US prosecutors add a torture conspiracy count against Maduro and Flores

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed a superseding indictment on Thursday charging Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, with conspiracy to commit torture. The count sits on top of the drug-trafficking and weapons charges already filed against them. Prosecutors also added Flores to the earlier narco-terrorism charge. Maduro is 63. Flores is 69. Both have been in a Brooklyn detention centre since January, when US forces seized them in a pre-dawn raid on their compound in Caracas.

The new count accuses the couple of presiding over a system of repression that used violence against political opponents, arbitrary detention, and the torture of detainees, including United States citizens. The indictment says the torture included electric shock, asphyxiation, rape, forced nudity, prolonged isolation, starvation, punishment cells, and psychological torture. The psychological torture, prosecutors say, included threats to kill victims' families, including children. The count names at least nine victims. Three of them are US citizens.

Barry J. Pollack, Maduro's lawyer, said his client denies the new charges and looks forward to his day in court. The couple have denied the earlier drug and weapons charges as well. Their trial is set for June 2027. Courthouse News reported that a judge denied Flores bail at a hearing on Thursday, minutes after the new indictment was unsealed. If they are convicted on the stack of charges now filed, the same outlet reported, the minimum sentence is 50 years.

What the indictment says was done

The charging document is not a verdict. It is an allegation the government must prove to a jury. The detail in it is still worth reading, because it is the first time US prosecutors have put a torture count, with named methods, on the former presidential couple themselves rather than only on officers further down.

One passage, described by Courthouse News from the indictment, concerns a detainee whose face was covered while officers poured a noxious liquid over it until he vomited, and who was then forced to eat the vomit. Prosecutors say the same man's torture continued in a Venezuelan prison, where officers shocked his genitals with electricity and injected him with a substance that caused seizures. Another victim, arrested in 2025 after officers came to his home looking for someone else, was beaten about every half hour during a year in custody, the indictment alleges.

These are claims about officers. The legal theory that reaches Maduro and Flores is conspiracy: that they entrenched themselves in power by running the system in which those acts occurred. A conspiracy count does not require the government to prove that either defendant held the electrodes. It requires proof of an agreement and of acts in furtherance of it. That is a lower bar than a substantive torture count against the person who did the act, and it is also the bar defence lawyers will attack first.

Where the case already stood

Maduro and Flores were flown to New York in January after the raid in Caracas. The original indictment centred on narco-terrorism and weapons. Adding torture changes the public shape of the case more than it changes the courtroom calendar. The trial date remains June 2027. What changes for the defendants is the floor. A drug case and a torture case tried together give a jury two narratives, and they give a sentencing judge a higher statutory minimum if both are proved.

The political use of the case is separate from that floor. The Trump administration has treated the Caracas raid and the New York prosecution as the same project. A torture count, with US citizens among the alleged victims, is easier to explain to a domestic audience than a narco-terrorism count built on cocaine routes. It is also harder to settle quietly. A plea that drops the torture count would be a visible concession. A plea that keeps it would still leave a former head of state admitting a conspiracy to torture.

What Thursday does not decide

Nothing in the unsealing is a finding. Pollack's denial is on the record. The nine alleged victims have not yet testified in this case. The methods listed in the indictment are the government's account of what it expects to prove, not a judgment. The concrete change on Thursday is procedural and numerical: a new count, Flores added to an old one, bail refused for her, a minimum of 50 years if the full set of charges is proved, and a trial still 20 months away.