Nicolás Maduro is a mafia boss, not a president, and the Venezuelan government is now a criminal enterprise with the power of a state. It poses a threat to democracies everywhere.
September 2025
Pablo Escobar was elected alternate representative to the Congress of the Republic of Colombia in 1982. Upon receiving the news of his victory, he told his wife: “Get ready to be the First Lady . . . the doors of the presidential palace will open for us.” The most notorious drug trafficker in history dreamed of becoming president of his country.
To realize that dream, Escobar oversaw a reign of terror that included bombings, assassinations of judges, police, and presidential candidates, and mass kidnappings. The exact number of victims is unknown but estimated to be around 50,000. The Colombian drug baron aimed to bend the authority of the state, transforming it into both a shield and a platform for his business.
Yet despite his efforts, he did not succeed. Colombia’s institutional framework acted as a bulwark against his incursions. The Supreme Court, armed forces, media, and citizens confronted Escobar and prevented organized crime from taking over their country. Democracy prevailed.
Forty years later, however, Escobar’s vision became reality in Venezuela. Nicolás Maduro achieved what Pablo Escobar never could. On 25 July 2025, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control identified the Venezuelan dictator as the leader of the Cartel of the Suns, a network of high-ranking military officers and officials that ships tons of cocaine abroad.
Maduro is the mafia boss in this story. He has succeeded in merging political power with criminal power into a single apparatus. He colonized the Venezuelan state and has bent it to serve international organized crime, destroying his country’s democracy along the way.
The Rise of Narco-Crime
The relationship between Chavismo-Madurismo and drug trafficking began more than two decades ago. It was inaugurated by Hugo Chávez, who created the institutional conditions that allowed the degradation of the Venezuelan state and placed it at the service of national and international organized crime.
Perhaps the most important step in this regard was the expulsion of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). On 5 August 2005, Hugo Chávez announced: “The DEA is using the fight against drug trafficking as a mask, to support drug trafficking and to carry out intelligence in Venezuela against the government.”
This event allowed Chávez to deepen his relationship with nonstate groups, especially Colombian ones such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Both Venezuelan and international sources reported the deployment of such groups in Venezuela and the coinciding increase in criminal activity along the border.
By 2020, these ties were consolidated. In March of that year, the U.S. Department of Justice charged Nicolás Maduro with narco-terrorism. He was accused of leading, along with fourteen other high-ranking officials, a network that had sent more than 200 tons of cocaine into the United States since 1999.
In June 2025, Hugo “El Pollo” Carvajal, former head of Venezuela’s military intelligence, pled guilty in a New York federal court of conspiring to import cocaine and other related crimes. He acknowledged his role in the structure of the Cartel of the Suns and confirmed the involvement of the highest-ranking military officials in drug-trafficking operations on a continental scale.
One month later, in July 2025, the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned the Cartel of the Suns, connecting it to networks such as the Tren de Aragua and Sinaloa Cartel. In August, the U.S. government increased the reward for Maduro’s capture to US$50 million. This is the highest amount ever offered by the United States for the capture of a criminal. During the same period, the United States began escalating its military campaign against narcotrafficking operations linked to the Maduro regime: In August, the U.S. Southern Command began deploying warships, aircraft, and forces to the Caribbean, and since September 2, U.S. forces have struck several alleged drug boats departing Venezuela, killing seventeen people.
Maduro’s Machine
Nicolás Maduro’s closest circle sits at the core of organized crime both in Venezuela and internationally. These ties have transformed formal state institutions into structures that enable the domestic and foreign operations of the Cartel of the Suns. Generals are overseeing trafficking routes and shipments; ministers and governors control ports, airports, and borders; intelligence officers safeguard operations and eliminate “obstacles,” and diplomats are facilitating connections with international criminal networks while providing political protection. But this is the most essential point: Nicolás Maduro has placed the Venezuelan state at the service of criminal organizations with global reach.
The case of the “narco-nephews” exposed this dynamic. In 2015, Efraín Antonio Campo Flores and Franqui Francisco Flores de Freitas, the nephews of First Lady Cilia Flores, were arrested in Haiti. DEA agents intercepted them as they attempted to smuggle more than 800 kilograms of cocaine to the United States.
The men were tried and convicted in New York in 2017. During the trial, they revealed how they used official facilities, diplomatic passports, and protection from the highest levels of government to carry out their operations.
This episode provided evidence of the direct connection between Maduro’s family circle and the drug-trafficking business. The incident left no room for doubt: Corruption and complicity reach the very core of Venezuela’s dictatorial power.
