By Monica Showalter
One of the worst “narratives” about Venezuela’s dictatorship revolves around whether the socialist hellhole is a narcostate, justifying President Trump’s emerging military buildup in the Caribbean, including Naval strikes on speedboats transferring state-produced cocaine to the U.S. If the Venezuelan state is, it’s a narcostate.
The Democrat-deep state-news media complex has been spreading the piece-by-piece narrative that they aren’t.
Here’s 60 Minutes and a Chavista shill ironically called ‘propaganda monitor,’ still denying there’s any such thing as Cartel de los Soles.
The non existent “Cartel of the Suns” was a 1990s CIA creation and only existed thanks to the DEA/CIA involvement in drug trafficking.
A ‘60 minutes’ investigation confirms this. pic.twitter.com/NvBLI24v6N
— Propaganda Monitor (@GotPropaganda) October 12, 2025
The State Department thinks otherwise, including even the pre-Trump State Department. InsightCrime sees something there, too. But anyone now defending Maduro says it’s all a right-wing conspiracy theory.
See, the speedboats are just hapless “fishermen.” The migrant surge is spontaneous. Tren de Aragua is a myth. The Sun Cartel is a chimera. The Maduro dictatorship wouldn’t dream of emptying its prisons of drug gangsters and sending them to the states. Any claim that the narcoregime might be actually directing them to spread mayhem is “without evidence.”
Except that it’s all true, according to two de facto defectors who were once top Venezuelan generals now sitting in U.S. prisons on drug trafficking convictions. They’re talking up a storm, and the tales they tell match what’s already been reported on crime websites and verify everything the Trump administration and many Venezuelan dissidents have been saying all along.
Here’s the first one, as reported on Dec. 3 at the Dallas Express:
The Dallas Express has obtained an explosive letter addressed to President Donald Trump from Hugo Carvajal Barrios — the former Director of Military Intelligence for Venezuela and once one of the most powerful figures inside the governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro.
The letter, shared exclusively with DX by Carvajal’s attorney, Robert Feitel — a former senior Justice Department prosecutor — marks the first time the retired Major General has put these warnings on the record since pleading guilty earlier this year in a U.S. federal narco-terrorism case.
Carvajal — extradited from Spain after a lengthy international manhunt — says he is writing “to atone” and to alert Americans to what he describes as a coordinated, state-directed campaign targeting the United States.