US prosecutors have charged Cilia Flores, wife of Venezuela’s captured president Nicolas Maduro, with accepting bribes to facilitate drug trafficking and manipulate the country’s anti-drug office.
The First Lady of Venezuela is accused of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2007 to arrange a meeting between a major drug trafficker and Nestor Reverol Torres, director of Venezuela’s National Anti-Drug Office.
According to the US indictment, the trafficker then agreed to pay the director monthly bribes and about $100,000 for each cocaine-laden flight to ensure safe passage, some of which was allegedly funnelled to Flores. Reverol Torres was later charged with narcotics offences in New York in 2015 and remains a fugitive.
The charges also spotlight her family’s involvement in drug operations. In 2015, her nephews were recorded by confidential US sources agreeing to send “multi-hundred-kilogram cocaine shipments” from Maduro’s presidential hangar.
During the meetings, they claimed they were “at war” with the United States. The nephews were sentenced in 2017 to 18 years for conspiracy to traffic tons of cocaine into the US, but were released in 2022 as part of a prisoner swap involving seven Americans.
Maduro faces charges alongside his wife, son, and three others. He is indicted on counts including narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess such weapons.A lawyer from a modest background Cilia Flores rose through former President Hugo Chavez’s socialist movement in the 1990s and became a key legislative figure. She and Maduro, partners since the late 1990s and married in 2013, were instrumental in consolidating Maduro’s grip on power.
Even after leaving formal government posts in 2013, Flores maintained immense behind-the-scenes authority. US prosecutors now allege that she, along with her husband and son, leveraged her political power to facilitate drug trafficking.
