#nicolas-maduro

#nicolas-maduro

The superseding indictment alleges that Maduro and other top Venezuelan public officials have, for the past two decades, worked closely with international drug trafficking organizations to ship illicit drugs into the US while enriching themselves. The validity of the US complaint against Maduro and wife Cilia Flores is likely to be challenged in federal court in the New York on Monday over whether, as a foreign head of state, he can be put on trial in the US.

Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, who dined on steak and lived in a palace as his country starved, is now in "hell on Earth'' in a Brooklyn jail - and machine-gun-toting authorities are making sure he stays there. Maduro, 63, and his 69-year-old fellow-inmate wife Cilia were thrown into separate cells in solitary confinement away from the general population at the infamous federal Metropolitan Detention Center since their extraordinary capture by elite US forces in Caracas early Saturday.

From humble beginnings in a working-class Caracas neighbourhood to an authoritarian presidency, here is a look at Maduro's life. Nicolas Maduro, 63, kept an iron grip on power for over a decade in Venezuela. It ended abruptly on Saturday, January 3, when United States forces abducted him and his wife, First Lady Cilia Flores, removing them from the country. The two are ostensibly to be tried in a US court on drug- and weapons-related charges. Who is Maduro? How did he come to lead Venezuela?