A federal indictment unsealed by the U.S. Department of Justice in the Southern District of New York names Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in connection with a 5.5-tonne cocaine shipment dispatched from Venezuela to Mexico in 2006 — an allegation that reaches back two decades into the Chavista state apparatus and implicates some of the highest-ranking figures in the current Caracas government.
According to the indictment, the cocaine departed from Simón Bolívar International Airport in Maiquetía and was ultimately seized by Mexican authorities. Prosecutors allege the shipment was enabled through bribes, the use of diplomatic passports, and the deployment of state aircraft, suggesting the operation was not a rogue criminal enterprise but a function of the Venezuelan state itself. Both Maduro and Flores have pleaded not guilty. A hearing is scheduled for March 26, 2026, in the Southern District of New York.
The 2006 date is significant. Maduro was at that time serving as foreign minister under Hugo Chávez, while the alleged narcotrafficking infrastructure was being constructed across multiple layers of government. The indictment, as reported by El Nacional, frames the shipment not as an isolated event but as evidence of a two-decade narcostate operation — one that predates Maduro's presidency and implicates the institutional continuity of Chavismo itself.
Also named in the document is Diosdado Cabello, Venezuela's current Interior and Justice Minister, who is accused of receiving payments to protect drug trafficking operations. Hugo 'El Pollo' Carvajal, the former head of military intelligence, is likewise named — a figure already extradited to the United States and whose cooperation with federal prosecutors has long been anticipated.
The charges against Maduro and Flores are narcotrafficking and narcoterrorism. Both remain in the United States, detained pending trial, following their extraordinary arrest in 2025 — a development that marked one of the most dramatic seizures of a sitting head of state in modern legal history.
Analysts caution against reading the indictment as purely a law enforcement exercise. The U.S. indictment is a geopolitical instrument as much as a legal document — part of a sustained sanctions-and-diplomacy strategy toward Caracas that has spanned multiple administrations in Washington. The Maduro prosecution fits squarely within that tradition, offering leverage over Venezuela's political transition while generating evidentiary records that may outlast any particular administration's priorities.
The naming of Mexico as the shipment's destination complicates the diplomatic landscape for President Claudia Sheinbaum's government in Mexico City. Mexico has charted a cautious, sovereignty-first foreign policy stance and has been reluctant to align itself publicly with U.S. legal actions against regional leaders. Mexico's foreign ministry had not issued a formal response to the indictment at the time of publication.
For Venezuelans who have lived through the collapse of the country's oil economy, the flight of more than seven million people into exile, and the systematic dismantling of independent institutions, the indictment confirms what many opposition figures and human rights groups have argued for years: that the humanitarian crisis they endure is not incidental to the government's conduct, but structurally connected to it. The same networks alleged to have moved cocaine through state aircraft are the same networks that governed oil revenue, controlled food distribution, and decided who could access dollars in the years the economy imploded.
In Venezuela, as across nations experiencing collapse, oil wealth that once seemed a blessing became a curse — and ordinary people pay the price. The indictment against Maduro and Flores will not, by itself, alter the lives of the millions still inside the country. But it extends the legal architecture surrounding the former regime, and with a trial date now set, the testimony and evidence to emerge in a New York courtroom may prove consequential for years to come.
