Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges linked to what prosecutors describe as his role in a scheme to import “thousands of tons” of cocaine into the United States, enriching himself, his family, and senior members of the Venezuelan government.
The indictment was unsealed Saturday, following an overnight military operation in which Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were taken into custody and brought to the U.S. to face criminal charges. Maduro, Flores, and four others are named as defendants, including Maduro’s son Nicolás Ernesto Maduro; Venezuela’s interior minister, Diosdado Cabello; former interior minister Ramón Rodríguez Chacín; and Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, a leader of the gang Tren de Aragua.
It remains unclear whether Maduro’s son has been arrested. The other three defendants were not taken into custody.
The case is being prosecuted in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, where Maduro and 14 others were first indicted in March 2020 during the Trump administration. According to two sources cited by CBS News, Maduro is expected to be arraigned next week in the Southern District of New York.
The superseding indictment claims that for more than 25 years, Venezuelan leaders have “abused their positions of public trust and corrupted once-legitimate institutions to import tons of cocaine into the United States.”
Prosecutors allege that Maduro was at the “forefront of the corruption,” working with drug traffickers and narco-terrorists to flood the U.S. with “thousands of tons of cocaine.” This operation, they say, benefited Maduro, his family, and Venezuela’s political and military elite.
“This cycle of narcotics-based corruption lines the pockets of Venezuelan officials and their families while also benefiting violent narco-terrorists who operate with impunity on Venezuelan soil and who help produce, protect and transport tons of cocaine into the United States,” the indictment states.
Maduro faces four charges: narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices.
The indictment alleges that Maduro leveraged his positions within the Venezuelan government to facilitate cocaine trafficking. Prosecutors claim that, as minister of foreign affairs, he sold diplomatic passports to known drug traffickers to move drug proceeds from Mexico to Venezuela under diplomatic cover, and coordinated the movement of private planes to evade law enforcement scrutiny.
Between 2004 and 2015, Maduro and his wife allegedly worked together, with military escorts, to traffic cocaine seized by Venezuelan law enforcement. Prosecutors state that they maintained state-sponsored gangs to support and protect their operation, allegedly ordering kidnappings, beatings, and murders against individuals who owed them money or interfered with their drug trafficking activities.
