https:\/\/reason.com\/2026\/01\/07\/why-the-doj-has-stopped-describing-maduro-as-the-head-of-a-literal-drug-cartel<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“C\u00e1rtel de los Soles “is actually a slang term, invented by the Venezuelan media in the 1990s, for officials who are corrupted by drug money.” As Savage explained in November, citing “a range of specialists in Latin American criminal and narcotics issues,” C\u00e1rtel de los Soles “is not a literal organization” but rather “a figure of speech in Venezuela.”<\/p>\n
In 2020, in other words, the Justice Department made a pretty embarrassing mistake, which it has sought to rectify in the revised indictment. Yet the Treasury Department and the State Department are still listing C\u00e1rtel de los Soles, which federal prosecutors now say refers to “a patronage system” created by a bunch of corrupt government officials, as an FTO, which under federal law means “a foreign organization” that “engages in terrorist activity” threatening “the security of United States nationals or the national security of the United States.””<\/p>\n
https:\/\/reason.com\/2026\/01\/07\/why-the-doj-has-stopped-describing-maduro-as-the-head-of-a-literal-drug-cartel\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[951,221,986,439,170,619,741],"class_list":["post-21038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article-share","tag-corruption","tag-donald-trump","tag-drug-cartels","tag-drugs","tag-trump","tag-united-states","tag-venezuela"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21038"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21038\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21039,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21038\/revisions\/21039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}