Trump administration officials seeking to remove Nicolás Maduro as the leader of Venezuela have been citing a federal indictment returned half a decade ago in Manhattan as one justification.
The indictment, by a grand jury in March 2020 during President Trump’s first term, charges Mr. Maduro in a decades-long narco-terrorism and international cocaine trafficking conspiracy, and accuses him of overseeing a violent drug cartel as he rose to lead the South American nation. The United States is offering a $50 million reward for his capture.
The United States does not recognize Mr. Maduro as Venezuela’s president, but the decision to indict a putative head of state was unusual, representing an escalation of the Trump administration’s efforts to pressure Mr. Maduro to leave office.
Now, with the charges still pending, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and national security adviser, has repeatedly mentioned the 2020 indictment and called Mr. Maduro a “fugitive from American justice,” seemingly opening the door further to efforts by the United States to oust Mr. Maduro and seize him as it would any criminal on the run from the law.
Venezuela, once a wealthy petrostate, has devolved into chaos since the socialist Hugo Chávez become president in 1998; Mr. Maduro succeeded him in 2013. For the Trump administration, the nation is of keen interest. Its socialist leadership presents an attractive ideological target, and the nation has the world’s largest proven oil reserves, though its nationalized industry is moribund.
Recently, the U.S. military launched lethal attacks on civilian vessels in the Caribbean Sea that the administration said were smuggling drugs for Venezuelan gangs, and the military has also been planning operations against suspected traffickers inside Venezuela itself, The New York Times reported this week.
Because the Trump administration contends that Mr. Maduro leads a cartel, removing him from power could be seen as part of a counternarcotics operation, The Times’s report said. Mr. Rubio also recently described Mr. Maduro as the leader of “a terrorist organization and organized crime organization that have taken over a country.”
Here’s what to know about the indictment:
Maduro is accused of being a drug lord
The 28-page indictment says Mr. Maduro, a former bus driver and transit union leader, came to lead a drug trafficking organization, the Cartel de Los Soles, or Cartel of the Suns.
Experts say the Cartel de los Soles is not a criminal group in the conventional sense, but shorthand for a patronage system in which military and political elites profit from drug smuggling and other illicit trades. Its name refers to the sun-shaped insignia on the uniforms of high-ranking Venezuelan military officials, the indictment notes.
Under the leadership of Mr. Maduro and others, the indictment says, the cartel sought to flood the United States with cocaine and “inflict the drug’s harmful and addictive effects on users in this country.”
The cartel “prioritized using cocaine as a weapon against America,” the indictment says.
The charges appear designed to remove Maduro
At the time the charges were announced, William P. Barr, then the attorney general, said the Justice Department aimed to root out corruption that plagued Mr. Maduro’s government — “a system constructed and controlled to enrich those at the highest level,” as he put it.
Mr. Maduro denounced the charges, accusing the United States on social media of giving “the order to fill Venezuela with violence” and saying he would not be defeated.
In addition to the narco-terrorism and cocaine importation conspiracy counts, the indictment charges Mr. Maduro and his co-defendants with having machine guns and conspiring to possess them. The narco-terrorism count alone carries a minimum prison sentence of 20 years and a maximum of life.
The indictments, in addition to charging Mr. Maduro, named more than a dozen current and former Venezuelan government and intelligence officials as well as members of what was once the largest rebel group in Colombia, the Revolutionary Armed Forces, known as the FARC.
The FARC, which the United States has designated a foreign terrorist organization, was one of the world’s largest producers of cocaine, according to the Maduro indictment.
The allegations cross borders
The indictment says Mr. Maduro negotiated multi-ton shipments of cocaine produced by the FARC, directed that his cartel provide military-grade weapons to the FARC, and “coordinated foreign affairs with Honduras and other countries to facilitate large-scale drug trafficking.”
Around 1999, the indictment says, while the FARC was in purported peace negotiations with the Colombian government, the group agreed with leaders of the Cartel de los Soles to relocate some operations to Venezuela.
The FARC and the cartel sent processed cocaine from Venezuela to the United States, via transshipment points in the Caribbean and Central America, according to the indictment. By 2004, it says, the U.S. State Department estimated that 250 or more tons of cocaine was transiting Venezuela annually, shipped north from Venezuela’s coastline in go-fast vessels, fishing boats and container ships. Other shipments were flown from clandestine airstrips, the indictment says.
Other countries send much more cocaine. In 2018, 1,400 metric tons moved through Guatemala, U.S. data shows. Venezuela has little domestic cocaine cultivation.