MEXICO CITY—Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro had long seemed untouchable despite a $50 million bounty on his head and a U.S. indictment unsealed in 2020 accusing him of narco-terrorism.
Now Maduro, who was whisked out of the country along with his wife after a military strike early Saturday, faces the prospect of a trial in a New York federal court for drug trafficking and conspiring with terrorists. He could appear in court as soon as Monday.
“They will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Saturday, referring to Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores .
U.S. prosecutors accuse Maduro of being the head of the Cartel of the Suns , a loose-knit organization of senior generals and officials who over more than two decades allegedly took millions of dollars in bribes from Colombian guerrilla leaders. The guerrillas financed their war against the Colombian government by shipping thousands of tons of cocaine through Venezuela to the U.S. and Europe, prosecutors say.
The group’s name refers to the gold suns—equivalent to American generals’ stars—worn by Venezuelan generals on the epaulets of their uniforms.
The superseding indictment unsealed Saturday builds on the 2020 charges, alleging Maduro ran a cocaine trafficking enterprise that “enriched and entrenched Venezuela’s political and military elite.”
The four-count indictment names six defendants, including Maduro’s wife, his son and other senior government officials, charging them with drug and gun offenses. It accuses them of engaging in a narco-terrorism conspiracy by working with drug traffickers that the U.S. considers foreign terrorist organizations, such as the Sinaloa Cartel and Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang President Trump has highlighted to push his hardline immigration agenda.
Prosecutors said the “massive-scale” drug-trafficking concentrated power and wealth in the hands of Maduro and his family.
“This cycle of narcotics-based corruption lines the pockets of Venezuelan officials and their families while also benefiting violent narco-terrorists who operate with impunity on Venezuelan soil and who help produce, protect, and transport tons of cocaine to the United States,” the indictment says.
The U.S. government says Venezuela has long played an important role in allowing narcotics from Colombia to move through its territory and then onto ships and planes headed to the U.S., the Caribbean and Europe.
Prosecutors say Maduro, his predecessor, the late Hugo Chávez, and other senior officials allegedly worked in tandem with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia to ship the cocaine through Venezuela. The U.S. identified the FARC, as the guerrilla organization was also known, as a terrorist group from 1997 to 2021. The group is no longer in operation.
Prosecutors say that first under Chávez—who became president in 1999, and then with Maduro who took office after Chávez died in 2013—Caracas “prioritized using cocaine as a weapon against America.”
Maduro denies the charges. “It’s the worst sort of fake news launched against our country to justify an escalation into an armed conflict that will have a catastrophic impact on all of the continent,” he wrote in a September letter to Trump, urging dialogue over conflict.
Some Venezuela experts believe that prosecutors will have a difficult time proving Maduro’s drug involvement.
“Legally, the biggest problem they will have is to demonstrate in a court that the Cartel of the Suns exists, and that he commands it,” said Brian Naranjo, a former senior U.S. diplomat who served in Venezuela.
Most cocaine bound to the U.S. is shipped from Colombia’s Pacific coast and next door Ecuador. Unlike drug-trafficking organizations such as Mexico’s Jalisco cartel, the Cartel of the Suns isn’t a hierarchical cartel but rather a diffuse network mostly made up of military officers who facilitate drug shipments, getting payoffs along the way, said Phil Gunson, a Caracas-based analyst for the International Crisis Group, which works to prevent violent conflict in Venezuela.
“It is a convenient label for a loose and sometimes fractious group of generals and senior government officials that thrives amidst Venezuela’s endemic corruption,” Gunson said.
Maduro’s situation resembles that of another Latin American strongman—the late Panamanian leader General Manuel Noriega. Once a former U.S. ally, Noriega fell into disfavor after engaging in electoral fraud. He was accused of conspiring with drug traffickers to ship cocaine to the U.S. In late 1989, the U.S. invaded Panama and arrested Noriega two weeks later.
He was convicted in 1992 of drug trafficking charges in a Miami federal court and sentenced to 40 years in prison. He served 17 years, and was eventually extradited to Panama where he died in 2017.
U.S. prosecutors trace Venezuela’s drug-trafficking connections to the presidency of the late Chávez, who ordered generals to provide weapons to the FARC. The guerrilla group signed a peace treaty with Colombia’s government in 2016.
The superseding indictment says Maduro “tarnished every public office he has held,” accusing him of moving loads of cocaine as a legislator of Venezuela’s national assembly. During his time as foreign minister, he gave diplomatic passports to drug traffickers and facilitated diplomatic cover for planes used by money launderers to repatriate drug proceeds from Mexico to Venezuela, prosecutors said.
Drug trafficking reached deep into Maduro’s own family . In 2015, two nephews of Flores, Maduro’s wife, were arrested in a sting in Haiti after they offered to get hundreds of kilos of cocaine to undercover agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration, prosecutors said. The two nephews told agents they were “at war” with the U.S. and bragged about their connection to a top FARC commander, the indictment said. Convicted in 2016 in New York, the pair was set free in exchange for seven U.S. prisoners in 2022.
Two other alleged members of the Cartel of the Suns are already in American prisons, and could testify against Maduro. Both Gen. Hugo Carvajal, a former head of Venezuelan military intelligence known as “The Chicken,” for his long neck, and Gen. Clíver Alcalá, have pleaded guilty to helping to smuggle tons of cocaine to the U.S. , and providing weapons to the FARC.
The U.S. accuses other senior Venezuelan leaders of taking part in the alleged Cartel of the Suns conspiracy. It has placed a $25 million bounty on Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello and a $15 million reward for Gen. Vladimir Padrino, Venezuela’s defense minister.
Both men have denied any involvement in drug trafficking. Cabello recently denied the existence of the Cartel of the Suns, which he calls an “imperialist narrative.” Padrino said no cartels or drug capos exist in Venezuela.
The two remain in Venezuela and sent defiant messages in video recordings after the strikes on Saturday.
Write to José de Córdoba at jose.decordoba@wsj.com , Santiago Pérez at santiago.perez@wsj.com and Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com
