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 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.
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]:
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. (…)
Referencia que menciona Blumenthal y es importante para poner todo esto en contexto:
Anti-Drug Unit of C.I.A. Sent Ton of Cocaine to U.S. in 1990
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.
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