Maduro and his wife arrive in New York to face narcoterrorism charges

Ousted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife arrived at Stewart Air National Guard Base, just north of New York City, on Saturday afternoon, hours after their capture during a daring US military operation in Caracas.

Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were captured overnight at their home in Caracas. They were transported to the warship USS Iwo Jima before being flown to New York to confront criminal charges. The couple could be indicted as soon as Monday, two sources familiar with the matter told News themezone.

Maduro came to Metropolitan Detention Centera federal facility in Brooklyn, around 8:52 p.m. ET on Saturday. He was not scheduled to be housed in his own wing starting Saturday night. His wife’s confinement status was unknown as of Saturday night.

The MDC is one of the few detention centers in the United States that can accommodate high-security defendants. It is known for harboring other high-profile defendants such as Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, 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 United States accuses the South American leader of conspiracy to commit narcoterrorism and import cocaine. He is also charged with possession and conspiracy to possess “machine guns 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 presented in a 2020 indictment of Maduro and several key advisors.

The indictment, prepared by New York U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, says, “For more than 25 years, Venezuela’s leaders 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 teamed up with his co-conspirators to use his illegally obtained authority and the institutions he corroded to transport thousands of tons of cocaine into the United States.”

The US 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, Néstor Reverol Torres, and allegedly accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in 2007.

The trafficker arranged a bribe for Reverol Torres ($100,000 per flight) to send cocaine, prosecutors allege. Reverol Torres was indicted in 2015 by US prosecutors in New York.

In the indictment filed against Maduro in 2020, federal prosecutors alleged that the Venezuelan leader and other top Venezuelan government officials collaborated with the Colombian guerrilla group Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC, to traffic cocaine and weapons to the United States.

Maduro has denied the accusations against him in the past.

Hours after the operation, President Trump He said that the United States would govern Venezuela at least temporarily and take advantage of its vast oil reserves to sell to other nations.