Maduro and Cilia Flores Hit With Torture Charges in New Manhattan Indictment

NEW YORK — The criminal case against Nicolás Maduro got dramatically bigger on Thursday. Federal prosecutors unsealed a superseding indictment in Manhattan that adds a new accusation against the ousted Venezuelan president and his wife, Cilia Flores: conspiring to torture political opponents and American citizens — employing, according to the indictment, torture and abuse "to secure subservience from the Venezuelan population."

This is the second major escalation of a case that started with a middle-of-the-night raid. Maduro, 63, and Flores, 69, were captured on January 3 in their Caracas home during a U.S. military operation ordered by President Donald Trump, then flown to New York to face drug charges announced that same day. Both were already charged with helping transport thousands of tons of cocaine into the United States and possessing machine guns. They pleaded not guilty.

What the indictment alleges

The new indictment is unsparing in its detail. It describes a system of repression that relied on violence against the political opposition, arbitrary detention, and the torture of detainees — including U.S. citizens — to keep the couple in power. Nine alleged victims are named, three of them Americans, according to Reuters.

The methods alleged include electric shocks, beatings, asphyxiation, waterboarding, rape, forced nudity, prolonged isolation, and starvation — plus psychological torture like threats to harm and kill victims' families, including children. The Associated Press reported that, according to the revised indictment, Maduro personally signed off on torture methods, received updates on specific victims' treatment, watched a video of a forced confession, and personally threatened the killing of one prisoner's child — described in the indictment as "a form of psychological torture."

One of the most harrowing accounts involves a U.S. citizen detained in Venezuela in 2022 after the Maduro regime falsely accused him of plotting to kill the president. According to the indictment, he was starved, electrically shocked, waterboarded, repeatedly beaten, and injected with a substance that caused seizures — spending nearly nine months in a Caracas jail before being released back to the United States.

"He authorized the use of torture against specific individuals and oversaw a system designed to use torture, arbitrary detention and violence as a means of repression against the political opposition," the revised indictment says, per the AP. The U.S. attorney in New York, Jamie McDonald, called the conduct alleged "truly unthinkable" and "the epitome of corruption."

A case that keeps growing

The torture counts land on top of charges that were already enormous. Maduro was already facing drug trafficking conspiracy charges and machine-gun counts — the kind of case that could put him away for decades on its own. Reuters reports that if convicted on all counts now, the couple would face a mandatory minimum of 50 years in prison. The AP puts the potential sentence at life.

The couple has fought the case on every front. Both pleaded not guilty to the original charges, and their attorneys have asked for the case to be dismissed on the grounds that they have immunity as the leader and first lady of a foreign country — an argument that gets stranger with every passing month of their New York detention. They have not yet entered pleas on the new indictment.

The defense pushes back

Maduro's lawyer, Barry J. Pollack, denied the new charges in an email to USA TODAY: "President Maduro denies the charges in the new indictment and looks forward to his day in court." Flores's lawyers, Mark Donnelly and Andres Sanchez, said their client denies the allegations too — and questioned the timing, noting that court records show the indictment was returned under seal by a grand jury on Tuesday, only surfacing shortly before Thursday's hearing.

Flores appeared in court Thursday for a previously scheduled hearing, where her attorney said he hadn't yet had time to review the new allegations. Separately, U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, who is overseeing the case, denied a request by Flores to be released from jail due to health concerns ahead of a trial scheduled for next year, Reuters reported.

Trump's shadow over the case

This case has never been just a courtroom story — it's a geopolitical one. Trump ordered the operation that took Maduro out of Caracas, and at a Cabinet meeting on March 26 he said Maduro "emptied his prisons into our country" and that the U.S. had charged him with "a fraction" of what it could have. Thursday's indictment suggests prosecutors took that as a to-do list.

The president's willingness to project American force abroad has been a throughline of his second term — this week he was also weighing Iran strike options as oil spiked, as the news desk reported. The Maduro case is what it looks like when the planning becomes an indictment.

What's next

A trial is scheduled for next year. No pleas have been entered on the new indictment yet, and the immunity fight is still live. Expect the defense to attack the indictment's timing and its reliance on alleged victims' accounts — and expect prosecutors to keep building. If Thursday's pattern holds, this case isn't done growing.