The Case Against Nicolás Maduro Will Rely on a Myriad of Corrupt, Jailed Venezuelan Officials

Any eventual U.S. trial against ousted Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro will rely on witness testimony from a seedy cast of characters — drug kingpins, corrupt generals and murderous government officials — all of whom are seeking lenient prison sentences and forgiving treatment from immigration deportation officers.

President Donald Trump has railed about foreign criminals who flood the United States with drugs for years. But this group cut deals with American law enforcement agencies and are now cooperating witnesses.

Since Maduro’s arrest last week, NOTUS has reviewed hundreds of pages of trial transcripts that document how the Justice Department has slowly prosecuted its way up the chain of powerful individuals inside Venezuela’s drug networks, gathering the evidence it can now use against Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.

Both remain in custody as the criminal case against them proceeds in Manhattan, where they face criminal charges for overseeing a vast narco-terrorism empire.

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Maduro and Flores, who say they were illegally kidnapped from Venezuela during the Trump administration’s overnight military assault last week, have pleaded not guilty.

But to prove their cases, federal prosecutors can point to the firsthand experience of Venezuelans who are now in U.S. detention. These witnesses can describe how the Chávez and later Maduro regimes played a key role in the international drug pipeline, protecting Venezuelan kingpins who accepted cocaine shipments from neighboring Colombia that came directly from the Marxist–Leninist guerrilla group FARC, who then loaded it onto planes bound for Mexican cartels or go-fast boats headed to the Dominican Republic.

The ultimate destination was always the same: the USA.

Among them is Hugo Carvajal Barrios, once the Venezuelan military’s intelligence chief who went by the nickname “El Pollo.” Carvajal Barrios oversaw the Directorate General of Military Counterintelligence, or DGCIM, which the United Nations found has tortured dozens of people with “sexual violence and/or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment” at its network of gulags.

Carvajal Barrios, who had a falling out with the Maduro regime and fled to Spain where he was eventually extradited to the United States, pleaded guilty last summer to drug-trafficking charges. Other government witnesses have described him as the “main link” between the Venezuelan dictatorship and the FARC.

In a fawning Dec. 2 letter addressed to Trump (and authenticated by NOTUS), Carvajal Barrios said he remains “ready to provide additional details” to show that Trump’s assertions about Venezuela sending gangs and drugs north toward the United States are exactly right. It’s a policy Carvajal Barrios claims started with former Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez and continued under his successor, Maduro.

“The regime has provided weapons, passports, and impunity for these terrorist organizations to operate freely from Venezuela against the United States,” he wrote, mentioning Cuban government agents and the Shia Islamist group Hezbollah.

“I was present when decisions were made to organize and weaponize criminal gangs across Venezuela to protect the regime — among them the group known as Tren de Aragua,” he wrote, adding that Maduro “expanded this strategy by exporting criminality and chaos abroad to target Venezuelan political exiles and artificially reduce crime statistics within Venezuela.”

Another witness is expected to be Clíver Antonio Alcalá Cordones, a once-powerful general in the Venezuelan military who had a $10 million bounty on his head — until, according to the State Department, he turned himself in to U.S. government officials in Colombia in 2020. He’s since pleaded guilty to providing support to the FARC while it was still listed on the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations and is serving a 21-year sentence at a medium-security federal prison in Cumberland, Maryland.

A convicted drug trafficker who was the second-in-command at one of Venezuela’s most powerful cartels testified in 2024 that the military general would order the battalion under his watch to occasionally clear out of the airport in the industrial city of Valencia — all so that troops wouldn’t witness how tons of cocaine would get loaded onto sleek jets. Alcalá would net $150,000 for each plane that left the airport, with Gulfstream II jets able to carry 3,000 kilograms and Gulfstream III jets able to load an extra 500 kilos per flight. One of those planes belonged to the feared and since deceased Mexican cartel leader Arturo Beltrán Leyva, showing just how far the tentacles of the Venezuelan drug empire spread across the hemisphere.

Alcalá was put behind bars, in part, thanks to testimony from people like Roberto Perdigon, who worked with Walid Makled, whom federal prosecutors once referred to as “one of the world’s most significant narcotics kingpins.” Perdigon testified in 2024 before U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein — the same jurist now overseeing the Maduro case — that he was helping the U.S. government following a promise from the Drug Enforcement Administration that he wouldn’t be deported because his immigration court case was put on hold.

“I was needed to cooperate with them,” Perdigon said then.

Prosecutors also relied on testimony from Jorge Abasta León, who witnessed the way the highest echelons of the Venezuelan government would protect drug traffickers while he was a police officer in the state of Yaracuy — that is, until he lost his job after cops under his command murdered and burned three people.

He testified in court that the DEA was paying him $3,000 a month and had helped him and two immediate family members get “deferred action” on their immigration case, allowing them to stay.

In Alcalá’s case, prosecutors also relied on testimony from Antonio Guillermo Arvelaiz Idler, a drug trafficker who survived an assassination attempt from his angered uncle — and tried to return the favor — then laundered what he claimed was nearly $100 million in China, all before turning into an informant for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, during which he ran a currency-exchange fraud scheme that stole $1.3 million by duping investors. Two years ago, he told Judge Hellerstein that he had a pending asylum application he hoped would keep him in the United States.

Tess Cohen, who for a time represented the domestic spy chief Carvajal but is no longer involved in his defense, stressed that the current case against Maduro follows a long chain of similar cases that rely heavily on questionable witnesses — who have the worst kinds of credibility issues. They’re murderers, torturers and have once partnered with known terrorists.

“These cases are often successful, but there are to me real concerns about whether we can truly rely on desperate people searching for a way to get free,” she told NOTUS. “These cases are almost entirely based on uncorroborated informant testimony. These informants are typically people who’ve been charged and pled guilty to extremely significant crimes where they’d spend life in prison if they didn’t have information that was useful to the United States government.”

“A lot of times you’re relying exclusively on confidential informants. These aren’t cases where the CIA intelligence officer or DEA agent sat in the room undercover and saw a meeting that’s relevant, or intercepted drugs, or even intercepted electronics,” she said.