Nicolás Maduro, the captured president of Venezuela, is expected to face charges in the Southern District of New York, where prosecutors had targeted him for years, the U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi, announced on Saturday.
Ms. Bondi posted the news on social media, adding that Mr. Maduro’s wife, Cilia Flores, who was not included in an earlier indictment, had also been charged. Both of them, she said, “will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.”
Mr. Maduro was indicted in Manhattan in 2020. With those charges pending, Secretary of State Marco Rubio referred to Maduro as a “fugitive from American justice.”
That indictment charged Mr. Maduro and five others with narcoterrorism, conspiracy to import cocaine, possession of machine guns and conspiracy to possess machine guns.
Federal prosecutors often return what is known as a superseding indictment to add defendants or charges to an existing indictment. In this case, Ms. Bondi’s post on X suggests that a new indictment would add Mr. Maduro’s wife as a defendant.
The 2020 indictment said that Mr. Maduro had helped to manage and eventually came to head a drug trafficking organization, the Cartel de los Soles, or Cartel of the Suns, as he gained power in Venezuela. Cartel de los Soles has been an ironic nickname for the Maduro administration’s military officers, who wear suns on their epaulets.
Under Mr. Maduro’s leadership, the indictment charged, the organization sought not only to enrich members and enhance their power, but also to “flood” the United States with cocaine “and inflict the drug’s harmful and addictive effects on users in this country.” The indictment said Maduro and others “prioritized using cocaine as a weapon against America.”
Prosecutors in the Southern District had long targeted Mr. Maduro, and the investigation into him was overseen by a former criminal defense lawyer to President Trump, Emil Bove III. One of the prosecutors on the 2020 case was Amanda Houle, who now leads the office’s criminal division.
William K. Rashbaum is a Times reporter covering municipal and political corruption, the courts and broader law enforcement topics in New York.
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