Donovan Slack,
Grace Eliza Goodwinand
Kayla Epstein
Barely 48 hours after US forces took Nicolás Maduro and his wife from a compound in Caracas, the Venezuelan leader stood in a New York court and pleaded not guilty to conspiracy charges brought by the US government.
As the world grapples with the highly unusual military seizure by the US of another world leader, the criminal case against Maduro will work through the justice system much like any other filed in New York, based upon the evidence and US law.
Prosecutors in their charging document alleged Maduro, his wife and son and their accomplices engaged in a cocaine-trafficking conspiracy and partnered with cartels designated as terrorist groups.
They said the accused “abused their positions of public trust and corrupted once-legitimate institutions to import tons of cocaine into the United States”.
Maduro has previously called such charges a tool to further “imperial” plans for getting access to Venezuela’s rich oil reserves.
In court on Monday, his lawyer suggested he should be immune from prosecution as the leader of a sovereign country and that the US taking him by force is illegal.
As he left court, Maduro said in Spanish that he is a “kidnapped president” and a “prisoner of war”.
His wife, Cilia Flores, was in good spirits, according to a statement from her attorney, Mark E Donnelly, that added “we look forward to reviewing and challenging the evidence the government has”. She also pleaded not guilty.
In the 25-page indictment, US prosecutors laid out a case that allegedly began in 1999, when Maduro was first elected to public office, saying he, Flores, his son Nicolás Ernesto Maduro Guerra, and three others participated in a “relentless campaign of cocaine trafficking”.
The current and former interior ministers for Venezuela who oversaw the country’s police forces – Diosdado Cabello Rondón and Ramon Rodriguez Chacin – have also been charged, as has Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, an alleged gang leader of Tren de Aragua.
The US is offering rewards for information leading to the arrests of Cabello Rondón and Guerrero Flores, who was charged in New York in December with racketeering, drug importation and other crimes.
After the US raid, Cabello Rondón appeared on television in Venezuela urging residents to “trust in our leadership, trust in our military and political leaders during the situation we are facing.”
Altogether, the six people face four counts, including engaging in a narco-conspiracy with designated terrorist groups, conspiring to traffic cocaine into the US, and possessing and using illegal weapons – primarily machine guns – to carry out the alleged conspiracy.
The indictment accuses them of working with the Farc, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the Sinaloa and Zetas cartels, and Tren de Aragua. The US government designated them all terrorist groups in February 2025.
Prosecutors allege the accused provided “law enforcement cover and logistical support” for drug shipments through Venezuela, knowing they were headed for the US.
Before becoming president, the US government says, Maduro provided passports to drug traffickers and “facilitated diplomatic cover for planes used by money launderers to repatriate drug proceeds from Mexico to Venezuela”.
After taking office in 2013, he allegedly allowed the drug trade to “flourish for his own benefit, for the benefit of members of his ruling regime, and for the benefit of his family members”.
Prosecutors allege his wife, who was leader of Venezuela’s National Assembly, accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, including as kickbacks for safe passage of drug shipments, as well.
The couple allegedly commandeered state-sponsored gangs and “ordered kidnappings, beatings, and murders against those who owed them drug money or otherwise undermined their drug trafficking operation”.
Meanwhile, prosecutors accuse Cabello Rondón of working with Colombian drug traffickers to facilitate massive cocaine shipments to Mexico and ultimately the US.
Rodriguez Chacin allegedly maintained an estate that housed a Farc encampment and training school and is accused of accepting bribes from the group to shield it from arrest and prosecution.
Maduro’s son, Maduro Guerra, is accused of regularly visiting Margarita Island off the coast of Venezuela on a plane with packages that military officials believed contained drugs.
Prosecutors also allege that in 2017 he worked to ship hundreds of kilograms of cocaine to Miami, and “spoke with his drug trafficking partners about, among other things, shipping low-quality cocaine to New York because it could not be sold in Miami, arranging a 500-kilogram shipment of cocaine to be unloaded from a cargo container near Miami, and using scrap metal containers to smuggle cocaine into the ports of New York”.
On Monday, Maduro Guerra railed against the US operation as “a direct threat to global political stability”.
“If we normalise the kidnapping of a head of state, no country is safe,” the Venezuelan congressman said.
In the indictment, prosecutors also asked for the defendants’ property and money to be forfeited.
US District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein has set the next hearing in the case for March 17.
It’s difficult to assess the legal merits of the case against Maduro because the indictment does not include what evidence prosecutors have against him, said defence attorney and former federal prosecutor Sarah Krissoff.
Generally, in international narcotics trafficking indictments, or charging documents, there are “a lot of conclusions and not a lot of specificity”, said Krissoff, who worked for over a decade in the court where Maduro is being tried.
The document does not technically have to detail what evidence prosecutors have against the defendant and for large-scale drug trafficking cases like this, much of that evidence is confidential or classified, she said.
Krissoff expects parts of the trial to be closed to the press and the public, and that defence attorneys will have to get security clearances and review some of the material in highly secured areas the government uses for handling classified intelligence.
In their case against Maduro, prosecutors have a “real advantage” because they’ve been building the case over a decade, she added.
Several legal experts interviewed by the BBC, including Milena Sterio of the Cleveland State University College of Law, believe the US operation to bring Maduro to New York violated the UN Charter and other international law.
But now that Maduro is in the United States, it’s almost certainly legal under US domestic law for him to stand trial, Sterio said.
“Our courts have long recognised that for a defendant, even if they are kidnapped or abducted or forcibly brought to the US, that is not grounds for tossing out the case,” she said.
The BBC has reached out to Maduro’s attorney for comment.
