The deposed Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro pleaded not guilty to drugs, weapons and “narco-terrorism” charges on Monday, two days after his capture by US special forces in an operation ordered by Donald Trump that sent shock waves around the world.
The brevity and formality of the arraignment hearing in federal court in Manhattan – barely 30 minutes during which Maduro was asked to confirm his name and that he understood the four charges against him – belied the far-reaching consequences of the US action.
As Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, addressed the court in lower Manhattan, the UN security council held an emergency meeting just a few miles to the north, where a dozen countries condemned the US “crime of aggression” and secretary general António Guterres suggested the operation constituted a breach of international law.
Maduro, 63, insisted to federal judge Alvin Hellerstein that he was “still president of my country”, had been illegally “captured” at his Caracas home, and was “a prisoner of war”.
“I am innocent. I am not guilty. I am a decent man,” Maduro said in Spanish during repeated attempts to speak over the judge.
As he entered the courtroom, shackled at the ankles though not at the wrists, he looked toward the jury box. Before sitting down, Maduro told the public gallery “Happy new year!” in English.
Maduro was dressed in orange slippers, a blue shirt on top of a neon orange shirt and beige pants. He scribbled notes on a legal pad throughout the hearing.
He faces four US federal criminal counts, including “narco-terrorism” conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy and possession of machine guns and destructive devices. Each charge carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.
He was first indicted in 2020, along with 14 members of his inner circle, as part of a sprawling drug-trafficking case against Venezuelan officials and Colombian guerrillas.
Defence lawyer Barry Pollack made no immediate application for bail, but said he would later file a motion alluding to the “military abduction” he said his client was subjected to.
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”.
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 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 Ernesto 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.
Commenting on the military operation, Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel peace prize winner María Corina Machado told Fox news that she planned to return home “as soon as possible”.
Machado said Rodríguez was “rejected” by the Venezuelan people, and voters were on the opposition’s side.
“In free and fair elections, we will win by over 90 percent of the votes, I have no doubt about it,” Machado said, describing Rodríguez as “one of the main architects of torture, persecution, corruption, narcotrafficking”.
Machado – widely seen as Maduro’s most credible opponent – left Venezuela last month to travel to Norway to accept the Nobel prize and hasn’t returned since. Trump on Saturday dismissed the idea of working with Machado, saying: “She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country.”
Despite this, Machado welcomed the US actions as “a huge step for humanity, for freedom and human dignity”.
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. That would mark a return to past “naked imperialism” by the US in Latin America, Alan McPherson, a history professor at Temple University, told the Guardian.
Tensions with Colombia ramped up further on Monday when its president, Gustavo Petro, said his country would “take up arms” if Trump acted on his threat of military action there.
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.”
