SEEING RED is an irregular column on Fremantle Shipping News by Barry Healy*. In this piece, Barry weighs the New York Grand Jury Indictment against Nicolás Maduro and five others, including his wife Cilia Flores, to see how substantial the charges again Madura and his co-defendants appear to be. According to Barry, not very.
The January 5 New York Grand Jury indictment of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and five others, including his wife Cilia Flores, is a document law students will study for decades to come – for lessons on what not to do.It is a sloppy, full of holes reflection of Donald Trump’s “Behind the Looking Glass” grasp on reality.
It appears Trump’s Department of Justice (DoJ) knows the weaknesses of its case but wants to smear the defendants before the matter is ultimately dismissed. Unfortunately, that dismissal will probably be years down the track.
In a political show trial innocence is nothing; the politics of the Big Lie is all.
The “Sealed Superseding Indictment”, as it is called, accusesMaduro and the others of conspiracy to traffic “thousands of tons of cocaine to the United States.” The standard of evidence stands in stark contrast to that in the indictment of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández. He was convicted of smuggling over 400 tons of drugs into the US – only to be pardoned by Donald Trump!
The Hernandez indictment referenced evidence of his collaboration with major transnational cartels, including video and photographic exhibits.
The DoJ alleges that for more than twenty-five years, beginning around 1999, senior Venezuelan officials transformed the state into a vehicle for large-scale drug trafficking. Venezuela became a haven for smugglers andarmed “narco-terrorist” cartels. Cocaine shipments ultimately bound for the United States were managed with military escorts and diplomatic cover.
For so massive an allegation, you would expect some solid evidence. Not so in Trump World.
The prosecutors carefully avoid precise data on Venezuelan cocaine exports to the USA. At one point in the indictment, it is “tons” of cocaine and then later “thousands of tons.” Such massive shipments would be worth billions of dollars.
Remarkably, the Drug Enforcement Administration 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment (NDTA) makes no mention of it. In fact, where the Assessment does mention Venezuela(six times) there is no reference to Maduro or any other government official. The NDTA mentions only the Tren De Aragua (TDA) criminal gang, saying it conducts “small-scale drug trafficking activities.”
Yet, TDA is among the “narco-terrorists” Maduro supposedly “partnered with.” This flies in the face of a 2025 US intelligence assessment that concluded that Maduro had no control over TDA. The DoJ claim is contrary to the known history of the gang.
TDA originated in the early 2010s inside Venezuela’s Tocorón prison. Like many Latin American countries, Venezuela’s gaols are overcrowded, and more so since US sanctions wrecked the economy. Within Tocorón prison the inmates, through a combination of corruption and intimidation came to run the prison, formed TDA and spread their tentacles.
That ended in September 2023, when more than 11,000 police and military personnel conducted a large-scale operation to retake the prison and break up TDA by sending gang members to separate gaols. The repression of TDA was ordered by Nicolás Maduro.
The case against Maduro accuses him of “partnership with narco-terrorist groups” between 2003 and 2011. The narco-terrorists were TDA and the Mexican Sinaloa and Los Zetas cartels. However, these cartels were not designated by the Trump administration as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) until February 2025.
The narco-terrorism narrative rests upon those FTO designations. Count One of the indictment cannot standwithout them.
Count Two of the indictment charges all six defendants with cocaine “importation conspiracy”. However, the proffered evidence shows the alleged shipments did not reach US territory, they wound up in Mexico or other jurisdictions.
Flights that do not cross into U.S. airspace do not enter U.S. customs boundaries. They do not violate U.S. law even if they are carrying contraband.
The indictment attempts to shoehorn these flights into U.S. criminal jurisdiction by asserting that the cocaine involved was intended for the United States. The word “intent” is doinga lot of work.
In smuggling cases, prosecutors must establish a chain of evidence leading to violation of US territory. These are normally entry or attempted entry into US territory, Coast Guard interception near US waters or proven coordination with US-based criminals. In the Maduro indictment that chain of evidence is glaringly absent.
Finally, the DoJ’s grounds for prosecuting Maduro depend on avoiding international law on head-of-state immunity. To do that, the DoJ merely labels his presidency as illegitimate. It will eventually have to prove that claim.
To do that the DoJ will have to impugn the 2024 Venezuelan presidential election. That will open the Pandora’s Box of US interference in Venezuelan elections in particular and the poisoning of its political life in general. Reams of evidence will prove US transgressions against Venezuela.
I wonder if the Trump administration will just quietly attempt to strike a deal to discreetly sweep this indictment under the carpet after the media circus has moved on.
By Barry Healy
* Barry Healy is a life-long Marxist who first came to Perth in the 1970s to establish the Resistance young socialist group. He was a founder of the Green Left and currently edits the Culture section of the Red Spark website.
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