US charges Venezuelan President with drug trafficking

The US has charged the Venezuelan President, Nicolás Maduro, and 14 members of his inner circle with drug trafficking, ‘narco-terrorism’, corruption and money laundering, and offered a $15m reward for information leading to Maduro’s capture and prosecution. According to a report in The Guardian, unveiling the indictment, Attorney-General William Barr said the Venezuelan leadership collaborated with a dissident faction of the former Colombian guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc, operating on the Colombian-Venezuelan border, which Barr described as an ‘extremely violent terrorist organisation’. Alongside Maduro, Venezuela’s vice-president for the economy, Venezuela’s Defence Minister, and the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice are among the list of 15 current and former officials who have been indicted. But US data for 2018, which shows 210 tons of cocaine passing through Venezuela, reveals that six times as much passed through Guatemala in the same period. ‘The evidence they point to against Maduro is thin, which suggests this is more about politics than about drugs,’ said Geoff Ramsey, director of the Venezuela programme at the Washington Office on Latin America thinktank. ‘Venezuela’s nowhere close to a primary transit country for US-bound cocaine. If the US Government wanted to address the flow of cocaine they’d focus on corruption in places like Honduras and Guatemala – both governments that the administration has coddled in recent years.’ Just a day earlier, Maduro had extended an olive branch to his opponents because of the Covid-19 crisis. But that offer appeared to have been rescinded following the US charges.

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