A recently unsealed indictment from the US Justice Department accuses Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro of overseeing a “corrupt and illegitimate regime” propelled by a vast drug-trafficking network responsible for inundating the United States with massive quantities of cocaine.

Attorney General Pam Bondi commented on X, asserting that Maduro and Flores “will soon encounter the formidable force of American justice within the US legal system.”

Let’s delve into the allegations against Maduro and the specific charges he is facing:

Maduro, along with his wife, son, and three others, stands accused in this case.

The charges against Maduro include: conspiracy to commit narco-terrorism, conspiracy to import cocaine, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess such weaponry.

The new indictment unsealed on Saturday, which adds charges against Flores, was filed under seal in the Southern District of New York just before Christmas.

Maduro is due to make his first appearance on Monday (Tuesday AEST) in federal court in Manhattan.

He was expected to be detained at a federal jail in Brooklyn while awaiting trial.

‘Cocaine-fuelled corruption’ flourished

Authorities allege powerful and violent drug-trafficking organisations, such as the Sinaloa Cartel and Tren de Aragua gang, worked directly with the Venezuelan government and then sent profits to high-ranking officials who helped and protected them in exchange.

But a US intelligence assessment published in April, which drew on input from the 18 agencies that comprise the intelligence community, found no co-ordination between Tren de Aragua and the Venezuelan government.

Maduro allowed “cocaine-fuelled corruption to flourish for his own benefit, for the benefit of members of his ruling regime, and for the benefit of his family members,” the indictment alleges.

US authorities allege that Maduro and his family “provided law enforcement cover and logistical support” to cartels moving drugs throughout the region, resulting in as much as 250 tons of cocaine trafficked through Venezuela annually by 2020, according to the indictment.

Drugs were moved on go-fast vessels, fishing boats and container ships or on planes from clandestine airstrips, the indictment says.

“This cycle of narcotics-based corruption lines the pockets of Venezuelan officials and their families while also benefiting violent narco-terrorists who operate with impunity on Venezuelan soil and who help produce, protect, and transport tons of cocaine to the United States,” the indictment says.

Successive US administrations have warned about Venezuela’s role as a transit point for cocaine and a haven for criminal gangs, terrorist groups and drug-smuggling leftist rebels from neighbouring Colombia.

While reliable data is hard to ascertain, the vast majority of cocaine departs South America from Colombia and Ecuador, making its way north through the eastern Pacific Ocean, not the Caribbean.

Allegations of kidnappings and murders ordered

The US accuses Maduro and his wife of ordering kidnappings, beatings and murders “against those who owed them drug money or otherwise undermined their drug trafficking operation”.

That includes the killing of a local drug boss in Caracas, according to the indictment.

Maduro’s wife is also accused of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in 2007 to arrange a meeting between “a large-scale drug trafficker” and the director of Venezuela’s National Anti-Drug Office.

In a corrupt deal, the drug trafficker then agreed to pay a monthly bribe to the director of the anti-drug office as well as about $US100,000 ($149,000) for each cocaine-carrying flight “to ensure the flight’s safe passage”.

Some of that money then went to Maduro’s wife, the indictment says.

Nephews of Maduro’s wife were heard during recorded meetings with confidential US government sources in 2015 agreeing to send “multi-hundred-kilogram cocaine shipments” from Maduro’s “presidential hangar” at a Venezuelan airport.

The nephews during the recorded meetings explained “that they were at ‘war’ with the United States,” the indictment alleges.

They were both sentenced in 2017 to 18 years in prison for conspiring to send tons of cocaine into the US before being released in 2022 as part of a prisoner swap in exchange for seven imprisoned Americans.

Rubio calls operation a ‘law enforcement function’

During a news conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cast the military raid that captured Maduro and his wife as an action carried out on behalf of the Department of Justice.

Caine said the operation was made “at the request of the Justice Department”.

Rubio, as he responded to a question about whether Congress had been notified, said the US raid to get the couple was “basically a law enforcement function,” adding that it was an instance in which the “Department of War supported the Department of Justice”.

He called Maduro “a fugitive of American justice with a $US50 million reward” over his head.