On February 18, General Francis Donovan, the head of the United States Southern Command, made a surprise appearance in Venezuela. The lightly-publicized visit seemed to be a sign that the US military is keeping a close watch on the country in the aftermath of its dramatic capture of Nicolás Maduro on January 3.
By all accounts, it was a productive visit. Venezuelan authorities said Donovan met with President Delcy Rodríguez, Interior and Justice Minister Diosdado Cabello, and Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López. They discussed bilateral cooperation on combatting migration and drug trafficking, a top communications official said in a post on X. And in a statement, Southern Command said it had advanced President Donald Trump’s plan for stabilizing Venezuela.
*This article is the fourth in a six-part investigation, “Cocaine and Venezuela’s Cartel of the Suns Post-Maduro,” exploring the current drug trafficking dynamics in Venezuela, the nature of the Cartel of the Suns, and their future without Maduro. Read the full investigation here.
“During the meeting, the leaders reiterated the United States’ commitment to a free, safe, and prosperous Venezuela for the Venezuelan people, the United States, and the Western Hemisphere,” Southern Command said.
But what no one said was that, according to US justice officials, Cabello and Padrino are part of the Cartel of the Suns and currently have rewards of $25 million and $15 million, respectively, for their capture. In fact, the pair are the criminal network’s most prominent leaders. Their position at the top of the Chavista regime is proof that the Cartel of the Suns, while perhaps debilitated after Maduro’s capture, is still very much alive. What’s more, after numerous transformations over many decades, it looks set to undergo another transformation.
Phase I: Chávez’s Praetorian Regime
Since its beginnings in the 1990s, the Cartel of the Suns has always been embedded in the state, principally the military. The name comes from the golden stars that generals in the National Guard have on their epaulettes.
At its onset, there was no formal relationship with the government. The cartel got its start as a series of unconnected cells which turned a blind eye to drug traffickers, mostly Colombians, who were moving cocaine through Venezuela. They had little connection with each other or the top echelons of the government.
This changed in 2002. In the aftermath of a coup attempt against him, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez began to forge an alliance with Colombian rebels. The coup was initially recognized by the United States and Colombia, prompting Chávez to turn to the Colombian guerrillas, ideological allies of his Bolivarian Revolution. But the alliance came with tradeoffs. The Colombian rebels, especially the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – FARC), were deeply involved in the drug trade.
SEE ALSO: The Colombo-Venezuelan Guerrillas: How Colombia’s War Migrated to Venezuela
Chávez turned to trusted lieutenants to run this relation, mainly those in the military. These included Hugo Carvajal, alias “El Pollo,” the head of military intelligence, and General Cliver Acalá, a high-ranking military official. In subsequent court documents, witnesses described how Carvajal acted as an intermediary with the FARC for drug deals, while Alcalá coordinated logistics for traffickers. Both were later indicted and pleaded guilty in the United States to drug trafficking.
However, Chávez’s point man was Diosdado Cabello. Cabello’s relationship with Chávez stretched back years to his time in the military. Cabello had supported Chávez in his dramatic military coup in 1992. The coup failed, and both were jailed, but following their release, they went into politics, and Cabello helped Chávez win the presidency in 1998. He was chief of staff before becoming vice president. He stood by him once again in 2002 when Chávez was temporarily ousted during that coup, briefly taking on the role of interim president before handing power back to Chávez.
Others outside the military were also drawn into the network. Nicolás Maduro, for instance, was the foreign minister between 2006 and 2011, during which the US indictment alleges Maduro facilitated false passports for traffickers and helped shield shipments of cocaine from Venezuela to Mexico and the movement of money from Mexico to Venezuela. His wife, Cilia Flores, was a prominent politician. Court documents say she took hundreds of thousands of dollars to broker a meeting between drug traffickers and the then-head of the anti-narcotics division of the government.
