Maduro Sits in a Brooklyn Jail but the Drug Network He Allegedly Ran Never Closed Shop

More than nine months after American forces hauled Nicolás Maduro out of Caracas, the man Washington once branded the head of a narco-terrorist cartel is a federal inmate in Brooklyn. But the trade he was accused of running has carried on without him.Cocaine still leaves Venezuela by new routes. The interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, carrying a $25 million American bounty, still commands the police. Washington, meanwhile, has certified Caracas as a drug-war partner and signed billions of dollars in oil deals with the same government.So, with the alleged kingpin behind bars, what has actually changed?A Wanted Man Keeps His BadgeThe answer starts with the man who never left his desk.Mr. Cabello oversees Venezuela’s police forces and prisons. This portfolio makes him the country’s top law enforcement official even as Washington refuses to recognize his title and offers a fortune for his arrest. He serves under the interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, who was Mr. Maduro’s deputy. Recently, Mr. Cabello marched with ruling party loyalists at Caracas and urged them to stand behind Ms. Rodríguez.The interior minister’s family has also prospered under the new order. In February, Ms. Rodríguez named his daughter, Daniella Cabello, tourism minister and in July handed his brother, José David Cabello, control of the state petrochemical company. Other Maduro loyalists fared worse. On March 18, Ms. Rodríguez removed the longtime defense minister, Vladimir Padrino López, whose $15 million American reward offer stayed active.A longtime student of the region’s armed forces sees a clear logic in the shuffle.“It appears that the Chavista leadership that has chosen to cooperate with Delcy and the Trump administration has been largely untouched, but Delcy has exploited the new partnership to get rid of certain internal rivals and those who were challenging the new arrangements or who could not be controlled,” the research professor of Latin American studies at the United States Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, Evan Ellis, tells The New York Sun.“My colleagues tell me that in this cynical dynamic, Diosdado Cabello is prudently keeping a low profile and playing along with Delcy.”A Cartel Without a BossThe name Cartel of the Suns comes from the sun insignia on Venezuelan generals’ uniforms. The Trump administration spent 2025 describing it as a terrorist organization led by Mr. Maduro, and in November it formally designated the group a foreign terrorist organization.A superseding indictment unsealed after the January 3 raid told a different story. The earlier 2020 indictment naming Mr. Maduro, Mr. Cabello and 13 others had used the term more than 30 times and named Mr. Maduro as its leader. The new one mentions it twice and describes a patronage system tied to drug money inside the military and political elite.That revision matches what longtime observers of Venezuela have argued for years.“The ‘Cartel of the Suns’ is not an actual drug-trafficking organization but a term coined decades ago to refer generically to the involvement of high-ranking military officers in the drug trade. So no one ‘runs’ the Cartel of the Suns,” the senior Venezuela analyst at the International Crisis Group, Phil Gunson, tells the Sun.Mr. Ellis describes the term as shorthand for a system in which Chavista leaders, military commanders, and local officials “collaborated with Venezuelan and Colombian criminal groups to charge rents and facilitate a range of criminal activities in the country.” Despite a modest Drug Enforcement Administration presence, he explains, “the criminal structures that operate in Orinoco Belt, border states like Zulia and elsewhere are still substantially intact.”So the man at the top is gone but the machinery beneath him is still running.“Maduro’s capture removed a central political figure, but it did not eliminate the underlying infrastructure. The military, intelligence services, territorial access, and institutional corruption that enabled these activities did not simply disappear in January after Maduro’s arrest,” a former Drug Enforcement Administration country attaché for Venezuela, Wesley Tabor, tells the Sun.Mr. Tabor cautions that casting Mr. Cabello as Mr. Maduro’s heir atop the trade misreads it, too. Naming the interior minister as the network’s sole new commander “would oversimplify how the organization functions.”The indictment sketches how Mr. Maduro and his wife allegedly took their cut. As foreign minister before becoming president, Mr. Maduro allegedly sold diplomatic passports to traffickers. His wife, Cilia Flores, allegedly took hundreds of thousands of dollars to broker a meeting between a major trafficker and the head of the national anti-drug office, then shared in the monthly bribes that followed.Prosecutors claim that the pair moved seized cocaine under military escort and used state-backed gangs to punish people who owed them money. Both have pleaded not guilty in a Manhattan courtroom.A 2025 State Department report estimates that about 250 metric tons of cocaine move through Venezuela each year, roughly 10 percent of global production. No updated official estimate has been made public since Mr. Maduro’s capture, but in February, researchers at InSight Crime found that the state-embedded system had survived his removal largely intact, with loads shifting toward Guyana, Suriname and semi-submersibles bound for Europe.A Clean Bill From WashingtonOn September 16, the Trump administration removed Venezuela from the list of countries that have “failed demonstrably” to meet drug-control commitments, where it had sat since 2005. The determination credited the interim government’s cooperation, including the killing of the Tren de Aragua leader known as Niño Guerrero, a co-defendant in Mr. Maduro’s case.According to Mr. Ellis, the traffic has moved, not stopped.