It was almost six years ago — during the COVID-19 pandemic — that then-Attorney General Bill Barr called a “virtual press conference” to announce that the Justice Department was taking action against Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela.

“Today, I am here to talk about the former Maduro regime and its direct participation in narco-terrorism, corruption, money laundering, and drug trafficking,” Barr said on March 26, 2020.

“As you will hear, the Department of Justice is announcing the unsealing of a superseding indictment filed in the Southern District of New York against four defendants, including Nicolas Maduro,” said Barr.

“The indictment of Nicolas Maduro and his co-defendants alleges a conspiracy involving an extremely violent terrorist organization known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia — or FARC — in an effort to flood the United States with cocaine,” Barr said.

“There is an area on the border of Columbia, Norte de Santander, which is one of the primary cocaine producing areas remaining in Columbia,” explained Barr. “FARC gets this cocaine over into Venezuela and then is given safe haven by the regime to fly this cocaine from an area called Zulia, near Lake Maracaibo, up into Central America. Since 2016, this air bridge has been established and has grown fivefold in just those four years. In addition, the regime is allowing these drug traffickers to take drugs by a maritime route in the Caribbean. We estimate somewhere between 200 and 250 metric tons of cocaine are shipped out of Venezuela by these routes per year.

“Those 250 tons,” said Barr, “equate to 30 million lethal doses.”

The indictment filed in 2020 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York alleged: “From at least in or about 1999, up to and including in or about 2020, NICOLAS MADURO MOROS … participated in a corrupt and violent narco-terrorism conspiracy between the Venezuelan Cartel de Los Soles and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Columbia (‘FARC’).”

In 2020, the State Department offered a reward “of up to $15 million for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of Maduro.”

Eight months after Barr’s Justice Department filed its indictment against Maduro, Joe Biden was elected president of the United States.

On Jan. 10, 2025, ten days before Donald Trump would be sworn into a second term, Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a statement condemning Maduro for fraudulently taking a third term as Venezuela’s president.

Blinken then announced that the Biden administration was increasing the reward being offered on Maduro.

“In solidarity with the Venezuelan people, the U.S. government and our partners around the world are taking action today,” said Blinken. “The Department of State is increasing the reward offers to up to $25 million each for information leading to the arrests and/or convictions of Nicolas Maduro and Maduro’s Minister of the Interior Diosdado Cabello. The Department of State is also adding a new reward offer of up to $15 million for Maduro’s Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez.

“These three reward offers,” said Blinken, “stem from criminal narcotrafficking indictments announced in March 2020.”

Last August, the Trump State Department increased the reward for “information leading to the arrest and/or conviction” of Maduro to $50 million.

What impact has cocaine trafficking had on the United States in recent years? “The number of overdose deaths involving cocaine increased from 4,681 in 2011 to 29,449 in 2023,” said the Aug. 28 edition of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. In just a dozen years, the United States saw a six-fold increase in fatal cocaine overdoses.

According to annual data published by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, the United States experienced a total of 172,960 overdose deaths from cocaine from 2013 — the year Maduro became the president of Venezuela — through 2023. That is almost three times the 58,220 military fatalities that, according to the National Archives, the United States suffered in the Vietnam War.

U.S. military forces on Jan. 3 did not suffer any casualties while successfully carrying out an operation to capture Maduro and return him to the United States to stand trial.

That same day, Attorney General Pam Bondi released an updated indictment of Maduro that included his wife.

The United States does not need to occupy Venezuela or try to create a free democracy there. But Maduro deserves to stand trial in this country for the horrendous crimes he has allegedly committed.