Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced this week his intention to declare the so-called Cártel de los Soles a foreign terrorist organization, ratcheting up the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against Venezuela.

In a statement Sunday, Rubio described an organized cabal of Venezuelan military officers and politicians working hand in glove with drug traffickers to oversee the shipment of massive quantities of cocaine to American shores, all overseen and managed by President Nicolás Maduro.

“Based in Venezuela, the Cartel de los Soles is headed by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking individuals of the illegitimate Maduro regime who have corrupted Venezuela’s military, intelligence, legislature, and judiciary,” Rubio said.

The announcement came months after the Treasury Department issued its own sanctions against the group, known in English as the Cartel of the Suns, which it accused in July of “using the flood of illegal narcotics as a weapon against the United States.”

It’s a troubling image: a state captured by ideologically motivated drug lords hell-bent on the destruction of the American way of life.

Rubio’s push to label Maduro and his allies as terrorists, though, is just the latest escalation in the Trump administration’s fusion of America’s two forever wars: the war on drugs and the war on terror.

Since February, the State Department has slapped the foreign terror organization label on more nearly a dozen street gangs and drug-trafficking networks across Latin America, and Trump has used the highly fungible phrase “narcoterrorists” to justify a series of dubiously legal strikes on boats off the coast of Venezuela.

There’s just one giant problem: There is little evidence that Cartel of the Suns exists. The organized........

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