The Cartel of the Suns, a political-military-criminal corporation, has maritime, air, and land routes that operate securely and freely across different regions. Its shipments travel in vehicles bearing official Venezuelan state insignia.
The Venezuelan Navy guarantees the departure of the cartel’s shipments to the United States and Europe, and flights to Central America and Mexico take off from both regular and irregular airstrips operating under military protection. Ports, airports, river routes, and border areas have been militarized to facilitate criminal logistics. In this way, they function as safe havens for drug trafficking and other illicit activities.
The loss of territorial sovereignty is evident: Entire regions are under the influence of criminal networks associated with the state structure. The border areas and municipalities of the Mining Arc, in particular, stand out. In these spaces, Venezuelan law does not apply; instead, the rules imposed by the cocaine trade prevail. The country’s geography has become an open channel for the transit of drugs, weapons, and illicit capital.
Moreover, the impact of the Cartel of the Suns transcends borders. Its ability to coordinate with groups such as Tren de Aragua allows it to carry out violent operations in other regions. And in these operations, criminal practices such as kidnappings, extortion, and assassinations are intertwined with political motivations.
Take the assassination of 32-year-old Ronald Ojeda, a former Venezuela soldier. On 21 February 2024, a group of men posing as Chilean state-security officials broke into Ojeda’s home in Santiago, Chile, and kidnapped him. A few days later, the young man was found dead inside a suitcase that had been buried under a concrete slab. Subsequent investigations revealed that he had been tortured and buried alive, ultimately dying from asphyxiation.
The case shocked Chilean society. With witnesses testifying during the criminal investigation that Venezuelan authorities were behind the brutal murder, the violent reach of Maduro’s regime came into sharp relief along with the morbid culture of the mafia and drug cartels.
The investigation revealed four critical facts: First, the crime was politically motivated. Ojeda, an army lieutenant, had been expelled from the Bolivarian National Armed Forces in 2017 for allegedly participating in a military conspiracy to foment a coup d’état. Second, it was the Maduro regime’s second-in-command, Minister of Interior, Justice, and Peace Diosdado Cabello, who ordered the assassination. Third, members of Tren de Aragua based in Chile carried out the killing. And finally, payment for the murder was made in Peru.
This illustrates the vast scope of the regime’s operations. Maduro’s narco-criminal dictatorship does not respect territorial boundaries and efficiently aligns political objectives with criminal mechanisms.
Each shipment that crosses the Atlantic and reaches Europe is an extension of the criminal threat. The Cartel of the Suns supplies mafias operating in Spain, Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, increasing urban violence, money laundering, and political corruption across the continent. For this reason, the tentacles of the Cartel of the Suns pose a serious security threat for Europe: Its ports and cities have been penetrated by a transnational crime ring backed by a Latin American state.
Western mechanisms to contain criminal-authoritarian expansion have clearly proven insufficient. The United States has, without ideological bias — because drug trafficking recognizes no ideology — taken the lead in pursuing and sanctioning those responsible. Most of the Americas, however, have shown limited capacity to respond, and Europe’s silence has effectively provided an escape route for Maduro and his associates, who have found ways to traffic drugs in Europe to bypass U.S. controls.
European Union countries should instead shut down the financial channels that Maduro’s regime uses for money laundering, strengthen judicial, police, and even military cooperation with Latin American countries, and support the formation of an alliance of Latin American armed forces to fight drug trafficking.
Moscow in Caracas
Nicolás Maduro’s narco-state counts the world’s autocracies, especially Russia, among its principal allies. The Cartel of the Suns maintains a direct relationship with Moscow, positioning Venezuela as its foremost enclave in Latin America.
Russia’s military, technological, and intelligence presence in Venezuela has at least three purposes: supplying the Maduro regime with weapons and tools that allow it to withstand Western pressure, providing strategic protection for its criminal operations, and integrating it into an international axis that grants it a place in the international community.
This relationship has turned Venezuela into a geopolitical platform for Moscow. From there, Vladimir Putin projects his growing influence over the Americas. On 5 May 2025 in Moscow, for example, Maduro and Putin signed a strategic cooperation agreement focused on energy.
The close ties between Moscow and Caracas are deep and visible. This is why NATO must turn its gaze toward Caracas, because the fight against drug trafficking and the defense of hemispheric security are one and the same battle. Without a doubt, recognizing this connection could serve as a crucial first step in containing a narco-authoritarian state allied with Vladimir Putin.
