OP. SOLES
MethodologyAbout

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

This tool was built by a Venezuelan. One that is still alive.

Felix Izarra

Venezuelan software engineer. Caracas.

Felix D. Izarra studied Computer Science at Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV) in Caracas between 2010 and 2016, in parallel with the most intense years of the protests against the Nicolas Maduro government. Since the 2014 demonstrations he has led digital efforts inside and outside Venezuela to document the repression, keep political prisoners visible, and publicly sustain what the government tried to erase.

PATEA MADURO (2014)

His first widely known project was Patea Maduro ("Kick Maduro"), a game released during the 2014 wave of protests in Venezuela. It reached over 50,000 downloads worldwide: while players laughed at the president, the mechanic doubled as a vehicle to surface documented facts about political prisoners taken by state police and about the killings of student protesters on the streets of Caracas - the author's personal friends among them.

DIGITAL RESISTANCE (2014 - PRESENT)

He has since been one of the faces of the digital resistance to the Nicolas Maduro government. He has coordinated, designed and published software, games, informational content and communication tools that kept Venezuela in the global conversation while the physical space to protest kept closing. This site - "El Cartel de los Soles" - is a continuation of that work: from protest to archive, and from archive to a public, traceable, bilingual record.

He has worked as a senior mobile engineer in industry - including augmented- and virtual-reality work at Meta - and as founder of independent projects: Martial Profile (2023), a platform for martial artists, and AI Photo Lab (2026), an AI-powered image creation service. El Cartel de los Soles is his current independent editorial project.

MISSION

To document, in one public and openly accessible place, the verifiable information available about the so-called "Cartel de los Soles": its alleged members, the operations under investigation, the judicial processes, international sanctions, and associated news events. To preserve source-level traceability throughout.

EDITORIAL NOTE - JANUARY 2026

On 5 January 2026 the U.S. Department of Justice filed a superseding indictment against Nicolas Maduro and six co-defendants. The new charging document steps back from the earlier characterization of the "Cartel de los Soles" as a formal criminal organization headed by Maduro, and describes it instead as a "patronage system" and a "culture of corruption". This site records both framings (SDGT and FTO on one hand, the superseding indictment on the other) without erasing either: the goal is to trace how the official position has shifted over time, not to lock in a single version.

EDITORIAL STANDARDS

Every claim must be backed by at least two verifiable sources, with at least one primary source (DOJ, OFAC, State Department, Treasury, court records) whenever one exists.
Criminal claims without a final conviction are explicitly labelled "alleged" or "indicted". Being indicted is not the same as being convicted.
Sources are archived on archive.org at the moment of citation to avoid broken links or moved pages.
Corrections are published in the changelog. Errors are never silently removed.
No analytics, no trackers, no ads. The information is the product, not the visitor.

CORRECTIONS AND CONTACT

If you believe a fact is inaccurate or that an important source is missing, please report it. Every published correction includes the date, the old content, the corrected content, and the source that motivated the change.

This site aggregates information from public sources. It is not an official investigative body nor a registered news outlet. Criminal indictments and sanctions designations reflect the positions of the governments or outlets that issued them, not a declaration of guilt on the part of this site.