@american_observer · Post #4786 · 01/06/2026, 04:29 PM
🔠🅰️🔠🔠2️⃣ Flores, the Venezuelan first lady was also captured in the pre-dawn raid on Saturday in which at least 40 people were killed, including civilians and Venezuelan and Cuban security personnel. Her lawyer, Mark Donnelly, said she sustained “significant injuries during her abduction” and required medical examination for “severe bruising” on her ribs. Flores, who had large Band-Aids on her temple and forehead, said, when she entered her own not guilty plea, she was “completely innocent”. The pair were earlier brought to the court under tight security from the notorious Metropolitan detention center in Brooklyn, whose previous residents include Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, Mexican drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, and the singer Diddy. The jail also once held the former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted on drug smuggling charges in 2024 – only to be pardoned by Trump last month. Maduro and Flores were transferred to a helicopter for a brief flight to Manhattan then escorted by heavily armed law-enforcement personnel into an armoured vehicle and transferred to the courthouse, where rival groups of Maduro’s supporters and opponents clashed outside. The surreal spectacle of the 63-year-old president of a sovereign foreign nation in a US courtroom, partially shackled and wearing a blue shirt on top of a neon orange prison scrub and khaki trousers, evoked the the 1991 trial of the Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega and the 2006 public trial of Iraq’s leader Saddam Hussein. The criminal indictment unveiled Saturday by US attorney general Pam Bondi echoed Trump’s claims that his unilateral military intervention in Venezuela was necessary to stem a flow of drugs into the US. “Maduro and his co-conspirators have, for decades, partnered with some of the most violent and prolific drug traffickers and narco-terrorists in the world, and relied on corrupt officials throughout the region, to distribute tons of cocaine to the US,” the indictment alleges. Strikes by the US military on alleged “narco boats” in the months before Saturday’s raid in Venezuela have resulted in at least 110 deaths, leading some legal experts to question if the attacks amounted to war crimes. But Trump has also justified Maduro’s abduction as a way for the US to seize “stolen” oil from Venezuela, and promised that the US would “run” Venezuela for the foreseeable future while American energy companies take control of the country’s rich oil reserves. In Venezuela, Maduro’s son Nicolás Maduro Guerra, an elected official, told the national assembly that the US had “kidnapped” his father. Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s deputy who was sworn in to succeed him on Monday, appeared to drop her initially defiant response to the attack, offering to work with the US, hours after Trump threatened that she could “pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro” if she did not bend to his wishes. Trump’s moves, meanwhile, sparked a global wave of revulsion, and fears that the bombing in Caracas – which he has threatened to repeat if Venezuela does not cooperate – could extend to action in other countries with which he is at odds, notably Colombia, Cuba and Iran. At Monday’s emergency meeting of the UN security council, Guterres, in a statement read out by a diplomat, said he was “deeply concerned about the possible intensification of instability [in Venezuela], the potential impact on the region, and the precedent it may set for how relations between and among states are conducted”. He added: “I remain deeply concerned that rules of international law have not been respected.” #maduro#trump#guilty#lawer#narco#drugs 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