The Cartel of the Suns became shorthand for all military involvement with the cocaine business. But it was more. Turning a blind eye to cocaine trafficking allowed Chávez to maintain the loyalty of his security forces, as he moved military men he trusted into almost every part of the state in what became a quasi-Praetorian regime. Simultaneously, he was strengthening ties to the Colombian leftist guerrilla groups that controlled much of the cocaine trade and provided a convenient border buffer against any potential aggression from Colombia, which he saw as a US-government proxy in the region.
Over time, this drug trafficking grew, and local Venezuelan operators replaced the Colombian narcos who had previously managed the drug business in Venezuela. One of them was Carlos Orense, whom US prosecutors accuse of moving close to 40 tons of cocaine per year from Venezuela to Central America and Mexico in the 2000s, where it was then transported to the United States. All of this, according to the documents, was facilitated by people like Carvajal and Alcalá and the Cartel of the Suns. The court files go further, describing how Carvajal also worked with well-known drug traffickers, including meeting with them on his properties.
In essence, Chávez set up a quid pro quo: Participants in the corrupt system could keep their proceeds but were expected to be loyal to the regime and maintain discretion. This was the Cartel of the Suns under Chávez. But his hand-picked successor, Nicolás Maduro, took this system of corruption and built it into something far more sophisticated, a means to retain his hold on power amid a collapsing economy and international isolation, a system of hybrid criminal governance.
From the Cartel of the Suns to the Hybrid Criminal System
2013
March 2013: President Hugo Chávez dies, opening a power transition within Chavismo.
April 2013: Nicolás Maduro narrowly wins the presidential elections, consolidating the succession.
2014
February-May 2014: Massive protests against Maduro are suppressed by military forces, police, and colectivos.
2015
November 2015: Nephews of Maduro and Cilia Flores are arrested in Haiti by the US, under accusation of conspiring to transport 800 kilograms of cocaine.
2017: Both nephews were found guilty and sentenced to 18 years in prison. In 2022, they were released by the Biden administration as part of a swap for US citizens imprisoned in Venezuela on political grounds.
2016
February 2026: Maduro decrees the creation of the Orinoco Mining Arc, where military officials and armed groups regulate mining.
2022
A drug trafficking network including a pro-government mayor and multiple members of the National Assembly is dismantled.
2023
September 2023: Security forces raid Tren de Aragua’s headquarters in the first in a series of operations aimed at reasserting control over the country’s prisons.
2024
July 2024: Maduro fraudulently declares himself the winner of the presidential elections in Venezuela.
- Tren del Llano attacks security forces in retaliation against Maduro and the election, sparking a new state campaign against the gang.
August 2024: Maduro appoints Diosdado Cabello as Minister of the Interior and Justice.
2025
April 2025: Seven mayors are detained for alleged involvement in a drug trafficking network, setting the stage for the government to secure control over Zulia state.
2026
January 2026: After months of mounting pressure, a US operation arrests Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores in Caracas and transfers them to New York to face criminal charges. Vice President Delcy Rodríguez assumes the presidency and signals cooperation with the Trump administration.
2013 – 2016
The government grants prison leaders some administrative functions to control increasing internal violence, enabling criminal groups to grow behind bars.
2016 – 2023
The “peace zones,” created earlier, solidify as enclaves allowing criminal gangs to grow and negotiate directly with state forces.
Tren de Aragua and similar groups increase their operations outside the prisons and start migrating to other countries.
2017 – 2021
Nicolás Maduro Guerra, the president’s son, was engaged in drug trafficking to Miami and New York in the US and met in 2020 with representatives of a FARC dissident group in Colombia to coordinate drug and weapons shipments, according to a 2026 US indictment.
The ELN increases its presence on the Venezuelan side of the border, in alliance with Maduro’s government, and takes control of clandestine border crossings.
2021 – 2025
Mega-operations weaken the country’s major criminal gangs.
2022 – 2023
Operations in Amazonas state displace more than 13,000 illegal miners from Yapacana National Park, but they move to other mines.
