Sam Cooper

Newly unsealed U.S. charges name two former Venezuelan justice ministers alongside Maduro’s wife and son in a sprawling narco-terror conspiracy case.

Hours after President Trump said the United States had carried out a “large-scale strike” in Venezuela and extracted President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, from the country, federal prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed a sweeping indictment that portrays Venezuela’s top leadership, including several former justice ministers, as the hub of a long-running cocaine enterprise aimed intentionally at the United States.

The geopolitical edge of the operation was sharpened further by reports that Maduro had met at the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas with Qiu Xiaoqi, China’s special representative for Latin American affairs, only hours before the American action began.

The charging document — filed in the Southern District of New York in United States of America v. Nicolás Maduro Moros, et al. — opens with an assertion that “for over 25 years” Venezuela’s leaders “abused their positions of public trust” and “corrupted once-legitimate institutions” to import cocaine into the United States. It places Maduro “at the forefront,” accusing him of using “illegally obtained authority” and “the institutions he corroded” to move “thousands of tons of cocaine” north.

In prosecutors’ telling, the alleged scheme was not simply tolerated by the state; it was fused with it.

The indictment says Maduro “now sits atop a corrupt, illegitimate government” that, for decades, “leveraged government power to protect and promote illegal activity, including drug trafficking,” enriching and entrenching the political and military elite around him — including Diosdado Cabello Rondón, described as Venezuela’s Minister of the Interior, Justice and Peace, and Ramón Rodríguez Chacín, identified as a former interior and justice minister.

It also alleges that “massive-scale drug trafficking” concentrated power and wealth in Maduro’s family, including Flores — described in the document as Venezuela’s de facto First Lady — and Maduro’s son, Nicolás Ernesto Maduro Guerra, a National Assembly member known as “Nicolasito” and “The Prince.”

From the start, prosecutors tie the alleged state-protected pipeline to major trafficking and insurgent networks across the hemisphere. The indictment says Venezuelan officials “partnered with narco-terrorists” from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the National Liberation Army, the Sinaloa Cartel, the Zetas, and Tren de Aragua, naming Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores — “Niño Guerrero” — as the Venezuelan gang’s leader.

In a notable update that situates the case inside the present-day U.S. counterterrorism framework, the indictment states that in February 2025 the State Department designated the Sinaloa Cartel as a foreign terrorist organization, and that it remains so designated. It likewise says the State Department in the same month designated the Cartel del Noreste — “formerly known as the Zetas” — as a foreign terrorist organization, and designated Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization, with both groups remaining designated as of the filing.

In one of the document’s most consequential framing passages, prosecutors describe Venezuela’s geography and ports — and the collapse of meaningful constraints on officials — as structural enabling conditions.

“Starting in or about 1999,” the indictment says, Venezuela “became a safe haven for drug traffickers willing to pay for protection,” and it describes a flourishing trade routed through Caribbean and Central American transshipment points.

By about 2020, it adds, the State Department estimated “between 200 and 250 tons of cocaine were trafficked through Venezuela annually,” moved by maritime routes using go-fast vessels, fishing boats, and container ships, and by air from clandestine airstrips.

The indictment’s narrative then proceeds office by office, laying out how prosecutors say power was converted into logistics.

As a National Assembly member, it alleges, Maduro “moved loads of cocaine under the protection of Venezuelan law enforcement.” As foreign minister, it alleges, he provided “Venezuelan diplomatic passports to drug traffickers” and facilitated “diplomatic cover” for flights used to repatriate drug proceeds from Mexico to Venezuela. And as president — “now-de facto ruler,” prosecutors write — he “allows cocaine-fueled corruption to flourish” for his benefit, for the benefit of the ruling regime, and for the benefit of his family.

Much of the indictment’s detail is concentrated in a long “overt acts” section that reads like a catalogue of how prosecutors say trafficking networks use the state when the state belongs to them. Between roughly 2006 and 2008, it alleges, Maduro “sold Venezuelan diplomatic passports” to individuals he “knew were drug traffickers,” then facilitated private flights “under diplomatic cover” by alerting the Venezuelan embassy in Mexico, enabling traffickers to load planes with drug proceeds and return to Venezuela shielded from scrutiny.

Flores is accused of playing a direct role as well.

The indictment alleges that in about 2007 she attended a meeting in which she “accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes” to broker access to the head of Venezuela’s National Anti-Drug Office, and that a portion of subsequent bribery payments was paid to her.

