For years, Washington sold Nicolas Maduro as the kingpin of a terror‑listed super‑cartel called “Cartel de los Soles.” Now, with Maduro in U.S. custody, prosecutors have quietly rewritten the indictment, abandoning the claim that the cartel even exists as a real organization and recasting it as a drug‑soaked “patronage system” and “culture of corruption” inside Venezuela’s state. The new filing mentions the term just twice instead of 32 times, even as Marco Rubio still talks like it’s a full cartel.