2024 – 2025
- Mining in Cerro Yapacana and surrounding areas continues, this time under security force permits and criminal groups like the ELN.
- Police and military operations become more politicized and less transparent; repression and arbitrary detentions increase.
Phase II: The Hybrid Criminal State
When Maduro took office after Chávez’s death in 2013, he inherited more than the presidency. He inherited a corruption system that had underpinned the Bolivarian Revolution and that would become essential to sustaining his own rule. However, the country he received had changed. The oil boom had ended, and the economy was in steep decline. Caracas ranked among the most violent cities in the region. And unlike Chávez, Maduro lacked allies in the armed forces.
To confront growing discontent amid falling government revenue and to avoid fractures within the corruption networks that existed under Chávez, Maduro chose to broaden and reorganize the system he inherited. This reorganization marked the gradual consolidation of a hybrid criminal state: a political order in which formal institutions and criminal structures did not compete but complemented each other. Rather than suppress illicit actors, the government integrated them into a system of hybrid governance. Armed groups exercised authority in defined territories and cooperated with state elements. In exchange for loyalty and a measure of order, they received operational autonomy and in turn facilitated access to criminal rents for generals and senior Chavista figures.
One of the men presiding over this system in the military was Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López. Padrino had played a role in quickly returning Chávez to power in the wake of the 2002 coup, after which he shot up the ranks. By the time Chávez died, he was second-in-command of the army. And in 2014, Maduro promoted him to defense minister, a position he has held ever since. He has kept the military loyal to the Chavista regime and oversaw its transformation from national defense to a force of political and social repression.
Still, Padrino has maintained a profile that is more institutional than criminal. Allegations from US prosecutors make mostly vague references to drug trafficking. A 2019 indictment states that Padrino received payoffs from drug traffickers in exchange for allowing them free passage through Venezuelan airspace and that he ordered the military to shoot down the planes of those who did not pay his fee.
Facing fiscal collapse, Maduro expanded the role of illicit economies in sustaining the state. Revenues from drug trafficking, illegal mining, and contraband fed into Chavista figures and indirectly into regime coffers, helping the government weather economic collapse and contributing to the flow of hard currency into the state’s payment machinery. These criminal rents were not merely tolerated. They were structured, redistributed, and folded into the political economy of the regime.
SEE ALSO: How Criminal Groups Helped Fill Venezuela’s Post-Chávez Void
Military officers, political elites, and local power brokers were granted participation in revenue streams in exchange for loyalty. Corruption networks that once operated parallel to the state fused with governance structures at municipal, state, and national levels.
In this way, Cabello’s case is illustrative. A former army officer, he had transformed himself into a political operator and powerbroker, a path other military officials connected to the Cartel of the Suns would follow. After being chief of staff and vice president, he became a minister to multiple departments, governor of the state of Miranda, head of the telecommunications commission, and president of Congress. He maintained his deep ties with the armed forces. In other words, Cabello, more than any single political figure, came to embody the Venezuelan state in its modern, hybrid form: part military officer, part congressman, part minister, part governor, and part criminal operator.
On the security front, alliances with criminal groups were key. In parts of Caracas, authorities reduced operations, withdrew security forces from certain neighborhoods, and tolerated gang dominance in exchange for lower homicide rates. This was reflected in the government’s creation of so-called “peace zones” in 2013, which restricted police entry into gang-controlled areas in exchange for promises to reduce violence.
Colectivos, the armed civilian groups that emerged under Chávez, consolidated their role within this structure. They functioned as the regime’s street-level enforcers, repressing protests and deterring opposition mobilization. In return, they gained access to black markets linked to subsidized food, propane gas, gasoline distribution, extortion, and the retail sale of drugs. And operators like Cabello now run dozens of their own colectivos.
Phase III: Recalibration
The system required periodic recalibration. In several regions, criminal actors accumulated power beyond their assigned roles. Competition over rents intensified, and violence escalated. When local arrangements threatened central authority, the regime intervened.
