By Gustavo de Arístegui, as published in La Razón.
January 04, 2026

The early morning of January 3, 2026, marks a turning point not only for Venezuela, but for the entire Western Hemisphere. The United States executed a large-scale military/police operation against the heart of Chavista power, culminating in the arrest of Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. This was not the result of improvisation: it was the culmination of a legal and intelligence operation that began in 2020.

The US operation should therefore not be interpreted as a classic intervention against a sovereign government, but rather as the execution of arrest warrants against the leaders of a narco-terrorist network formally designated as such by the competent US authorities. The indictment filed by the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York in March 2020 accurately describes the criminal organization that Maduro presided over, the so-called Cartel of the Suns , a name that alludes to the golden suns on the epaulettes of Venezuelan generals. The Cartel of the Suns is not a fringe group that parasitizes the state: it is the state itself at the service of crime.

Generals, high-ranking police officials, ministers, judges, and the regime’s leader himself allegedly coordinated to put ports, airports, air bases, public companies, and state banks at the service of the massive cocaine trafficking to the United States and Europe. Added to this network is the Tren de Aragua, an organization that began as a prison gang in the Aragua Penitentiary Center and, under official protection, transformed into a veritable hemispheric criminal hydra. Its tentacles extend through Peru, Chile, Colombia, Brazil, and, increasingly, into the United States and Europe . Its activities go far beyond drug trafficking: human trafficking, sexual exploitation of women and children, contract killings, extortion, arms trafficking, and money laundering are all part of its repertoire. None of this could have occurred on a continental scale without the active sponsorship of the Chavista regime.

On July 25, 2025, the U.S. Treasury Department took a decisive step by designating the Cartel of the Suns as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Organization (SDGT). This action noted that Nicolás Maduro heads the organization and that the cartel provides material support to both the Tren de Aragua and the Sinaloa Cartel, one of the most powerful and violent drug trafficking groups in the world. A few months earlier, the State Department had designated the Tren de Aragua as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, elevating it to the level of other actors that combine crime and terror.

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Added to this picture are the regime’s alliances with Colombian guerrillas. Dissident groups from the FARC and the National Liberation Army (ELN) found a safe haven in Venezuelan territory from which to plan operations, train fighters, and manage cocaine labs. For years, high-ranking U.S. security officials have warned that Venezuela has transformed into a “narco-terrorist state” : not a state that tolerates crime, but a state whose very existence has become intertwined with the criminal economy and terrorist organizations.

The central question is not only whether the United States could act, but whether it had an obligation to do so. From a legal and political standpoint, Maduro is not recognized as the legitimate head of state by the major democracies. Following the 2018 electoral fraud and the National Assembly’s subsequent invocation of the Constitution in 2019, more than fifty countries, led by the United States and much of the European Union, refused to recognize him. The July 2024 elections, designed to legitimize his continued hold on power, only served to confirm the usurpation.

In parallel, the terrorist designations and criminal charges created a formidable legal framework. Maduro and several of his closest associates were indicted in 2020 in U.S. federal courts for conspiracy to commit narcoterrorism, conspiracy to import large quantities of cocaine into the United States, and the use and possession of weapons of war and destructive devices in connection with those activities. Each of these charges carries minimum and maximum penalties that, combined, place Maduro’s potential sentence at a minimum of three decades in a maximum-security prison and a maximum of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

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Added to this are the increasing rewards offered for his capture—reaching an unprecedented $50 million —a sign of the strategic priority assigned to the case. In the American view, he is no longer a political adversary, but rather the head of an organization that combines drug trafficking, terrorism, and corruption on a global scale.

From this perspective, the January 3rd operation cannot simply be equated with an “invasion” of a sovereign government. It is more akin to the location and capture of a leader of a formally designated terrorist organization that uses the state apparatus as both a shield and a tool. One doesn’t need to subscribe to all the tenets of US doctrine to recognize that the legal landscape has shifted: the line separating non-intervention from the duty to protect one’s own society from a cartel state has become blurred.

Maduro and Cilia Flores will appear before the court in the Southern District of New York; Alvin Hellerstein, a federal judge with extensive experience prosecuting international drug trafficking networks, will preside. The message is clear: no one is above the law when using state power for crimes of this magnitude. The Trump administration has insisted that the arrests are part of a broader strategy to combat hemispheric narcoterrorism.

The internal impact in Venezuela will be profound.

The arrest of the regime’s top leader opens a phase of uncertainty, internal power struggles, and potential fractures within the Chavista coalition. The generals who enriched themselves for years under the umbrella of the Cartel of the Suns are now scattering, and many are likely secretly negotiating with U.S. authorities.

My old friend Pedro Mario Burelli , former director of PDVSA and insightful analyst of the Venezuelan tragedy, always said: “The Chavista regime is not a legitimate government; it is a criminal organization. You don’t negotiate with criminals: you hand them over to justice.” This maxim has finally prevailed in practice. Maduro’s capture solidifies the idea that the international community, and the United States in particular, has ceased to consider Chavismo a political interlocutor.

The choice for Venezuela is brutally simple: continue as a cartel state allied with regimes hostile to the West, or become once again a nation fully integrated into the international community. The capture of Maduro does not, in itself, resolve the situation of a country that was once one of the most prosperous in Latin America. For the first time in 26 years, there is a real opportunity to dismantle, step by step, the structure of organized crime that has hijacked Venezuela. The task is monumental: to transform this turning point into the beginning of an era of freedom, justice, and reconstruction.