Before pleading “not guilty” at her first court hearing after she and her husband, Nicolás Maduro, were captured by US special forces, Cilia Flores made a point of adding, in Spanish: “I am first lady of the Republic of Venezuela.”
But Maduro himself and others close to the couple agree that she was always far more than that. Before her rendition to New York, Flores wielded power comparable with – and at times greater than – that of other figures from the regime, including Delcy Rodríguez, the former vice-president who is now the country’s acting leader.
Maduro used to say that Flores was not the first lady but the “first combatant”, reflecting the frontline role she occupied within the regime.
The two, who met in a Venezuelan prison while visiting their political mentor Hugo Chávez in the 1990s, are now being held in a New York jail and face US charges of “narco-terrorism” and drug trafficking.
“Flores is Maduro’s wife, first and foremost, but really more: she’s his key partner, one of his closest confidants and, in large part, helped his rise into politics,” said Eva Golinger, a US lawyer and writer who met the couple several times while acting as an adviser to Chávez – she would later break with him and write The Chávez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela.
“Flores was more the brains, and Maduro was more the brawn – not to downplay his abilities as a very successful political operator in his own right – but she has been his pillar of support throughout everything,” added Golinger.
When they met, Maduro was a bus driver and union leader, while Flores, six years his senior, was a lawyer who was part of the legal team seeking to free Chávez, then a lieutenant colonel, who had been jailed for his part in an attempted coup against Carlos Andrés Pérez, the president, in 1992.
After Chávez was released, the couple threw themselves fully into the political movement that would later become known as Chavismo.
When Chávez first came to power in 1999, they were rewarded with senior posts and steadily expanded their political influence. Maduro would later reach the highest office, but Flores was not far behind: in 2006, she became the first woman to serve as president of the national assembly, a period during which she appointed nearly 40 relatives to public posts. When confronted with the findings, she called reporters “mercenaries” and barred the press from covering congress.
After nearly two decades together, they married in 2013, shortly after Maduro was sworn in following the death of Chávez. They both have children from previous relationships, including Nicolás Maduro Guerra, known as “Nicolasito,” who has also been indicted in the US but was not captured and remains in Venezuela.
Described as “introverted, shy, very soft-spoken and with a gentle appearance” by Golinger, Flores was nonetheless a “very astute political operator” under her husband’s oppressive regime, which carried out more than 20,000 extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances and torture, jailed thousands of political opponents, and whose corruption and economic mismanagement – compounded by US sanctions – triggered the largest humanitarian migration crisis from a country not at war, forcing about 8 million people to flee.
“She may not have been the face of the government, but she certainly had all the influence behind. I believe he would consult her on everything,” she added.
As an experienced lawyer, Flores took particular control over the judiciary, said Casto Ocando, a Venezuelan investigative journalist based in the US.
“She was very actively involved in the process of appointing judges and prosecutors, a crucial area, because they replaced them to install others loyal to the revolution,” added Ocando.
He said that while Flores was highly influential, it is difficult to say whether she ranked as a clear “No 2” – a position many instead attribute to the interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, or to the current acting president, Rodríguez.
“The regime is not homogeneous, but made up of factions that each controlled parts of power. Maduro was the president, but he did not necessarily control all power, even though the strongest faction was the one formed by him and his wife,” said Ocando.
In the indictment, US prosecutors allege that the presidential couple benefited from “large-scale drug trafficking” that filled the “pockets of Venezuelan officials and their families, while also benefiting violent narco-terrorists who operate with impunity on Venezuelan soil and who help produce, protect and transport tonnes of cocaine to the US”.
Prosecutors allege that the couple were part of the Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns), which the US treats as a criminal organisation, but which security analysts say is not a group in itself, rather a dramatised description of how Maduro has allowed criminal networks – including senior military figures – to exploit illegal industries such as cocaine smuggling.
The document alleges that Flores accepted “hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes” to broker a meeting in 2007 between a “large-scale drug trafficker” and the then head of Venezuela’s anti-narcotics agency. According to prosecutors, the parties agreed on a monthly bribe plus $100,000 to guarantee safe passage for each cocaine flight, “a portion of which was then paid to Flores”.
The indictment also cites a 2015 episode in which two of her nephews were caught by US agents planning to ship “multi-hundred-kilogram cocaine loads” from the presidential hangar of a Venezuelan airport, allegedly with the aim of raising $20m to finance Flores’s congressional campaign at the time. Both nephews were convicted in the US in 2016.
Flores and Maduro deny all the allegations. At Monday’s hearing, her lawyer, Mark Donnelly, said she had suffered “significant injuries” during the military operation that led to her capture and that he believed she may have a fracture or a serious back injury, requiring a complete medical examination.
“I’m sure that Maduro and Flores did not expect this,” said Golinger. “The hearing may have been the last day they ever saw each other – and I can imagine how hard that must have hit them after spending their entire lives together.”
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
