“I’m innocent,” he said when asked for his plea. “I’m not guilty. I am a decent man.”

The morning of January 3, shortly after the raid was carried out, US Attorney General Pam Bondi shared a federal indictment filed in the Southern District of New York. The now-unsealed document charges Maduro with one count each of “narco-terrorism conspiracy,” “cocaine importation conspiracy,” “possession of machineguns and destructive devices” and “conspiracy to possess machineguns and destructive devices.” Flores, Maduro’s son Nicolás Ernesto Maduro Guerra and three others were also indicted on some or all of the same charges. Only Maduro and Flores appear to have been captured.

Both were transported to the notorious Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn ahead of the arraignment. They are expected to plead not guilty, and to be remanded back to the federal detention center while they await trial. They could be sentenced to life in prison if convicted.

Court documents filed January 5 show that Maduro’s legal counsel is Barry Pollack, the attorney who recently secured Julian Assange’s release from prison. Flores is being represented by former federal prosecutor Mark E. Donnelly.

Maduro was previously indicted on drug-trafficking charges in 2020, also in the Southern District of New York.

At a January 3 press conference President Donald Trump described the extraction as “an assault like people have not seen since World War II,” before claiming that both Maduro and Flores had been indicted “for their campaign of deadly narco-terrorism against the United States.” Flores, however, has not been indicted for narco-terrorism; only the cocaine and weapons charges.

“As alleged in the indictment [Maduro] personally oversaw the vicious cartel known as Cartel de los Soles, which flooded our nation with lethal poison responsible for the deaths of countless Americans,” Trump continued; “many, many Americans—hundreds of thousands over the years—of Americans died because of him.”

Despite repeated mischaracterization by the Trump administration, there is no single organization known as Cartel de los Soles; the name is a catch-all referring to the loose network of trafficking cells in Venezuela.

The indictment does not mention the overdose crisis, nor any drug-related harms at all.

Bondi, in a statement posted to social media January 4, also described the alleged trafficking activity as having “contributed directly to the drug crisis claiming American lives.”

Yet the indictment does not mention the overdose crisis, nor any drug-related harms at all. Overdose deaths in the US are primarily attributed not to cocaine but to fentanyl, a separate trade that is is not meaningfully associated with Venezuela or any South American country. Venezuela is involved in transport of cocaine from Colombia and other countries that produce it, but no moreso than half a dozen other countries in Central and South America.

In December 2025, Trump pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez from a drug-trafficking conviction for which he was serving a 45-year sentence in a federal prison in West Virginia.

“We’ve knocked out 97 percent of the drugs coming in by sea,” Trump claimed, referring to the series of Caribbean and Pacific airstrikes his administration began carrying out in September 2025. “Each boat kills on average 25,000 people … and those drugs mostly come from a place called Venezuela.”

Trump stated that is “going to run” Venezuela until such time as a peaceful transition of power can take place, to leadership that the US has approved. He claimed that Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who was sworn in as acting president following Maduro’s capture, had told Secretary of State Marco Rubio that she prepared to cooperate with the US. Rubio will apparently play a prominent role in overseeing government operations in Venezuela, along with “various people” including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

“President Donald Trump, our peoples and our region deserve peace and dialogue, not war,” Rodríguez subsequently posted to social media. “This has always been President Nicolás Maduro’s message, and it is the message of all of Venezuela right now … Venezuela has the right to peace, development, sovereignty and a future.”

Trump described an occupation that could potentially last for years, as “the money coming out of the ground is very substantial.” Plans to take over, revitalize and profit from Venezuela’s oil infrastructure dominated much of the press conference.

Image (cropped) via United States Department of State

The post “I’m Innocent”: Maduro Pleads Not Guilty to Drug-Trafficking Charges appeared first on Filter.

Maracaibo, Venezuela’s second-largest city, isn’t far from the Colombian border. In my heyday, starting in the mid-’90s, there were four or five different places you could go to buy heroin. Today, there is only one left. Head to the Cerros de Marin sector—not far from downtown—and walk to El Milagro Avenue at the end of 77th Street.

Maracaibo is at sea level for the most part, so it’s always hot and humid. Since we have almost no elevation, it feels poetic that the last place in the city where you can buy heroin is surrounded by foothills. It had been five years since my last journey there—since I stopped using. I wanted to go back. Not to buy, but to see what had changed.

Chicha, the lady who does the actual selling, received me like a prodigal son.

I was greeted warmly by neighbors—friendly acquaintances from my former life, surprised to see me. Chicha, the lady who does the actual selling, received me like a prodigal son. Perhaps a mixture of sincere tenderness and the prospect of regaining a formerly superb client.

Now in her early 60s, Chicha’s eyes watered when she spoke about her daughter and grandchildren who had migrated to Colombia. I had known them all well. Now, she’s in a house too big for the few family members who are left. It’s an uncommon burden in a place where most houses are crowded with families too poor to leave. 

