo son las cosas o por qué EEUU y sus aliados son inmensamente crueles con gente como Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden o los detenidos de Palestine Action en el Reino Unido.
By Tim Weiner
The New York Times, Nov. 20, 1993
A Central Intelligence Agency anti-drug program in Venezuela shipped a ton of nearly pure cocaine to the United States in 1990, Government officials said today.
No criminal charges have been brought in the matter, which the officials said appeared to have been a serious accident rather than an intentional conspiracy. But officials say the cocaine wound up being sold on the streets in the United States.
One C.I.A. officer has resigned, a second has been disciplined and a Federal grand jury in Miami is investigating.
The agency, made aware of a "60 Minutes" investigation of the matter scheduled for broadcast on Sunday, issued a statement today calling the affair "a most regrettable incident" involving "instances of poor judgment and management on the part of several C.I.A. officers."
The case involves the same program under which the agency created a Haitian intelligence service whose officers became involved in drug trafficking and acts of political terror. Its exposure comes amid growing Congressional skepticism about the role of the C.I.A. in the war on drugs.
In the mid-1980's, under orders from President Ronald Reagan, the agency began to set up anti-drug programs in the major cocaine-producing and trafficking capitals of Central and South America. In Venezuela it worked with the country's National Guard, a paramilitary force that controls the highways and borders.
Government officials said that the joint C.I.A.-Venezuelan force was headed by Gen. Ramon Guillen Davila, and that the ranking C.I.A. officer was Mark McFarlin, who had worked with anti-guerrilla forces in El Salvador in the 1980's. The mission was to infiltrate the Colombian gangs that ship cocaine to the United States.
In December 1989, officials of the United States Drug Enforcement Agency said, Mr. McFarlin and the C.I.A. chief of station in Venezuela, Jim Campbell, met with the drug agency's attaché in Venezuela, Annabelle Grimm, to discuss a proposal to allow hundreds of pounds of cocaine to be shipped to the United States through Venezuela in an operation intended to win the confidence of the Colombian traffickers.
Unlike so-called "controlled shipments" that take place in criminal investigations, shipments that end with arrests and the confiscation of the drugs, these were to be "uncontrolled shipments," officials of the drug agency said. The cocaine would enter the United States without being seized, so as to allay all suspicion. The idea was to gather as much intelligence as possible on members of the drug gangs.
(...) LEER EL RESTO
COUNTERPUNCH - APRIL 10, 2013
Would You Believe That the United States Tried to do Something That was Not Nice Against Hugo Chávez?
WILLIAM BLUM
Wikileaks has done it again. I guess the US will really have to get tough now with Julian Assange and Bradley Manning.
In a secret US cable to the State Department, dated November 9, 2006, and recently published online by WikiLeaks, former US ambassador to Venezuela, William Brownfield, outlines a comprehensive plan to destabilize the government of the late President Hugo Chávez. The cable begins with a Summary:“During his 8 years in power, President Chavez has systematically dismantled the institutions of democracy and governance. The USAID/OTI program objectives in Venezuela focus on strengthening democratic institutions and spaces through non-partisan cooperation with many sectors of Venezuelan society.”USAID/OTI = United States Agency for International Development/Office of Transition Initiatives. The latter is one of the many euphemisms that American diplomats use with each other and the world – They say it means a transition to “democracy”. What it actually means is a transition from the target country adamantly refusing to cooperate with American imperialist grand designs to a country gladly willing (or acceding under pressure) to cooperate with American imperialist grand designs.OTI supports the Freedom House (FH) “Right to Defend Human Rights” program with $1.1 million. Simultaneously through Development Alternatives Inc. (DAI), OTI has also provided 22 grants to human rights organizations. Freedom House is one of the oldest US government conduits for transitioning to “democracy”; to a significant extent it equates “democracy” and “human rights” with free enterprise. Development Alternatives Inc. is the organization that sent Alan Gross to Cuba on a mission to help implement the US government’s operation of regime change.OTI speaks of working to improve “the deteriorating human rights situation in” Venezuela. Does anyone know of a foreign government with several millions of dollars to throw around who would like to improve the seriously deteriorating human rights situation in the United States? They can start with the round-the-clock surveillance and the unconscionable entrapment of numerous young “terrorists” guilty of thought crimes.
“OTI partners are training NGOs [non-governmental organizations] to be activists and become more involved in advocacy.”
Now how’s that for a self-given license to fund and get involved in any social, economic or political activity that can sabotage any program of the Chávez government and/or make it look bad? The US ambassador’s cable points out that:OTI has directly reached approximately 238,000 adults through over 3000 forums, workshops and training sessions delivering alternative values and providing opportunities for opposition activists to interact with hard-core Chavistas, with the desired effect of pulling them slowly away from Chavismo. We have supported this initiative with 50 grants totaling over $1.1 million.“Another key Chavez strategy,” the cable continues, “is his attempt to divide and polarize Venezuelan society using rhetoric of hate and violence. OTI supports local NGOs who work in Chavista strongholds and with Chavista leaders, using those spaces to counter this rhetoric and promote alliances through working together on issues of importance to the entire community.” This is the classical neo-liberal argument against any attempt to transform a capitalist society – The revolutionaries are creating class conflict. But of course, the class conflict was already there, and nowhere more embedded and distasteful than in Latin America.OTI funded 54 social projects all over the country, at over $1.2 million, allowing [the] Ambassador to visit poor areas of Venezuela and demonstrate US concern for the Venezuelan people. This program fosters confusion within the Bolivarian ranks, and pushes back at the attempt of Chavez to use the United States as a ‘unifying enemy.’One has to wonder if the good ambassador (now an Assistant Secretary of State) placed any weight or value at all on the election and re-election by decisive margins of Chávez and the huge masses of people who repeatedly filled the large open squares to passionately cheer him. When did such things last happen in the ambassador’s own country? Where was his country’s “concern for the Venezuelan people” during the decades of highly corrupt and dictatorial regimes? His country’s embassy in Venezuela in that period was not plotting anything remotely like what is outlined in this cable.
The cable summarizes the focus of the embassy’s strategy’s as: “1) Strengthening Democratic Institutions, 2) Penetrating Chavez’ Political Base, 3) Dividing Chavismo, 4) Protecting Vital US business, and 5) Isolating Chavez internationally.”
The stated mission for the Office of Transition Initiatives is: “To support U.S. foreign policy objectives by helping local partners advance peace and democracy in priority countries in crisis.”
Notice the key word – “crisis”. For whom was Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela a “crisis”? For the people of Venezuela or the people who own and operate United States, Inc.?
Imagine a foreign country’s embassy, agencies and NGOs in the United States behaving as the American embassy, OTI, and NGOs did in Venezuela. President Putin of Russia recently tightened government controls over foreign NGOs out of such concern. As a result, he of course has been branded by the American government and media as a throwback to the Soviet Union.
Under pressure from the Venezuelan government, the OTI’s office in Venezuela was closed in 2010.
For our concluding words of wisdom, class, here’s Charles Shapiro, US ambassador to Venezuela from 2002 to 2004, speaking recently of the Venezuelan leaders: “I think they really believe it, that we are out there at some level to do them ill.”
