Maduro, Wife to Appear in US Federal Court Today on Alleged Drug Charges

Venezuelan defence chief says abduction cowardly

EU demands respect for nation’s sovereignty

Emmanuel Addeh in Abuja

Ousted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, will appear before a federal judge on Monday (today), a spokesperson for the U.S. district court in the Southern District of New York confirmed yesterday.

The spokesperson told CBS News that Maduro and Flores are scheduled to appear in federal court at 12 p.m. It will be their first court appearance on criminal charges since they were extracted from Venezuela during a U.S. military operation in Caracas on Saturday.

Maduro and Flores arrived in New York on Saturday afternoon, hours after they were taken from their home in Caracas and transported to the USS Iwo Jima warship before being flown to New York to face criminal charges.

Maduro arrived at Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC), a federal facility in Brooklyn, at about 8:52 p.m. He was not slated to be housed in his own wing. His wife’s confinement status as of Saturday night was unknown.

MDC is one of the few detention centers in the U.S. with the capacity for high-security defendants. It is known for housing other high-profile defendants like Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Luigi Mangione, Sean “Diddy” Combs and Ghislaine Maxwell.

In a superseding indictment filed in the Southern District of New York against Maduro, members of his family and his cabinet, the U.S. is accusing the South American leader of conspiracy to commit narco-terrorism and to import cocaine. He is also accused of possession of and conspiracy to possess “Machineguns and Destructive Devices,” according to the indictment unsealed by Attorney General Pam Bondi.

“They will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts,” Bondi said.

The charges appear to be the same as those that were filed in a 2020 indictment of Maduro and several key aides.

The indictment, prepared by New York U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, said: “For over 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,” before alleging that Maduro “is at the forefront of that corruption and has partnered with his co-conspirators to use his illegally obtained authority and the institutions he corroded to transport thousands of tons of cocaine to the United States.”

The U.S. government also claimed that Flores is involved in her husband’s alleged crimes. According to the indictment, Flores allegedly brokered a meeting between a large-scale drug trafficker and the director of Venezuela’s National Anti-Drug Office, Nestor Reverol Torres, and allegedly accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in 2007.

The trafficker arranged a bribe to Reverol Torres — $100,000 per flight — to ship cocaine, prosecutors allege. Reverol Torres was indicted in 2015 by U.S. prosecutors in New York.

In the indictment filed against Maduro in 2020, federal prosecutors alleged that the Venezuelan leader and other senior Venezuelan government officials collaborated with the Colombian guerrilla group Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC, to traffic cocaine and weapons to the U.S. Maduro has in the past denied the accusations against him.

Hours after the operation,  Trump said the United States would run Venezuela at least temporarily and tap its vast oil reserves to sell to other nations.

But Venezuelan Defence Minister,  Vladimir Padrino Lopez, has condemned the ‘cowardly kidnapping’ of Maduro. In a statement released on Sunday, posted on the Instagram account, he said a “large part” of Maduro’s security team was killed in the U.S. mission that extracted Maduro from his Caracas compound in the early morning hours on Saturday.

The statement said that the Venezuelan military will support Delcy Rodriguez, Maduro’s vice president, as she assumes the role of acting president, and will “guarantee the governability of the country, and our institution will continue to employ all its available capabilities for military defense.”

Also, in a statement on Venezuela, backed by 26 of the EU’s 27 member states, the bloc’s foreign policy representative, Kaja Kallas, has called for “calm and restraint by all actors”.

EU countries also demanded that “principles of international law and the UN Charter must be upheld”, especially by members of the UN Security Council.

Drug trafficking must be tackled “in full respect of… territorial integrity and sovereignty”, the statement added. It also called for the will of the Venezuelan people to be respected.

This appeared to be a thinly veiled criticism of the US approach, as its forces invaded Venezuela to capture Nicolas Maduro. Notably, the statement wasn’t backed by Hungary, whose far-right prime minister, Viktor Orban, is a close Trump ally.