Chicha confided that business is not booming. Where she’d once had dozens of regulars, only six or seven remain—in a city with a population of more than 1.5 million. 

In recent years, as hyperinflation worsened and job opportunities dried up, the majority of her former customers have emigrated in search of a better life. While there aren’t really any credible statistics, to me emigration feels like the main explanation for how the city’s heroin-using population has been whittled down to almost nothing. When someone who hasn’t seen me since my using days bumps into me on the street, the most common thing they say to me is, “I thought you left the country.”

Heroin was always more expensive and less readily available than many other state-banned drugs.

A few of the former heroin users who remain were probably forced into abstinence. Others have shifted to substances like bazuco or crack, which have remained not just cheaper than heroin, but exponentially easier to obtain. Even in better times, heroin was always more expensive and less readily available than many other state-banned drugs. Never that dominant in Maracaibo to begin with, heroin is now disappearing the fastest. 

Hyperinflation and Diminishing Returns

Venezuela is enduring its fourth year of hyperinflation, amid a worsening recession. In 2016, when I stopped using, a 0.1 g bag cost 35,000 bolívares. Today, 5 million bolívares.

In US dollars, though, it’s a very different story. While in my day you could get four bags for $12, today you can get four for just $5—that’s what a sorry state the bolívar is in now.

Four bags a day will not hold many long-time users. Eight would be no party, but it wouldn’t be bad—if every day you could keep coming up with the money. A few days before my visit with Chicha, Venezuela increased its minimum wage by nearly 300 percent—from the equivalent of 64 cents per month to $2.40 per month.

The value of the bolívar is so ludicrously low that even a huge wad of bills is mostly worthless, unless of course they’re USD. Most Venezuelans who need to buy anything these days, including Chica’s heroin, use wire transfers in bolivares of whatever that day’s equivalent is in USD.

Chicha may be the only access point for retail heroin in Maracaibo, but she’s not the one making the profits. She is, in fact, dramatically underpaid. 

Chicha’s son Enrique and daughter-in-law Ana live on a small potato farm in an Andes state about six hours away. Chicha’s customers haven’t seen them in years, but they’re the ones pulling the strings because they’re the ones with the contacts; Chicha just handles the retail end. She’s done this for the past eight years, though she’s been in the business in one way or another for decades.

Customers transfer the money to Ana, texting or calling her at the mercy of power outages or slow internet, and then wait for the notoriously unreliable Ana to greenlight the transaction. Chicha cannot hand over the bags until Ana gives the go-ahead. Even if Venezuela didn’t already have the worst internet service in the region, most of Chicha’s customers don’t have reliable access to smartphones. Nor, by the way, does Chicha. The process can take several hours.

“More than once she’s been tricked by someone who swears they already cleared everything with Ana.”

Chicha’s customers are technically allowed to pay in cash USD, rather than wire bolívares to Ana. But even as the US dollar becomes an increasingly common currency in Venezuela, it’s very hard for most people to find the small bills—$1 and $5—needed to buy heroin.

It’s easier if you have a US bank account, but few if any of Chicha’s customers are so lucky. Buying USD bills on the illicit market can be burdensome. Converting on-hand bolívares can be expensive. The end result is that Ana’s convoluted and erratic wire transfer system is, for most remaining customers, the only viable option.

Chicha told me that she often fronts her dope-sick customers because she sees the desperation in their eyes. But more than once she’s been tricked by someone who swears they already cleared everything with Ana, and is later screamed at by Ana and Enrique over the phone. “All of them have fucked me,” Chicha said of her customers.

In Maracaibo, like pretty much anywhere else in the world, people who use drugs can often bring their sellers personal items, or merchandise they’ve stolen or pawned, to offer in trade. But while here this works for acquiring other drugs like bazuco, it does not work for heroin.

I used to be able to pay all my heroin sellers with food from home—including Enrique and Ana, back when they lived in Maracaibo. But now trades are worthless to them, since they live hours away. Rice or flour or rum wouldn’t be worthless to Chicha, but she can’t accept such offers—it’s not up to her.

At one point during our conversation, I accompanied Chicha to a road near her house. Along with several neighbors, she was waiting for a water truck that was supposed to come through. Their zone of the city had been without running water for months, and people had begun building makeshift roadblocks to force passing water trucks to stop, whereupon they’d hold them up Wild West-style.

I had given Chicha a small bar of chocolate when I greeted her. After a while, I jokingly said, “Next time instead of chocolate I’ll bring you some water.”

As I was leaving her I ran into Humberto, one of the last heroin users I know of in the city. He recognized me from the old days but, still trying to hide his addiction, said: “You didn’t see me here.”

All I could think was, “No one sees you. No one sees you at all.”    

Photographs courtesy of Antonio Matheus Suárez

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