Ousted socialist Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro was the mastermind of a pervasive drug-fueled “culture of corruption” which extended all the way to the U.S.’s backyard, according to the scathing indictment against him, his wife, his son, and others, released Saturday.
Hours after President Donald Trump announced Maduro’s capture and removal from power, Attorney General Pam Bondi confirmed the deposed despot and his wife, Cilia Flores, were indicted in the Southern District of New York on four charges, including narco-terrorism conspiracy, and “will soon face the full wrath of American justice” on U.S. soil. A grand jury found Maduro “and corrupt members of his regime enabled corruption fueled by drug trafficking throughout” the Latin American region, including in Mexico and Central America, and empowered notorious crime syndicates such as Tren de Aragua (TdA), according to the unsealed indictment.
Signed by Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, the 25-page indictment names six defendants, including the deposed Maduro, Flores, and Maduro’s 35-year-old son from his first marriage, Nicolás “Nicolasito” Maduro Guerra. It also names as defendants TdA leader Niño Guerrero and two high-profile members of Maduro’s United Socialist Party, Diosdado Cabello Rondón and Ramón Rodríguez Chacín.
Maduro, “like former President [Hugo] Chávez before him[,] participates in, perpetuates, and protects a culture of corruption in which powerful Venezuelan elites enrich themselves through drug trafficking and the protection of their partner drug traffickers,” the indictment alleges. “The profits of that illegal activity flow to corrupt rank-and-file civilian, military, and intelligence officials, who operate in a patronage system run by those at the top-referred to as the Cartel de Los Soles or Cartel of the Suns, a reference to the sun insignia affixed to the uniforms of high-ranking Venezuelan military officials.”
The Trump administration’s State Department announced it was designating the Cartel de Los Soles as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) in November 2025. Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote in a statement at the time the cartel “is headed by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking individuals of the illegitimate Maduro regime who have corrupted Venezuela’s military, intelligence, legislature, and judiciary.”
The indictment also notes the South American nation “sits in a geographically valuable location for drug traffickers” and that, around the time Chávez came to power in 1999, “Venezuela became a safe haven” for them.
“In that environment, cocaine trafficking flourished,” the indictment continues, citing State Department estimates from arund 2020, with between 200 and 250 tons of the drug being trafficked through the country each year.
The charging document goes on to allege Maduro, his wife, son, and political allies had “partnered with narcotics traffickers and narco-terrorist groups, who dispatched processed cocaine from Venezuela to the United States via transshipment points in the Caribbean and Central America, such as Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico.”
“Through this drug trafficking, [Maduro] and corrupt members of his regime enabled corruption fueled by drug trafficking throughout the region,” the indictment continues. “The transshipment points in Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico similarly relied on a culture of corruption, in which cocaine traffickers operating in those countries paid a portion of their own profits to politicians who protected and aided them. In turn, these politicians used the cocaine-fueled payments to maintain and augment their political power.”
Maduro and his regime also “facilitated the empowerment and growth of violent narco-terrorist groups fueling their organizations with cocaine profits,” according to the indictment.
The charging document notably identifies organizations which collaborated with the Maduro regime: Colombian communist militant groups Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and National Liberation Army (ELN); Mexican syndicates the Sinaloa Cartel and Los Zetas; and Guerrero’s TdA.
The indictment also alleges Maduro Guerra, the captured dictator’s son, personally “worked to ship hundreds of kilograms of cocaine from Venezuela to Miami, Florida” around the year 2017. Maduro Guerra is a member of his father’s political party and served as a Deputy to the Venezuelan National Assembly since 2021.
“During this time, MADURO GUERRA 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,” the document reads.
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