Hijacked Political Change
Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorship is not a traditional autocracy. Every level of the regime’s hierarchy participates in a system in which the state serves the enterprise of drug trafficking. Public administration has been degraded to the point of becoming just another cog in the machinery of international criminal trade.
How does all this impact Venezuelans’ struggle for democracy? This is not a simple question, but in my view it is the one that must guide analyses of political change in the twenty-first century. The democratization theories of the past simply cannot meet today’s challenges.
The Venezuelan people, for their part, continued to build an electoral path toward democracy with an eye on elections in 2024 — despite the threats of Nicolás Maduro’s criminal regime. This decision was not naïve and was driven by at least two structural concerns.
First, Venezuelans are deeply committed to democracy and have a long record of peacefulness. In the late 1960s, when Latin America was a powder keg, the guerrilla forces in Venezuela voluntarily laid down their arms and joined political life in a successful peace process led by President Rafael Caldera.
Second, Venezuelans’ democratic commitment has fostered political work centered on political parties and elections. In our political culture, democracy is achieved through the vote. That is why Venezuelan citizens are prepared for electoral battles. And when such battles represent a real opportunity for change, we engage in them with special enthusiasm.
Thus, on 28 July 2024, Venezuelans voted overwhelmingly for political change and for the recovery of the republic. A majority of citizens elected Edmundo González Urrutia the legitimate president. That mandate, however, was denied and usurped by the Maduro dictatorship.
The popular will for change was suppressed by a power whose survival rests on the cocaine trade, money laundering, and protection of international criminal networks. The sovereign decision of the Venezuelan people was neutralized by a machinery that blends internal repression, propaganda, and alliances with organized crime.
Restoring democracy in Venezuela will not simply be a matter of dismantling a traditional autocracy or rebuilding institutions captured by a conventional political elite. The challenge will be to dismantle a system in which political power and criminal power have fused into a single framework. The type of transition that awaits will demand creativity and innovation if we are to definitively defeat transnational criminal actors with enormous capacity for violence and corruption. To cure the ills and confront the challenges presented by Venezuela’s gangster-style autocracy, we will have to devise completely new formulas.
The priority on the day after Maduro must be the comprehensive reconstruction of the state. This means restoring its essential capacities, especially the legitimate monopoly on violence. Without a military subordinated to civilian power and at the service of democracy, defeating organized crime and reasserting sovereign control over the territory will not be possible. Organized crime — narcotrafficking — is a cancer that can be eradicated only through the legitimate use of force. Before any process aimed at restoring democracy can begin, Venezuela must first bring our borders, ports, airports, and areas currently militarized for illicit purposes back under state authority. Without this step, every attempt at institutional reform or economic opening will be doomed to fail, as the state will remain hostage to criminal networks that operate under their own logic and contrary to the interests of a republic.
Venezuela must also heal the cultural and moral wounds left by this prolonged period of degradation. The narco-state has devastated both the economy and the state, while instilling cultural patterns based on impunity, corruption, and violence as means of social “advancement.” The country must undergo a profound process of moral regeneration so that we can relearn what it means to be citizens. Civic education, the reconstruction of the social fabric, and the creation of cultural “antibodies” against organized crime will be as important as legal, institutional, and economic reforms. Democracy endures only when citizens are conscious of their responsibility to defend the common good.
Finally, the challenges of political change in Venezuela transcend our borders. Our case is a warning of universal scope: When organized crime captures a state, it threatens the entire liberal order. The routes, the flows of capital, and the alliances that sustain Maduro’s regime know no territorial limits. Countries across the Americas and Europe have already felt the impact of these networks in the form of violence, corruption, and political destabilization. The democratic struggle in Venezuela is thus not merely a national cause but part of a global battle for democracy and international security.
Solidarity among free nations must therefore be deepened and translated into more effective mechanisms of expression. The construction of a new Venezuelan democracy will demand the will and sacrifice of its citizens, as well as the active commitment of international allies. Defeating its gangster-like autocracy will be both a victory for Venezuela and a triumph for all who believe that freedom, human dignity, and the rule of law are stronger than organized crime and its violence. The cause is urgent. And it belongs to us all.
Juan Miguel Matheus is a Venezuelan politician in exile and was professor of constitutional law at Monteávila University (Caracas). He is currently a senior research fellow at the University of Texas School of Law (Austin) and affiliate of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center.
Copyright © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy
Image credit: PEDRO MATTEY/AFP via Getty Images
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