The US unsealed an indictment on Saturday against Venezuela’s President, Nicolás Maduro, that charges him with narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine.
The four-count indictment also charges Maduro’s wife, his son, two high-ranking Venezuelan officials and an alleged leader of the Tren de Aragua group, a gang that the Donald Trump administration designated as a terrorist organisation last year.
President Trump has said that Tren de Aragua operates in conjunction with Maduro’s government, a conclusion that US intelligence agencies have contradicted.
The indictment states that Maduro and his allies worked for decades with major drug trafficking groups to move large quantities of cocaine to the US.
It follows months of a steadily escalating pressure campaign against Maduro, which culminated in his capture by the US military in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital. He arrived in New York on Saturday afternoon and will be flown in a helicopter to Manhattan for prosecution.
The pressure campaign began in September with lethal attacks by US forces on small vessels that the Trump administration has said were carrying drugs from Venezuela to the US. The administration has justified the attacks by saying the US was in an armed conflict with drug cartels and vowed to destroy trafficking networks. Many experts say these strikes are illegal.
Trump has asserted that the campaign is targeting drugs killing Americans, but most US overdoses involve fentanyl, which doesn’t come from South America, experts say.
The indictment unsealed on Saturday focuses almost entirely on Venezuela’s decades-long role in the cocaine trade. It accuses Maduro and co-conspirators of working closely with some of the region’s largest drug trafficking groups, in Colombia and in Mexico.
Experts, however, have said Venezuela is not a major drug producer and have described it as a minor cocaine transit country, with most of the cocaine flowing through Venezuela heading to Europe, not the US.
The majority of the cocaine bound for the US is believed to move not through the Caribbean but through the Pacific, according to data from Colombia, the US and the United Nations. Venezuela does not have a Pacific Coast.
Maduro landed on Saturday evening at a small airport in New York following the middle-of-the-night operation that extracted him and his wife, Cilia Flores, from their home in a military base in the capital, Caracas — an act that Maduro’s government called “imperialist”.
He was being held at the Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn.
Military ‘quarantine’
Secretary of state Marco Rubio said on Sunday that the Trump administration was keeping a military “quarantine” in place around Venezuela to prevent oil tankers on a US sanctions list from entering and leaving the country in order to exert leverage on the new leadership there.
Cuba 'huge problem'
Rubio suggested on NBC’s Meet the Press that Cuba could be the next target of US military operations. When asked whether Cuba was the Trump administration’s "next target", Rubio said, “The Cuban government is a huge problem.” Pressed again, Rubio said, “They are in a lot of trouble, yes.” He then accused the Cuban leadership of “propping up” Maduro’s Venezuelan regime and sponsoring his internal security apparatus, including his personal bodyguards.
New York Times News Service