NEW YORK: U.S. prosecutors unsealed indictments Monday against two high-ranking Venezuelan officials for conspiring to smuggle cocaine into the U.S., in the latest setback for the embattled government of President Nicolás Maduro.
Prosecutors at the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn unsealed indictments against Gen. Néstor Reverol, the former head of the country’s National Guard and its antidrug agency, and Gen. Edylberto Molina, who was second-in-command to Gen. Reverol at the antidrug agency.
The two men were in charge of the agency—known as the National Anti-Drug Office, an agency prosecutors compared to the Drug Enforcement Administration—between 2008 and 2010, the indictment said. It charged that the two co-conspirators helped facilitate shipments of cocaine from Colombia through Venezuela, up through Mexico and Central America and eventually to the U.S.
Gen. Molina now serves as Venezuela’s military attaché in Germany. Gen. Reverol stepped down recently as head of the National Guard and hasn’t yet been reassigned.
The developments came as electoral authorities in Venezuela on Monday said the opposition had completed the latest step in its drive to trigger a recall referendum to depose Mr. Maduro, whom opponents accuse of mismanaging an economy that is imploding.
Prosecutors and agents in Miami, New York, Washington and other jurisdictions have been conducting wide-ranging investigations of several Venezuelan officials for alleged drug trafficking and money laundering, according to officials involved with the investigations. Last November, two nephews of Venezuela’s powerful first lady, Cilia Flores, and Mr. Maduro, were arrested in Haiti and brought to New York where they face charges of conspiring to import 800 kilograms of cocaine to the U.S. The two, who have pleaded not guilty, are awaiting trial in Manhattan.
Spokesmen for the National Guard and Venezuela’s defense and communication ministries didn’t immediately respond to request for comment on Monday. The Venezuelan embassy in Berlin was also unavailable to comment immediately. In the past, the government has denied drug-related accusations against Gen. Reverol and has called them a U.S.-sponsored plot to destabilize the country’s populist government.
The indictments were dated Jan. 2015 but only unsealed Monday. By unsealing them, U.S. authorities effectively were acknowledging that they were unlikely to be able to arrest the defendants in the foreseeable future, according to former prosecutors, owing to the government’s opposition and a lack of an extradition treaty between the two countries.
The investigations are a response to an explosion of drug trafficking in this oil-rich country, which is in the middle of a political crisis and an economic meltdown. U.S. officials and analysts say the sharp increase of drug trafficking in Venezuela has taken place as traffickers moved operations out of Colombia where they were under heavy pressure from the government, to Venezuela. There, U.S. officials say, the traffickers found a government and military eager to permit and ultimately control cocaine smuggling throughout the country.
In 2013, about 131 tons of cocaine, about half the cocaine produced in Colombia, moved through Venezuela that year before being transported to the U.S. and Europe, according to U.S. estimates.
U.S. Attorney Robert Capers said on Monday that the indictment, unsealed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, was part of the struggle against “the ability of drug cartels to infiltrate and corrupt the highest echelons of government and law enforcement.”
“The shipments exported from Venezuela typically consisted of hundreds of kilograms of cocaine, sometimes exceeding a thousand kilograms in one shipment,” the indictment said.
The indictment said that Gen. Reverol and Gen. Molina were paid off by drug traffickers for alerting the criminals to drug raids “so that the narcotics traffickers could change the storage locations of narcotics or alter transportation routes.” The two also “hindered ongoing narcotics investigations” and arranged for the release of detained drug traffickers, among other things, the indictment said.
Last year, Gen. Reverol was named as one of the Venezuelan officials being investigated by the U.S. in a front-page article in The Wall Street Journal.
Venezuela’s armed forces and particularly the National Guard, are enmeshed in the drug trade, U.S. officials and analysts say.
In 2013, two other National Guard officers were indicted in the Eastern District of New York for using official government vehicles to transport more than 7 metric tons of cocaine from Colombia to airports and seaports in Venezuela and eventually, to the U.S., prosecutors said in a statement. The two have been detained by Venezuelan authorities, according to Venezuelan press accounts.
In 2014, Gen. Hugo Carvajal, the former head of Venezuelan military intelligence, was briefly detained on the Dutch Caribbean island of Aruba on a U.S. warrant for drug trafficking. Gen. Carvajal, who denied the allegations, claimed diplomatic immunity and was eventually released to Venezuela. He is now a congressman in the country’s national assembly.
In 2010, U.S. prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed an indictment of Walid Makled, a Venezuelan who boasted of having 40 generals in his payroll. Mr. Makled was later extradited to Venezuela from Colombia where he is currently serving a prison term for drug trafficking.
