Is the US targeting a Venezuelan cartel that may not technically exist?

By Michael Rios, Katie Bo Lillis, Priscilla Alvarez, CNN

(CNN) — As the Trump administration ramps up the pressure on Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro, experts and former government officials have raised concerns about its move to designate Cartel de los Soles as a foreign terrorist organization.

They argue it is not a formally organized cartel similar to criminal organizations in Colombia and Mexico, and it’s a stretch to suggest Maduro leads it, though there is government involvement in the drug trade.

They suggested the designation provides the administration a justification to take military action against the Venezuelan government.

US President Donald Trump said as much on Sunday, telling reporters that the designation could allow the US military to target Maduro’s assets and infrastructure inside Venezuela.

CNN has reached out to the State Department for comment.

What we know about Cartel de los Soles

Cartel de los Soles, which means cartel of the suns in English, is used to describe a decentralized network of Venezuelan groups within the armed forces linked to drug trafficking, say experts.

But given its lack of hierarchy and structure, some say it can’t be compared to traditional cartels that have been designated as terror groups by the US, and others suggest it technically doesn’t exist in a conventional sense.

“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.

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.”

The official said the Trump administration’s assertions are based on “bad intel” likely from the Defense Intelligence Agency or the Drug Enforcement Administration that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny before the greater intelligence community, or that “it is purely political.”

CNN has reached out to the DIA and DEA for comment.

The name emerged in the 1990s, after Venezuelan generals and commanders – who wore sun insignias on their epaulettes – were investigated for drug trafficking and related crimes, according to the think tank InsightCrime.

The name caught on and was frequently used, especially from the mid-2000s onward, when several members of different branches of the military assumed more active roles in drug trafficking, InsightCrime said in a recent report.

Jeremy McDermott, cofounder and co-director of InsightCrime, told CNN that the so-called cartel “is not a traditional, vertically organized drug trafficking organization. It is, at least according to InsightCrime, a series of normally disconnected cells embedded within the Venezuelan military.”

According to the State Department, Cartel de los Soles, along with the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua criminal organization and the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, are responsible for drug trafficking to the United States and Europe.

Phil Gunson, a researcher with the International Crisis Group based in Caracas, previously told CNN that “Cartel de los Soles, per se, doesn’t exist. It’s a journalistic expression created to refer to the involvement of Venezuelan authorities in drug trafficking.”

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t military personnel or government officials involved in drug trafficking. “The cartels are here, the Colombians and the Mexicans, too. There are drug shipments via the Orinoco River and by air through clandestine airstrips, flights from Apure to Central America, and so on. All of this wouldn’t be possible without direct involvement from above,” the expert said.

For Gunson, Maduro’s role is reminiscent of that of former Panamanian President Manuel Noriega, who was sentenced to decades in prison in various jurisdictions for his association with the Medellín cartel in 1992: an external partner who, while not directly part of a cartel, still benefited from drug trafficking routes under his protection.

The Venezuelan president has always denied any personal involvement in drug trafficking, and his government has repeatedly denied the existence of the alleged cartel.

“Suddenly, they (the US) dusted off something they call the Cartel de los Soles, which they have never been able to prove, because it doesn’t exist. It’s the narrative of imperialism,” Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello said a few days ago.

CNN contacted the Venezuelan Attorney General’s office for comment.

What is the purpose of the designation?

The foreign terrorist organization (FTO) designation is one of the State Department’s most serious counterterrorism designations. It is illegal for US persons to knowingly provide “material support or resources” to a designated foreign terrorist organization, and representatives and members of one are blocked from entering the US.

Beyond that, the move could allow the US military to target Maduro’s assets and infrastructure inside Venezuela, as Trump has suggested.

The US has traditionally treated counternarcotics work as a law enforcement matter, but Trump has increasingly sought to militarize those efforts, using traditional counterterrorism tools and authorities – something that Finucane said is really a smokescreen for the operation’s true purpose: to oust Maduro.

“The concerning aspect of this move is that it could be a prelude to military action against the Venezuelan government itself,” Finucane said, calling it another step in Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s “efforts to cloak a regime change operation in the guise of counternarcotics.”

The administration, he said, is “inventing a fact pattern” and “creating an alternate reality” in order to be able to publicly characterize its policy toward Venezuela as a counterterrorism campaign.

Although designating a foreign organization as a terror organization carries no legal authority for military strikes – it technically only authorizes financial and diplomatic penalties, such as the freezing of assets – the administration has nevertheless used it as a precursor to military action in the recent past. The US military has struck 22 small boats that the administration claims were manned by criminal gangs that it designated as foreign terror organizations.

Those designations have drawn scrutiny from legal experts because some of the gangs and cartels the US has designated are motivated by profit, not ideology. Terror groups, traditionally, have been defined as groups carrying out political violence.

Designating Cartel de los Soles, which may not even be a formal organization, takes that already-contested logic a step further. “They’re basically operating outside of the law which is why there is no limiting principle,” Finucane said.

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Stefano Pozzebon contributed reporting.