US prosecutors add torture charge against Maduro and wife Flores
Prosecutors in the United States have charged Venezuela's former president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, with conspiracy to commit torture — a new count added to the drug-trafficking and weapons charges already pending against the couple.
The charges were made public on Thursday in a superseding indictment. Maduro, 63, and Flores, 69, have denied the earlier accusations brought against them.
Both have been in custody since January at a detention centre in Brooklyn, New York, after US forces seized them in a pre-dawn raid on their compound in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital.
The indictment accuses the couple of “entrenching themselves in power” by presiding over “a system of repression that relied on violence against political opposition, arbitrary detention, and the torture of detainees, including United States citizens”.
It lists alleged methods of torture that include “electric shock, asphyxiation, rape, forced nudity, prolonged isolation, starvation, punishment cells, and psychological torture”. Prosecutors say the psychological torture included threats to kill victims' family members, among them children. The alleged purpose of the repression, the court document states, was to ensure that Maduro and his wife remained in power.
Flores is accused of playing a key role in building that system — ordering that individuals be tortured and receiving updates on the torture of specific prisoners. The indictment alleges she did so in order to protect relatives involved in illegal activities.
The new accusations concern the alleged torture of US citizens held in Venezuela while Maduro was in power. They echo accounts long given by human rights groups and by prisoners released from Venezuelan jails, who have described what they call systematic torture in the country's detention facilities. United Nations human rights investigators have also documented cases of torture and ill-treatment in Venezuelan custody in previous reports.
Javier Tarazona, who heads a human rights group in Venezuela, told BBC Mundo's Norberto Paredes earlier this year that he and his brother were held in a tiny punishment cell for 46 days after being arbitrarily arrested. Another former inmate, Ángel Godoy, said he was kept in isolation for months and was not allowed to contact his wife, who was left without information about his whereabouts.
Maduro has previously rejected US legal proceedings against him as politically motivated. The fresh charges, like the earlier ones, are allegations. Under US law, a defendant is presumed innocent unless and until a court convicts them, and the claims in the indictment have not yet been tested at trial. A superseding indictment replaces an earlier charging document and may add charges, defendants or evidence; it does not by itself establish guilt.
The trial for both Maduro and Flores is scheduled to begin in June 2027.
