Washington — Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges stemming from what prosecutors said was his role in a scheme to import “thousands of tons” of cocaine into the United States and enrich himself, his family and senior members of the Venezuelan government.
The indictment was unsealed Saturday by Attorney General Pam Bondi after Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were taken into military custody in an overnight operation and brought to the U.S. to face criminal charges. “They will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts,” Bondi said.
Maduro, Flores and four others are named as defendants in the indictment, including Maduro’s son, Nicolás Ernesto Maduro; Venezuela’s interior minister, Diosdado Cabello; its former interior minister, Ramón Rodríguez Chacín; and a leader of the gang Tren de Aragua, Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores.
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It’s unclear whether the U.S. has arrested Maduro’s son. The other three defendants were not taken into custody.
Maduro and Flores could appear in court in Manhattan as early as Monday, two sources familiar with the matter told CBS News. The case against them was brought in the Southern District of New York, where Maduro and 14 others were first indicted in March 2020, during the first Trump administration. U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein is overseeing the case.
The plane carrying Maduro landed at an airport in the Hudson Valley on Saturday afternoon. The Venezuelan leader was expected to be turned over to federal authorities and arraigned at the U.S. district court in the Southern District of New York next week, two sources told CBS News.
Secured by U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, the superseding indictment alleges that for more than 25 years, “leaders of Venezuela have abused their positions of public trust and corrupted once-legitimate institutions to import tons of cocaine into the United States.”
Prosecutors place Maduro at the “forefront of the corruption,” and say that he and his associates worked with drug traffickers and narco-terrorists to flood the U.S. with “thousands of tons of cocaine.” This drug trafficking, according to the indictment, enriched Maduro, his family and members of 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 machineguns and destructive devices; and conspiracy to possess machineguns and destructive devices.
“Maduro and his wife will soon face the full might of American justice and stand trial on American soil,” President Trump said in a press conference from his South Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, earlier Saturday.
The indictment alleges that Maduro has used his various positions in the Venezuelan government to transport cocaine. Prosecutors said that as minister of foreign affairs, Maduro sold diplomatic passports to known drug traffickers to help them move drug proceeds from Mexico back to Venezuela under diplomatic cover and facilitated the movement of private planes under diplomatic cover to evade law enforcement scrutiny.
Maduro and his wife also allegedly worked together between 2004 and 2015, with the help of military escorts, to traffic cocaine seized by Venezuelan law enforcement. Prosecutors said the two maintained their own groups of state-sponsored gangs to facilitate and protect their drug-trafficking operation. They are accused of ordering kidnappings, beatings and murders against people who owed them money or who undermined their drug-trafficking operation.
Prosecutors said that after Maduro became president in 2013, he and others authorized the arrest of certain Venezuelan military officials to divert scrutiny away from them after French authorities seized 1.3 tons of cocaine that had been dispatched on a commercial flight from Venezuela to Paris.
Maduro’s wife is accused of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to broker a meeting between a large-scale drug trafficker and the head of Venezuela’s National Anti-Drug Office, Nestor Reverol Torres, according to the indictment. The trafficker then arranged to pay a monthly bribe to Reverol Torres to ship cocaine, and Flores received a portion of it, prosecutors said.
Reverol Torres was charged with narcotics offenses in 2015 and is a fugitive.
