By Gustavo de Arístegui, as published by LA RAZÓN.
4 January 2026
THE FALL OF NICOLÁS MADURO | The Analysis
Gustavo de Arístegui
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 that culminated in the detention of Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. This is not the result of improvisation: it is the culmination of a legal and intelligence construction that dates back to the year 2020. The American operation should not be interpreted, therefore, as a classic intervention against a sovereign government, but rather as the execution of search and capture warrants against the leaders of a narco-terrorist network formally designated as such by the competent authorities of the US. The indictment presented by the New York Federal Prosecutor’s Office in March 2020 accurately describes the criminal architecture that Maduro presided over, the so-called Cartel of the Suns, a name that alludes to the golden suns on the shoulder pads of Venezuelan generals. The Cartel of the Suns is not a marginal gang that parasitizes the State: it is the State itself at the service of crime. Generals, high police ranks, ministers, magistrates, and the regime’s leader himself would have coordinated to put ports, airports, airbases, public companies, and state banks at the service of the massive trafficking of cocaine to the United States and Europe.
Added to this framework is the Tren de Aragua, an organization born as a prison gang in the Aragua Penitentiary Center and converted, under official protection, into a true hemispheric criminal hydra. Its tentacles extend through Peru, Chile, Colombia, Brazil and, increasingly, the United States and Europe. Their activities go far beyond drug trafficking: human trafficking, sexual exploitation of women and children, contract killing, extortion, arms trafficking, and money laundering form part of their repertoire. None of this could have occurred on a continental scale without the active sponsorship of the Chavista regime.
On July 25, 2025, the US Treasury Department took a decisive step by designating the Cartel of the Suns as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist Organization” (SDGT). In that action, it was pointed out that Nicolás Maduro heads the organization and that the cartel provides material support both to 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.
To this picture are added the regime’s alliances with Colombian guerrillas. Dissidents of the FARC and the National Liberation Army (ELN) found safe sanctuary in Venezuelan territory from which to plan operations, train combatants, and manage cocaine laboratories. High-ranking US officials have been warning for years that Venezuela has been transformed into a “narco-terrorist state”: not a state that tolerates crime, but a state whose reason for being has merged with the criminal economy and with terrorist organizations.
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¡Viva Venezuela libre!
The charges against Maduro carry a potential sentence with a minimum of three decades in maximum security prison and a maximum of life imprisonment.
(Caption: Supporters of Maduro patrol the streets after the United States operation)
The central issue is not only whether the United States could act, but whether it had the obligation to do so. From a legal-political point of view, Maduro is not recognized as the legitimate head of state by the major democracies. Following the 2018 electoral fraud and the subsequent invocation of the Constitution by part of the National Assembly in 2019, more than fifty countries, with the United States and a large part of the European Union at the forefront, refused to recognize him. The July 2024 elections, designed to “whitewash” his permanence in power, did nothing but confirm the usurpation.
In parallel, the terrorist designations and criminal indictments configured a formidable legal framework. Maduro and several of his closest collaborators were indicted in 2020 before US federal justice for conspiracy to commit narco-terrorism, conspiracy to import large quantities of cocaine into North American territory, and use and possession of destructive weapons and devices in relation to those activities. Each of those charges carries minimum and maximum sentences that, combined, place Maduro’s potential sentence at a minimum of three decades in maximum security prison and a maximum of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
To this are added the increasing rewards offered for his capture—which reached the unprecedented figure of 50 million dollars—a sign of the strategic priority assigned to the case. In American logic, it is not about a political adversary, but about the boss of an organization that combines drug trafficking, terrorism, and corruption on a global scale.
From this perspective, the operation of January 3 cannot be equated with an “invasion” against a sovereign government. It more closely resembles the location and capture of a leader of a formally designated terrorist organization that uses the state apparatus as a shield and tool. It is not necessary to share all the premises of American doctrine to recognize that the legal ground has shifted: the line that separates non-intervention from the duty to protect one’s own societies against a Cartel-State has become blurred.
Maduro and Cilia Flores will appear before justice in the Southern District of New York; Alvin Hellerstein is a federal judge with extensive experience in prosecuting international drug trafficking networks. The message is clear: no one is above the law when they use the power of the State for crimes of this magnitude. The Trump administration has insisted that the detention forms part of a broader strategy to combat hemispheric narco-terrorism.
The impact within Venezuela will be profound. The detention of the regime’s supreme leader opens a phase of uncertainty, internal struggles, and possible fractures within the Chavista coalition. The generals who enriched themselves for years under the umbrella of the Cartel of the Suns are in disarray and surely many of them are secretly negotiating with American justice.
My old friend Pedro Mario Burelli, former director of PDVSA and a lucid analyst of the Venezuelan tragedy, has always said: “The Chavista regime is not a legitimate government, it is a criminal organization. One does not negotiate with criminals: one hands them over to justice”. This maxim has ended up imposing itself in practice. The capture of Maduro crystallizes the idea that the international community, and particularly the United States, has stopped conceiving Chavismo as a political interlocutor. The choice for Venezuela is brutally simple: continue as a Cartel-State allied with regimes hostile to the West, or become a new nation fully integrated into the international community. Maduro’s departure does not solve, by itself, the situation of a country that was 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 hijacked Venezuela. The task is titanic; converting this turning point into the beginning of a stage of freedom, justice, and reconstruction.
Gustavo de Arístegui is a diplomat and former ambassador to India, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, and Sri Lanka (2012-2016) https://www.google.com/search?q=gustavodearistegui.substack.com