A courthouse is a machine for converting memory into judgment. On Thursday, in a federal court in Manhattan, another page was added to the file on Nicolás Maduro: Al Jazeera reported that prosecutors charged the deposed Venezuelan president and his wife, Cilia Flores, with conspiring to commit torture — a single count grafted onto the drug-trafficking case already waiting for them.
The pair already stand accused of narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, and the possession — and conspiracy to possess — of machine guns and destructive devices, CBS News reported. The new, 30-page superseding indictment, prosecutors wrote, tells of leaders who, “to undermine Venezuelan democracy and entrench themselves in power,” presided over “a system of repression that relied on violence against political opposition, arbitrary detention, and the torture of detainees, including United States citizens.”
Twenty-Six Years
That conspiracy, the indictment says, ran from at least 1999 through 2025 and drew in Venezuela’s military, intelligence services and law-enforcement apparatus. Its methods, according to prosecutors, included “electric shock, asphyxiation, rape, forced nudity, prolonged isolation, starvation, punishment cells, and psychological torture, such as threats to harm and kill victims’ families, including children.”
Maduro, prosecutors allege, personally directed the machinery or was regularly briefed on it. Told that a detained military officer remained defiant, he ordered his people to “squeeze them harder” — and, according to the indictment, at times suggested specific torture methods for unrelenting victims, directing additional “pressure” after being informed of beatings, electric shocks and simulated drowning. Flores was present at some of the meetings where detainees and their treatment were discussed. During the political unrest of 2014, Maduro allegedly proposed abducting five to seven military officers suspected of disloyalty and extracting information from them through torture; Flores, the indictment says, agreed.
One case reaches back to 2018, after a drone attack in Caracas that the government called an attempt to assassinate Maduro: a detainee arrested in its aftermath was allegedly subjected to electric shocks and asphyxiation.
The Americans in the Cells
The indictment also reaches into the cells where Americans were kept. “As alleged in the indictment, the Maduro regime subjected over a dozen American citizens to torture while held in custody of the Venezuelan government — including drugs, electrocution, sexual assault, and more,” FBI Director Kash Patel said in a statement on social media. “They will now answer for their crimes.” CNN had reported the day before that the new charges would concern the wrongful detention of more than a dozen US citizens — people American officials and advocates said the regime used as political pawns — and that investigators had also discussed charging several additional figures.
Three Americans appear in the indictment’s particulars. In January 2025, intelligence officers arrested one by mistake — he was not their intended target — and beat him repeatedly over two days, leaving permanent injury to his eye; released about a year later, he was warned by Venezuelan officials not to disclose the abuse. Another American, arrested in 2022, was allegedly given injections that caused seizures. A third, detained in 2023, was severely beaten and tortured, and an officer explained to him that he had been kept alive because his citizenship made him useful — material for a potential prisoner exchange.
Some who endured those cells have testified in their own way. Matthew Heath and Osman Khan, freed in a prisoner swap in October 2022, alleged in a lawsuit that they were subjected to waterboarding, electrocution, threats of sexual assault, mind-altering drugs and solitary confinement; Heath, a US Marine veteran, attempted suicide in detention, CNN reported. The “CITGO 6” — six American oil executives lured to Venezuela in 2017 and held nearly five years — describe similarly brutal conditions; Tomeu Vadell, Alirio Jose Zambrano and Jose Luis Zambrano have sued their employer, Citgo, saying they were tortured. All passed through the General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence, the DGCIM, which the United Nations has called “responsible for arbitrary detentions, ill-treatment and torture of political opponents and their relatives” — a service that “routinely resorted” to “electric shocks, suffocation with plastic bags, waterboarding, beatings, sexual violence, water and food deprivation, stress positions and exposure to extreme temperatures” in order to “extract information and confessions, intimidate, and punish the detainees.”
Immunity, and a Doctor’s Note
The couple came into this custody by force. In the middle of the night of January 3, US forces seized them from their home in Caracas in a raid authorized by President Donald Trump and carried them to New York, the Associated Press reported via Fortune. The administration defends the operation as a “surgical law enforcement operation.” Maduro calls himself a prisoner of war and his capture a kidnapping. His lawyers have asked that the case be dismissed, arguing he has immunity for conduct undertaken while he was Venezuela’s president — and his lawyer separately contests the legality of the arrest itself; according to prosecutors, the government now in Caracas has not joined the immunity claim on his behalf. Both Maduro and Flores have pleaded not guilty to the drug charges, and both are held at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center.
Thursday was also Flores’s day in court. Her lawyer asked that the arraignment on the new torture count be delayed — the indictment had arrived only that morning — and the judge allowed it. Then came the bail request, one her lawyers have pressed for weeks. Flores is 69; her lawyers say she has lost 25 pounds — 11 kilograms — in the Brooklyn jail, has been told she might need heart surgery, may have suffered a minor heart attack in July, and suffers “lingering lightheadedness, dizziness and shortness of breath,” along with permanent scarring from being “thrown against a wall or dresser” during the raid. She could live under a 24-hour guard at a New York residence, they argued; she is “intent on supporting her husband with her constant presence.” Prosecutors countered that she posed an “extreme risk of flight and danger to the public,” noting she has been taken from jail to a local hospital when treatment was needed. The judge, citing her access to “considerable funds” and calling the charges “serious allegations,” denied bail.
The drug case against Maduro — an indictment first filed against him and 14 others in March 2020, during the first Trump administration — is now set for trial on June 1, 2027, and conviction could mean life in prison. Between now and that June, among other questions, a court will have to settle the oldest one a deposed ruler can ask: how much of a palace travels with its occupant.