In 2018, authorities rolled out “Operación Manos de Metal” to retake control of gold mining zones in Bolívar state and weaken the sindicatos, or local gangs, which had come to dominate them. Rather than relying solely on formal security forces, the government turned to the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional – ELN), a binational guerrilla group that controls much of the Colombia–Venezuela border. Acting in coordination with state actors, the ELN displaced criminal rivals and consolidated control over strategic mining sites.
Maduro applied similar logic to drug trafficking. Rather than dismantle routes, the government reorganized them. Selective operations dismantled structures such as the Cartel de Paraguaná in Falcón state and displaced certain factions of the former FARC rebels, which had since demobilized and formed dissident factions, from border areas. In doing so, Maduro positioned the regime as the ultimate underworld regulator, using access to routes to reward key political, military, and criminal allies.
The pattern continued in late 2024 and early 2025, when more than a third of the 21 municipal mayors in Zulia state were detained under orders from Interior and Justice Minister Cabello. Publicly framed as a crackdown on drug trafficking, sources indicated to InSight Crime that this was a tactic Cabello used to punish opponents and consolidate his hold on trafficking routes. US prosecutors have charted Cabello’s involvement in drug trafficking during much of this time, including allegations that he was giving the ELN rebels instructions.
“Between in or about 2022 and in or about 2024, Cabello Rondón regularly traveled to clandestine airstrips controlled by the ELN near the Colombia-Venezuela border to ensure the cocaine’s continued safe passage in Venezuelan territory,” reads the 2026 indictment.
SEE ALSO: Cocaine Corridor: Drugs Drive ELN’s Venezuela Expansion
What’s more, multiple sources told InSight Crime how Cabello, through his networks of political and military actors, has maintained influence over drug trafficking routes and over criminal networks.
“Those involved [in the Cartel of the Suns] probably pay up to the higher levels of government,” James Story, the former US Ambassador to Venezuela, told InSight Crime. “In particular to Diosdado Cabello. Diosdado gets a taste of what everybody’s up to, I’m sure.”
Meanwhile, under Padrino, the military was completely transformed, shifting from an informal and unconnected constellation of officers implicated in trafficking to a systemic model embedded in the military hierarchy. Independent reports showed that the Venezuelan armed forces have the highest number of generals in the hemisphere relative to troop numbers. Promotions, rank inflation, and access to illicit rents became intertwined within a patronage-based command structure, feeding corruption and deepening military involvement in the drug trade, illegal mining, contraband, and other illicit markets.
But on January 3, everything changed again.
Phase IV: Retrenchment?
What comes next for Cabello and Padrino is hard to predict. The meeting with Donovan was an illustration that, in spite of their role in creating a deeply embedded criminal regime, they remain a critical part of the stability the US is seeking in Venezuela.
But they are also vulnerable. Cabello has flexed his political muscle in recent weeks, organizing public events and gatherings, but he is the most high-profile member of the Rodríguez regime under indictment. And he is named in the latest indictment that led to the capture of Maduro.
For his part, Padrino López has come to hold less sway within the armed forces and Venezuela’s power structure in recent years, one Venezuelan political analyst told InSight Crime, asking for anonymity for security reasons. And while Padrino López had remained loyal to Maduro, his response, or lack of one, to the US capture of Maduro in Caracas has caused controversy within the military ranks.
Meanwhile, others are already locked up in the United States, namely Carvajal, who is awaiting sentencing for drug trafficking, and Alcalá, who is serving a more than two-decade sentence for cocaine smuggling. These and many others are undoubtedly cooperating with US authorities to give them even more information on these two and others.
Maduro did not merely preside over corruption. He took the Cartel of the Suns and he systematized it. What had been a network operating within the military became a governing architecture built around corruption and access to criminal rents. Criminal actors functioned as delegated authorities within territorial fiefdoms, while regime figures allocated rents, regulated violence, and defined the rules of the criminal ecosystem.