New Delhi: US prosecutors have charged Cilia Flores, the wife of captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, alleging that she accepted bribes to help drug traffickers and influence the country’s anti-drug agency.
According to the indictment, she received hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2007 to arrange a meeting between a major drug trafficker and Nestor Reverol Torres, the then-director of Venezuela’s National Anti-Drug Office.
The trafficker reportedly agreed to pay monthly bribes to the director and around $100,000 for each cocaine-laden flight, some of which prosecutors claim was funneled to Flores. Reverol Torres later faced narcotics charges in New York in 2015 and is a fugitive.
The charges also bring Flores’ extended family under scrutiny. In 2015, US sources secretly recorded her nephews allegedly discussing plans to ship “multi-hundred-kilogram cocaine consignments” directly from Maduro’s presidential hangar. The nephews allegedly described themselves as “at war” with the United States.
In 2017, they were sentenced to 18 years in prison for conspiracy to traffic massive amounts of cocaine into the United States, though they were released in 2022 as part of a prisoner swap involving seven Americans.
The case extends to President Maduro as well. He, along with his wife, son and three others, faces indictments that include narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices and conspiracy to possess such weapons.
Flores’ rise to political prominence began in the 1990s when she emerged as a lawyer from a humble background within Hugo Chavez’s socialist movement. She became an important legislative face, helping consolidate the political strength of Maduro, her partner since the late 1990s and husband since 2013. Even after stepping down from formal government roles in 2013, she retained enormous influence behind the scenes.
US prosecutors now claim that she, together with Maduro and their son, used her political authority to facilitate drug trafficking operations, turning her once purely political clout into a powerful tool allegedly tied to the narcotics trade.
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