In a 33-20 vote, Colombia’s premier legislative body in Bogotá approved a measure to “politically declare the so-called ‘Cartel of the Suns’ a transnational criminal organization linked to drug trafficking, money laundering, and the financing of terrorist groups.”
The Venezuelan-linked criminal enterprise, according to the U.S. State Department, is managed by top officials of the Venezuelan military brass and heads of the regime of President Nicolás Maduro.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Trump White House have repeatedly denounced the government of Nicolás Maduro, delegitimizing the Maduro government amid an expansive military deployment in the South Caribbean as part of a campaign to eliminate the presence of armed drug trafficking groups to reduce the flow of illicit narcotics into the United States.
The deployment consists of several U.S. naval destroyers, guided-missile launchers, amphibious assault vessels, a horde of F-35 fighter jets, including a nuclear submarine.
The government in Caracas has expressed tremendous distress over the blockade, activating a nationwide basic military training program and calling up the Venezuelan territorial militia to prepare to repel any U.S. military assault on the Venezuelan mainland.
The U.S. deployment along the Venezuelan coast has also irritated the President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, who asserts that the U.S. military presence along the northern South American coastline has the risk of destabilizing the region, also claiming last month that the ‘Cartel of the Suns’ “does not exist”, asserting that such a narrative “is the far right’s fictitious excuse to overthrow governments that do not obey them.”
U.S.-Colombian relations have been rocky since the left-wing president and former M-19 rebel fighter Gustavo Petro to office. Petro’s administration has repeatedly sought to detach itself from the “neoliberal” foreign relations apparatus that has historically allowed a tremendous amount of U.S. influence over Colombia and some of its regional partners.
The watershed vote in the Colombian Senate came one day after the United States announced the decertification of Colombia’s anti-drug trafficking status, stating that the country has “demonstrably failed” to uphold its obligations in carrying on its efforts in combating the flow of drugs in its territory.
A survey by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC) found that coca bush cultivation had increased by 10% in 2023. The figures for 2024 are due to be released next month, reported by the BBC.
The move by the United States has the risk of having negative consequences for the South American republic, including cuts in U.S. foreign aid, a source of funding crucial for the central government in Bogotá to sustain its fight against various narco-trafficking organizations and revolutionary rebel movements eager to carve out pieces of territory in the north and south to perpetuate their criminal operations.
