Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, stood shackled at the ankles in tan prison garb inside a Manhattan federal courtroom this week and pleaded not guilty to a new U.S. indictment accusing them of conspiring to torture political opponents, including three American citizens. The superseding indictment, brought the previous Thursday, expands the drug-trafficking case already pending against the couple to accuse them of directing a state-backed campaign of beatings, asphyxiation and electric shocks against at least nine victims.
Maduro, 63, twice declined to enter a plea himself, prompting U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein to enter a not-guilty plea on his behalf, according to NBC News. Flores, 70, a former Venezuelan attorney general, addressed the court directly through a Spanish interpreter. “I am completely innocent,” she said. “I am not guilty.” Maduro separately told the court the accusations had been made before and were false, as reported by Reuters.
Nine Victims, Three of Them American
Manhattan U.S. Attorney's Office prosecutors say Maduro directed Venezuelan officials to torture opposition politicians and military personnel accused of plotting against him in order to maintain his grip on power, per Reuters reporting. The superseding indictment accuses Maduro and Flores of directing the torture of at least nine victims, three of them U.S. citizens, according to Courthouse News. The same report describes an indictment alleging that Maduro oversaw a violent torture system that beat, asphyxiated and delivered electric shocks to its victims.
Flores is accused of helping develop that repressive system and ordering the torture of specific individuals, the NBC News account states. Per the indictment, Maduro directed officials in 2014 to kidnap military personnel in order to extract information about possible dissidents, and told officials to “squeeze them harder” when some remained defiant. Flores reportedly agreed with the kidnapping plan and, per the indictment, dismissed an alternative proposal to obtain information by infiltrating the ranks instead. Neither Maduro nor Flores is accused of personally carrying out acts of torture; the charge is conspiracy.
From a Caracas Raid to a Brooklyn Jail Cell
The torture charge builds atop an earlier case: Maduro and Flores had previously pleaded not guilty to charges of abusing their power to help drug traffickers ship cocaine. The U.S. military captured the couple at their home in Caracas during a January 3 raid ordered by President Donald Trump, then flew them to the United States to face the drug-trafficking charges announced the same day. They have been held since at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
Hellerstein postponed the trial start by two weeks, setting proceedings to begin June 14, 2027. The prosecution of a foreign head of state in a U.S. courtroom remains exceedingly rare, having occurred only a few times, the NBC News report notes.
A Backdrop of Documented Repression
The torture allegations echo findings a UN fact-finding mission reported years earlier. The mission found reasonable grounds to believe Venezuelan authorities and security forces had planned and executed serious human-rights violations, including the systematic use of torture, since 2014, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Investigators said arbitrary detentions, short-term disappearances and torture were directed at civilians as part of a policy to silence opposition to the Maduro government, drawing on 223 investigated cases and 48 in-depth case studies compiled in a 411-page report. The same UN findings stated that Maduro and Venezuela's interior and defense ministers were aware of the crimes committed by security forces and had given orders, coordinated activities or supplied resources connected to them.
Successive U.S. administrations have imposed sanctions on top Venezuelan officials and key state companies, citing alleged human rights violations, corruption and election-rigging. Maduro led Venezuela for 13 years before his capture and has accused the United States of seeking his ouster to gain greater control of Venezuela's natural resources, per Reuters.
Venezuela Under New Leadership, Washington Under Election Pressure
Delcy Rodríguez has led Venezuela since Maduro's capture and has ramped up cooperation with the United States, according to Reuters. Trump has touted Maduro's capture and the broader reset of relations with Venezuela as foreign policy successes ahead of the November 3 midterm elections, in which Republicans are fighting to retain control of Congress.
Under Justice Department guidance, federal extraterritorial jurisdiction over torture offenses can apply when the alleged offender is found within the United States, regardless of the victim's nationality, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. That legal framework underpins the extraordinary spectacle now playing out in a Manhattan courtroom, where a man who led a nation for over a decade stood in shackles to deny the very accusations U.N. investigators had already documented years before his capture.
