News Americas, NEW YORK, NY: As U.S. prosecutors brought charges against captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, before a New York City court Monday, Jan. 5, 2025, on sweeping cocaine-trafficking and narco-terrorism conspiracy charges, attention has returned to longstanding U.S. assessments of Venezuela’s central role in the global drug trade.
Those assessments were laid out in stark terms in the United States’ 2025 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, (INCSR), which warned that Venezuela remains one of the most significant drug-transit corridors in the Western Hemisphere—and is showing growing signs of becoming a cocaine-producing country.
According to the 2025 State Department report, Venezuela continues to serve as a primary conduit for cocaine originating in Colombia, with shipments moved by air, sea, and land before transiting north through the Caribbean and Central America toward the United States, or south and east toward Brazil, Guyana, Suriname, and Europe. U.S. estimates cited in the report indicate that between 200 and 250 metric tons of cocaine transit Venezuela annually, accounting for roughly 10 to 13 percent of global production.
The INCSR directly linked this scale of trafficking to Venezuela’s political instability, economic collapse, and entrenched corruption. It stated that the country’s current power structure has created conditions in which transnational criminal organizations can operate with near impunity, while the ongoing economic crisis has increased reliance on illicit revenue streams – including narcotrafficking – to sustain political control.
The report also highlighted growing evidence of coca cultivation and cocaine production within Venezuelan territory, particularly in the states of Zulia, Apure, and Amazonas. Research cited in the report pointed to the presence of clandestine airstrips, drug laboratories, and trafficking infrastructure, often corroborated by local and Indigenous communities.
U.S. officials further criticized Venezuela’s lack of cooperation with international law-enforcement agencies, noting that the country does not cooperate on extradition or mutual legal assistance and that its constitution bars the extradition of Venezuelan nationals. While Venezuelan authorities routinely claim major drug seizures, the report notes these figures are often unverifiable and persist alongside allegations of official complicity in trafficking networks.
The INCSR also warned of the growing role of armed non-state actors and transnational criminal organizations, including Colombian guerrilla factions and Venezuelan-based groups such as Tren de Aragua, which originated in Venezuela’s prison system and has since expanded across South and Central America and into the United States. The group has been designated a significant transnational criminal organization by U.S. authorities.
The report underscored that Venezuela’s role in global drug trafficking is not isolated, but deeply embedded in regional supply chains that rely on Caribbean transshipment points, where cocaine is stored, redirected, and redistributed. It concluded that meaningful progress against drug trafficking in Venezuela is unlikely without fundamental changes in governance, transparency, and international cooperation.
Those findings now intersect directly with the 25-page U.S. indictment unsealed this week, which alleges that beginning around 1999, Maduro, Flores, their son Nicolás Ernesto Maduro Guerra, and senior officials – including former interior ministers Diosdado Cabello Rondón and Ramón Rodríguez Chacín – participated in what prosecutors describe as a “relentless campaign of cocaine trafficking.”
U.S. prosecutors allege the accused worked with designated terrorist and criminal organizations, including the FARC, Sinaloa Cartel, Los Zetas, and Tren de Aragua, to provide law-enforcement protection and logistical support for cocaine shipments bound for the United States. The indictment further claims Maduro facilitated diplomatic cover for drug flights and provided passports to traffickers before and after taking office in 2013.
Prosecutors allege Flores accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in exchange for safe passage of drug shipments, while rewards have been offered for information leading to the arrest of Cabello Rondón and alleged Tren de Aragua leader Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores.
Together, the indictment and the 2025 INCSR paint a picture of Venezuela as a central hub in a regional narcotics network – one whose reach, U.S. officials argue, extends deep into the Caribbean and beyond.