For Cabello, prosecutors describe the alleged use of military and port infrastructure to move bulk shipments at industrial scale. Between 2003 and 2011, the indictment alleges, the Zetas worked with Colombian traffickers to dispatch container ships carrying “five to six tons of cocaine” per container — “sometimes as much as 20 tons each” — protected in Venezuela by military officials referred to as “the generals.”

The indictment also portrays violence as an enforcement tool and a signature of impunity. It alleges that between 2004 and 2015, Maduro and Flores trafficked cocaine with armed military escorts and “maintained their own groups of state-sponsored gangs known as colectivos” to facilitate and protect the operation; it further alleges kidnappings, beatings, and murders against those who owed drug money or threatened the scheme, including “ordering the murder of a local drug boss in Caracas.”

Several episodes in the document appear designed to show not just trafficking, but how the alleged network adapted after shocks. In 2006, prosecutors allege, Venezuelan officials dispatched “more than 5.5 tons of cocaine” to Mexico on a DC-9 jet, moving the load through a hangar reserved for the Venezuelan president at the main international airport outside Caracas. After Mexican authorities seized the shipment, the indictment says traffickers were told they needed to pay Cabello a bribe to ensure that those who assisted at the airport would not be arrested.

Another episode, described as occurring only months after Maduro succeeded to the presidency, involves an international seizure. In September 2013, prosecutors allege, Venezuelan officials dispatched “approximately 1.3 tons of cocaine” on a commercial flight to Paris Charles de Gaulle; after French authorities seized the cocaine, the indictment says Maduro convened a meeting with Cabello and other officials and urged them to avoid using that airport route again, and it alleges that arrests were authorized to divert scrutiny from participants in the shipment and coverup.

The indictment places Maduro’s son, “Nicolasito,” inside the alleged machinery as well. It describes frequent visits to Margarita Island in 2014 and 2015, including travel on a plane owned by Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., and alleges the aircraft would be loaded with large taped packages that a National Guard captain “understood were drugs.” On one occasion, the indictment says, Maduro Guerra stated “the plane could go wherever it wanted, including the United States.”

If the case has a recurring connective tissue, it is the claim that Colombia’s insurgent-drug groups and Mexico’s cartel networks were not outside forces pressing on Venezuela, but partners operating in a jointly protected corridor.

The indictment describes the Sinaloa Cartel’s then-leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera as financing cocaine laboratories in Colombia in 2011, with cocaine then transported “under the protection” of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia into Venezuela and protected en route to an airstrip by a close ally of Maduro and Cabello.

It describes Rodríguez Chacín as maintaining a large estate in Barinas State that contained a “large” Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia encampment and training school, “with approximately 200 armed” members present “at any given time,” and it alleges that he accepted bribes and used corrupt influence to shield traffickers from arrest and extradition while discussing multi-ton quantities with other officials.

The indictment also folds in a strand of courtroom history that prosecutors appear to treat as corroboration: recorded meetings involving two relatives of Maduro and Flores in which, the indictment says, they discussed dispatching cocaine shipments from Maduro’s “presidential hangar,” described being “at ‘war’ with the United States,” referenced the “Cartel de Los Soles,” and discussed a connection to a commander in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Those relatives were later convicted at trial in the Southern District of New York, the document says.

In parallel, the indictment’s portrayal of Tren de Aragua extends beyond a street-gang label into a claimed logistics capability. It says Guerrero Flores, speaking from the group’s base inside Tocorón Prison, described storage compartments called “cradles” on a beach in Aragua State and “confirmed” the gang’s ability to protect “over one ton of cocaine,” offering escort services and control over coastal routes.

The overt-acts section extends into recent years, alleging that Cabello “regularly traveled to clandestine airstrips controlled by the ELN near the Colombia-Venezuela border” between 2022 and 2024 “to ensure the cocaine’s continued safe passage in Venezuelan territory.” It also references narcotics proceeds “in or about the end of 2024,” with discussions about continued trafficking “in or about 2025.”

The charges themselves track that architecture. Count One alleges a narco-terrorism conspiracy running from 1999 through 2025, naming Maduro, Cabello, and Rodríguez Chacín; Count Two alleges a cocaine importation conspiracy naming all defendants; and Counts Three and Four allege firearms conduct involving machine guns and destructive devices during and in relation to the charged trafficking crimes.

For the Justice Department, the indictment reads as an effort to collapse the distinction between political leadership and organized crime leadership — to argue that, in Venezuela’s case, they became the same thing. In paragraph after paragraph, it portrays decisions that look, in ordinary states, like diplomacy, aviation, and policing as instruments in a narcotics corridor.

More to come.