“With lethal U.S. interdiction and an expanded number of U.S. detection and interdiction assets, the number of drug boats leaving the Venezuelan coast has clearly decreased, and the expense of contracting local fishermen to run those boats has increased dramatically,” he observes.Traffickers, Mr. Ellis continues, appear to be shifting toward the use of commercial shipping and toward routes running to Europe through the Guiana Shield countries or overland through Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil.That kind of agility is exactly what Mr. Tabor spent his career watching.“These organizations are highly adaptable. They change routes, facilitators, transportation methods, and protection arrangements when political conditions change,” he says.That raises the question of what Washington’s seal of approval actually measures.“Last month’s drug certification says that Venezuela is cooperating, which certainly was not true before,” Mr. Ellis explains. “It doesn’t really say that cooperation is making a material difference.”Mr. Gunson goes further.“The decision to certify Venezuela as cooperating in combating the drugs trade is political,” he underscores. “There have undoubtedly been changes on the ground, in the sense that drug traffickers have modified their operations, changing routes and methods, but official figures on drug seizures in the U.S. suggest the overall impact on the trade has been minimal or non-existent.”Mr. Tabor draws the same line between paperwork and proof.“Drug certification is a diplomatic and policy determination. It should not be confused with independent proof that the trafficking infrastructure has been dismantled,” he notes.Real progress, Mr. Tabor emphasizes, would look like “sustained interdictions, credible investigations, arrests of corrupt officials, financial seizures, dismantling of trafficking organizations, and demonstrable reductions in the ability of criminal groups to operate with official protection.”The clean bill on drugs arrived just as American oil companies were lining up for Venezuelan crude.Oil First, Reform LaterThe money started moving in January, when Washington took control of up to 50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil and sold the first $500 million worth on Caracas’s behalf. Rather than hand the cash to the interim government, it kept the proceeds in American-controlled accounts, including one in Qatar, out of reach of Venezuela’s creditors. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told senators that future payouts would need American approval before release.The energy deals have multiplied since. On August 28, President Trump announced an agreement giving the United States access to 17 major oil fields. On September 2, Energy Secretary Chris Wright traveled to Caracas to oversee agreements, including Chevron’s plan to invest more than $7 billion over five years. Two weeks later, Oklahoma-based Continental Resources signed a memorandum with the state oil company to hold an Orinoco Belt block with an estimated 30 billion barrels in place.Nine months on, the alleged leader is in a cell, and a co-defendant is dead. The officers and ministers who made up the rest of the network are largely where they were, and the cocaine is finding new ways out.Mr. Cabello is the clearest case of all, and his staying power owes less to luck than to leverage.“For now it appears that there is no intention to pursue Interior Minister Cabello, probably because his collaboration is seen as necessary to ensure stability, given his control over elements of the security forces and the para-police groups known as ‘colectivos,’” Mr. Gunson says.“If there is to be a genuine political transition, it will be important to neutralize the threat of violent resistance, either through law enforcement or some form of agreement involving at least limited impunity.”Asked whether the oil push makes it harder to go after officials like Mr. Cabello, Mr. Tabor does not hedge.“Absolutely. There is an inherent conflict between seeking political and economic stability through cooperation with elements of the existing government and simultaneously pursuing senior officials associated with that same power structure,” he says. “Any serious effort to pursue him would carry substantial political consequences and slow or degrade the transitional process.”“The question is whether Washington is prepared to accept those consequences or whether accountability will become secondary to economic and geopolitical interests,” he contends.Real reform of the police, courts and prisons, Mr. Gunson stresses, is “virtually impossible unless and until institutional rule is restored and there can be free elections.”Mr. Tabor puts it more starkly.“You cannot realistically expect a criminal protection network to dismantle itself while the same individuals who benefited from that system retain control over the institutions responsible for enforcing the law,” he says.Mr. Ellis sees Washington caught between two goals.“The strategic dilemma of the current Trump administration is that it has made a bet on stability and expanding Venezuela’s oil production,” he says. “But you can’t eliminate the criminal economy without going to the root of the leaders, illegitimate political structures, corrupt economic activities and financial system that have sustained it over more than two decades.”Oil companies, Mr. Ellis warns, may soon learn who their real partners are.“You can’t truly get the hundreds of billions of dollars of investment that Venezuela needs while its foundation is a criminal economy not based on transparency or rule of law,” he adds. “But in which the security of your multibillion-dollar oil investments is your working relationship with the same criminals who once extorted and expropriated them.”

Maduro Sits in a Brooklyn Jail but the Drug Network He Allegedly Ran Never Closed Shop

Maduro Sits in a Brooklyn Jail but the Drug Network He Allegedly Ran Never Closed Shop

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