Maduro pleads not guilty in first US court hearing

What happened

Deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro Monday pleaded not guilty to cocaine trafficking and narco-terrorism conspiracy in a Manhattan courtroom, striking a defiant tone in his first public appearance since the Trump administration seized him and his wife from Caracas in a U.S. military raid. His wife, Cilia Flores, also pleaded not guilty.

Maduro told the court through a translator that he was “kidnapped” and is a “decent man, the constitutional president of my country.” He called himself a “prisoner of war” while leaving the courtroom.

Who said what

Maduro’s brief arraignment “kicked off a nearly unprecedented legal battle” over trying a foreign head of state in an American court, said The Wall Street Journal. Maduro’s lawyer, Barry Pollack, told the court he planned to contest the legality of the “military abduction” of a “head of a sovereign state.” But “Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega unsuccessfully tried the same immunity defense after the U.S. captured him in a similar military invasion in 1990,” The Associated Press said.

As “Maduro declared his innocence in New York,” his former vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, was being sworn in as interim president and “moving to consolidate power,” The Washington Post said. Trump and his aides have “offered mixed signals” on what they think “lies ahead for Venezuela,” but “much of the leftist power structure that rules Venezuela appeared to be publicly backing Rodríguez.”

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What next?

Maduro’s next court hearing is scheduled for March 17. If federal prosecutors can prove “to the satisfaction of a New York jury” that he helped funnel cocaine to the U.S., “Maduro will be convicted,” the Post said in an editorial. But “just five weeks ago, Trump pardoned the former president of Honduras” for similar cocaine trafficking crimes, and “it wouldn’t be surprising if Trump eventually cuts a deal with Maduro to cut short what promises to be a protracted U.S. legal process.”