Secret Deals, Bribes And Cocaine Flights: The Explosive Case Against Venezuela’s First Lady | World News
New Delhi: US prosecutors have charged Cilia Flores, the wife of captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, for allegedly accepting bribes to help drug traffickers and influence the country’s anti-drug agency.
According to the indictment, in 2007 he received hundreds of thousands of dollars to arrange a meeting between a major drug trafficker and Nestor Reverol Torres, then-director of Venezuela’s National Drug Enforcement Agency.
The smuggler reportedly agreed to pay the manager monthly bribes and approximately $100,000 for each cocaine-laden flight; Prosecutors allege some of this was funneled to Flores. Reverol Torres later faced narcotics charges in New York in 2015 and is a fugitive.
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The accusations also put Flores’ extended family under scrutiny. In 2015, US sources secretly recorded the nephews allegedly discussing plans to send “hundreds of kilograms of cocaine shipments” directly from Maduro’s presidential hangar. The nephews allegedly described themselves as “at war” with the United States.
They were sentenced to 18 years in prison in 2017 for conspiring to smuggle large amounts of cocaine into the United States, but were released in 2022 as part of a prisoner swap involving seven Americans.
The case also concerns President Maduro. He, along with his wife, son and three others, face charges including narco-terrorism conspiracy, conspiracy to import cocaine, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess such weapons.
Flores’ rise to political prominence began in the 1990s, when he emerged as a lawyer from a modest background within Hugo Chavez’s socialist movement. She has become a key legislative face, helping consolidate the political power of Maduro, her partner since the late 1990s and husband since 2013. Even after leaving official government posts in 2013, he retained enormous influence behind the scenes.
US prosecutors now allege that he, along with Maduro and his sons, used his political authority to facilitate drug trafficking operations, turning his once purely political influence into a powerful tool with alleged ties to the narcotics trade.
