By Geraldina Colotti, Resumen Latinoamericano, September 13, 2025.
On September 11, the day that commemorated Pinochet’s coup d’état in Chile against the socialist government of Salvador Allende 52 years ago, in the European Parliament, what can rightly be considered a new Nazi-fascist (and Zionist) international once again bared its teeth against Bolivarian socialism. With 355 votes in favor, 173 against, and 15 abstentions, MEPs effectively approved a resolution proposed by the Spanish party Vox and the Patriots for Europe group to include the so-called Cartel of the Suns, which the far right claims is led by Nicolás Maduro, on the list of terrorist organizations. The text also included the Clan del Golfo and dissident factions of the Colombian guerrilla groups, the FARC and the ELN, noting that they all pose a threat to regional and international security.
Vox MEP Hermann Tertsch, one of the promoters of the measure, together with representatives of various political groups (EPP, ECR, Renew), stated: “Under Gustavo Petro, organized crime and coca production have skyrocketed. Petro’s complicity with Maduro, the head of the terrorist cartel, is clear.”
He certainly has no shortage of audacity, considering the role of the cartels in previous right-wing governments in Colombia. But what does it matter? The important thing is to align oneself with Trump, who has sent an armed fleet to Caribbean waters after declaring the Bolivarian government a “narco-terrorist” and raising the bounty on its president’s head to $50,000. It’s pure Wild West, in which the tycoon, who already likes to act like a bully on the international stage, is overtaken on the right by his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, the angry voice of Miami’s anti-communist potentates.
“A man with a lot of power,” said Brian Nichols, assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere during Joe Biden’s presidency, noting that Rubio is also a national security adviser. “Never since the days of Henry Kissinger have two such important positions been concentrated in one person,” Nichols said in an interview heavily emphasized by the Venezuelan far right, eager to know whether, according to the U.S. diplomat, Trump will invade Venezuela. And for this reason, Maduro rightly pointed out at an international press conference that the real architect of US foreign policy is in fact Rubio, who has Donald Trump under blackmail.
The US Democrat was asked several times to explain why the tycoon went from granting his multinational Chevron a license to operate in Venezuela to military siege. “The Trump administration’s strategy,” Nichols replied, “is to increase the military siege to force Maduro to negotiate in earnest.” That said, he added, no one can predict with certainty what Trump may decide, given his strange and contradictory style. And, in any case, experience has shown that “to remove Maduro from power, it is necessary to act militarily.”
How? U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth hinted at this in an interview with Fox News, which in turn whetted the appetite of the Venezuelan far right. Hegseth recalled that Trump has defined several drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. This step allows the US government to use a variety of unconventional legal and military tools, including selective operations against the leaders, assets, and logistical networks of these groups on the continent.
The measure enables the Armed Forces to intervene, giving priority to direct action outside US territory and with the support of national intelligence. “We will treat them as we treat Al-Qaeda,” Hegseth warned, proposing, in fact, an aggression similar to that which struck Iran, accused of violating the nuclear weapons treaty.
The fact that the US has even sent a nuclear submarine to Caribbean waters, violating the Treaty of Tlatelolco (a treaty signed in Mexico City on February 14, 1967, prohibiting the circulation and use of nuclear weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean) is not taken into account. The only ones who protested were the countries of ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, and some progressive presidents, such as Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, who holds the pro tempore presidency of CELAC.
An international body that, in 2014, at a summit in Cuba, declared Latin America and the Caribbean a zone of peace. “Colombia will not lend its territory for an invasion. How could we allow an invasion?” said the Colombian leader. He then insisted that the attack by U.S. military vessels on a Venezuelan civilian vessel in the Caribbean, which, according to U.S. reports, was transporting drugs and caused eleven deaths, should be treated as murder.
He added that if South American countries do not protest such an act, if they defend governments that align themselves with genocidal leaders, they could suffer the consequences in the future. “Latin America, which owns the Caribbean, cannot tolerate this and remain silent because otherwise, in the future, bombs will fall on Bogotá, Rio de Janeiro, and other cities in the region,” Petro said.
This attitude has contributed to placing him at the center of the resolution voted on in Brussels and increasing the resentment of the European far right. This is a camp that has long adopted the position of María Corina Machado, one of the signatories, along with the current Italian prime minister, of the Madrid Charter: a document with which Trump, during his first term, sponsored the birth of the new Nazi-fascist international, launching it at the time against the São Paulo Forum and the Puebla Group. And now organizing it into a new false anti-drug crusade.
It matters little that the US is the main consumer of drugs. And it matters little that the crusade is led by someone like Rubio, whose ancestry does not exactly allow him to play the role of champion in the fight against drug trafficking: so much so that, on the left, he has long been called “Narco-Rubio,” echoing the words of Captain Diosdado Cabello.
For years, in fact, the character—who pretends to be a “Cuban-American” refugee when his ancestors left Cuba during the Batista dictatorship—has lived in the home of his brother-in-law, which was a drug trafficking operations center. His brother-in-law ended up in prison and was convicted of distributing around $15 million worth of cocaine. However, when Rubio was elected representative for Florida in 2000, he was released and became part of his political team.
For now, however, Rubio is receiving applause from vassal governments in Latin America and the Caribbean, such as Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago. For some time now, he has had the support of Ecuador’s Noboa, a wealthy banana businessman known for his involvement with drug cartels (the real ones, not the invented ones like the Cartel de los Soles). And now he has also received applause from Panama’s neoliberal president, José Raúl Mulino, who has said that he “will not hesitate” if he has to classify the Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organization. Not content with having sparked massive popular protests over the neoliberal measures imposed, Mulino seeks to carve out a role for himself as the US’s lapdog, which once made clear with bombs to a former protégé who had turned against it, Noriega.
“World War III has already begun. I believe that to be the case. The US empire has a war plan to try to reinforce its political, economic, cultural, and military hegemony in the world,“ said President Maduro. Meanwhile, all popular sectors, but also that part of the opposition that has accepted parliamentary dialectics, are mobilizing. If the US decides to invade the country, the president warned, they will find themselves facing ”a new Vietnam.”
The extraordinary congress of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and the party’s youth wing has sent the same message, assuming the responsibility of having to move to a new phase of armed struggle in the event of a military invasion; but also repeating Maduro’s exhortation, uttered so many times in recent years in response to the many aggressions imposed by imperialism on the heroic Bolivarian people: “Nerves of steel, calm and sanity, maximum popular mobilization.”