United States prosecutors have charged Venezuela’s former leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, with conspiracy to commit torture, in a superseding indictment unsealed on Thursday.
The count is additional to the drug-trafficking and weapons charges the couple already faced and have denied. Al Jazeera reported that the indictment was filed in a Manhattan federal court and alleges a conspiracy running from at least 1999 through 2025 — a span beginning well before Maduro became president in 2013 — involving Venezuelan military, intelligence and law enforcement officials.
The indictment accuses the pair of “entrenching themselves in power” by presiding “over a system of repression that relied on violence against political opposition, arbitrary detention, and the torture of detainees, including United States citizens”, Hiru News reported. It lists methods including electric shock, asphyxiation, rape, forced nudity, prolonged isolation, starvation, punishment cells and psychological torture. The new accusations relate to the alleged torture of US citizens held in Venezuela while Maduro was in power.
Prosecutor Jamie McDonald said the indictment “alleges conduct that is truly unthinkable”, adding that “the members of Maduro’s broad conspiracy were not just sitting behind a desk.”
Barry J. Pollack, Maduro’s attorney, said his client denies the new charges and looks forward to his day in court.
Custody and trial
Maduro, 63, and Flores, 69, have been held since January at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, after US forces seized them in a pre-dawn raid on their compound in Caracas. They will remain there: a judge on Thursday refused Flores’s request to be moved to house arrest. The trial is set to begin on 1 June 2027.
Where the two filings differ. Hiru reports that prosecutors also added Flores to the earlier narco-terrorism charge. Al Jazeera instead describes her being brought into the torture count, noting the indictment says she “was present at some of the meetings where detainees and their treatment were discussed”. The accounts are not necessarily in conflict — she may have been added to both — but no filing read by this desk states plainly which charges she now faces in total.
Not reported: neither filing gives the number of alleged victims, names any of the US citizens said to have been tortured, or says whether Flores has entered a plea to the new count. Neither reports a response from the Venezuelan government or from Flores’s own counsel, and neither says whether the June 2027 trial date is affected by the added charge.
Sources: Hiru News, Al Jazeera.
