Federal prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed a superseding indictment on Thursday that charges Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, with conspiracy to commit torture. Most of the coverage treats it as one more count stacked on the drug case. We read it as the government’s answer to the only defense Maduro has left.
That defense is immunity. Maduro’s lawyers moved in September to dismiss the case, arguing that a head of state cannot be prosecuted for official acts. Prosecutors had until October 2 to answer. The torture count arrived six days later.
Torture is a crime a court has already ruled a former head of state cannot claim as part of the job.
The new indictment says Maduro “authorized the use of torture against specific individuals and oversaw a system designed to use torture, arbitrary detention and violence as a means of repression against the political opposition.” It accuses him of personally threatening to kill one prisoner’s child “as a form of psychological torture.”
The cases it lays out are specific. A Venezuelan military officer was shocked about 20 times with electrical wire, hung by his hands and feet and waterboarded about 30 times. An American detained in January 2022 was punched, electrocuted and forcibly injected with a substance that caused seizures. Another American, arrested at home in January 2025, was held hooded in a basement and beaten every hour for two days, leaving a permanent eye injury.
What the indictment alleges
- Maduro authorized torture of specific individuals from the time he took office in 2013.
- He signed off on the methods: electric shocks, beatings, asphyxiation.
- Americans were among the people tortured in state custody.
What Maduro’s side argues
- Heads of state have held “absolute immunity from criminal jurisdiction” for “hundreds of years.”
- Everything charged was an official act of the Venezuelan state.
- He calls his capture a kidnapping and himself a prisoner of war.
What the Pinochet Case Settled
The indictment answers the motion. In March 1999 the House of Lords ruled six to one that Augusto Pinochet had no immunity for torture committed after the UN Convention Against Torture bound the countries involved. The reasoning was simple. A treaty that outlaws torture by officials cannot treat torture as an official function.
The drug counts lean on a different precedent. Courts denied Manuel Noriega immunity because Washington never recognized him as Panama’s leader, and the United States has not recognized Maduro since 2019. His lawyers argue recognition is irrelevant to immunity. The torture count does not need that fight at all.
Judge Alvin Hellerstein hears the immunity motion on November 17. He now does it with a count that carries its own precedent.
The American statute adds its own twist. Section 2340A of the federal criminal code reaches torture committed abroad by a foreigner only if the accused is “present in the United States.” Maduro is present because U.S. forces seized him in Caracas in January. The raid that delivered the defendant also created the jurisdiction.
We think the charge is right, and overdue. The people in that indictment were real, the methods were documented for years, and the man prosecutors say ran the system is in a cell in Brooklyn. A torture case is the strongest case the government has, legally and morally.
It is also the case that asks the most of the government bringing it. In March and April 2025 the Trump administration sent 252 Venezuelans to El Salvador’s CECOT prison. Human Rights Watch and Cristosal found the abuse there was systematic, with every former detainee they interviewed describing serious abuse on a near-daily basis for as long as they were held.
A government that wants Manhattan to be where torturers answer for it has to reckon with the prison it chose to fill. Prosecutors will never have to address that in court. Nobody else should let the administration skip it.
Flores was due back in court Thursday asking for house arrest on heart-health grounds. Prosecutors called her “an extreme risk of flight and danger to the public.” Trial is set for June 1, 2027.
The torture count does not need to reach a jury to matter. It needs to survive November 17.