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Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife arrived at Stewart Airport just north of New York City on Saturday afternoon, hours after their capture during a daring U.S. military operation in Caracas.
Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were captured overnight from their home in Caracas. They were transported to the USS Iwo Jima warship before being flown to New York to face criminal charges.
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 Saturday 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, says: “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, President Trump said the United States would run Venezuela at least temporarily and tap its vast oil reserves to sell to other nations.
