By comparison, the only glimpse of Flores before her court appearance on Monday was as she touched down in America over the weekend, when she was escorted, stony-faced, through a secure flight terminal by armed guards.
Indeed, to the wider world she is still largely unknown. But at home, Venezuela’s first lady is considered a power behind the throne. So who exactly is she, and how is she connected to the drug charges against her husband?
First and foremost, in the nomenklatura of Venezuelan socialism, Flores is not actually referred to as “first lady”. When Maduro took power in 2013, he declared her “first combatant” instead, arguing that first lady was an “aristocratic concept”.
President Nicolás Maduro accompanied by first lady Cilia Flores greets supporters during an event in 2024.Credit: AP
The pair, by all accounts, are as devoted to the socialist cause as to each other, having met in the early 1990s when both were supporters of Hugo Chávez, the ex-military officer who would go on to become Venezuela’s firebrand socialist leader.
At the time, Chávez was in jail for his role in a failed 1992 military coup. Flores was a young lawyer leading his defence team, while Maduro – a former bus driver – was a grassroots militant campaigning for his release. Flores, who is six years older than Maduro, first fell for him when she heard him speaking at a supporters’ meeting.
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“He spoke, and I just stared at him,” she told the opening episode of her husband’s presidential podcast in 2023. “I said: ‘How intelligent’.”
Latina Lady Macbeth
That was not a judgment shared by many Venezuelans, who regard Maduro as having neither the brains nor the charisma of Chávez, the country’s ruler from 1999 until he died in 2013, having anointed Maduro as his successor.
But Flores has stuck by her man ever since, advising him behind the scenes and helping fend off challenges from within his own ranks. Many regard her as a Latina Lady Macbeth, driving her husband’s ambition and perhaps encouraging him to cling to power come what may.
“To her detractors, she is seen as part of a deeply corrupt, human rights-abusing and brutal government,” Christopher Sabatini, a senior fellow at Chatham House’s Latin America program, told the BBC.
“But like any good power behind the throne, you really didn’t see her hand that much, so no one really knew how powerful she was.”
Born in Tinaquillo in central Venezuela, Flores grew up in working-class neighbourhoods of the capital, Caracas, and later studied labour and criminal law. In the macho, rough-and-tumble world of her country’s politics, defending would-be coup-mongers carried its own risks, and her work for “El Comandante”, as Chávez became known, won her respect.
“She was Commander Chávez’s lawyer and, well, being Commander Chávez’s lawyer in prison… tough,” Maduro once recalled. “I met her during those years of struggle and then, well, she caught my eye.”
While both had children from previous relationships, the pair are believed to have started quietly dating in the 1990s, with Flores also pursuing her own political career. She became a member of the National Assembly in 2000 and, in 2006, became the first woman to serve as the body’s president, succeeding Maduro, who became Chávez’ foreign minister. That year, Chávez became the darling of the international Left after calling then US President George W. Bush a meddling, imperialist “devil” at the UN General Assembly.
Drug-trafficking nephews
During Flores’ time in office, she showed signs of the corrupt authoritarianism that came to symbolise the Chávez regime. She banned journalists from entering the legislative chamber and hired dozens of relatives as government employees. Her rise continued regardless, with Chávez appointing her attorney general in 2012.
When Maduro inherited Chávez’ throne the following year, he and Flores finally married. Since then, she has assumed a more backseat role. Despite her “first combatant” title, her public profile has been more akin to that of a traditional first lady, trailing dutifully by her husband’s side and dancing on stage with him after the 2024 presidential elections, which Maduro is widely accused of rigging.
She also starred in her own schmaltzy TV show, With Cilia in the Family, touring hospitals and aged care homes while delivering homilies about Venezuelan socialism. It is considered far less watchable than Aló Presidente, the late Chávez’ weekly chat show, where he would crack jokes, sing songs and make policy on the hoof.
However, analysts say that behind the scenes Flores has used her legal expertise to load Venezuela’s legal system in the regime’s favour, packing the judiciary with loyalists. In 2018, she herself was sanctioned by the US, which accused her of helping “solidify” her husband’s “authoritarian rule”.
As with her husband, the full details of the drug allegations against her have yet to be unveiled. But her wholesome family image certainly suffered a blow in 2015, when two of her nephews were arrested on drug-trafficking charges by undercover US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents in Haiti.
The two – Efraín Antonio Campos Flores and his cousin, Francisco Flores de Freitas – arrived in Haiti on a private jet flown by Venezuelan military personnel, with 800 kilograms of cocaine on board.
While Flores denounced their arrests as “a kidnapping”, the pair were sentenced to 18 years by a New York court after being convicted of conspiracy to smuggle. They were released in 2022 as part of a prisoner exchange between Venezuela and the US during president Joe Biden’s administration.
‘Don’t mess with Cilia’
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Some of the charges against Flores apparently arise from the operation against her nephews, who allegedly planned to use their drug-trafficking proceeds to fund a 2015 run for office. Her successful campaign for a seat in the National Assembly came amid complaints that María Corina Machado – now the country’s main opposition leader – had been illegally barred from the elections.
The indictment against her also alleges that, in 2007, she “accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to broker a meeting between a large-scale drug trafficker and the director of Venezuela’s national anti-drug office, Néstor Reverol Torres”. Torres, currently a minister of the economy in the Maduro government, was first accused of drug trafficking by the US in 2016.
US prosecutors accuse Maduro of being the head of the Cartel of the Suns, a coalition of senior generals who took millions of dollars in bribes from Colombian cocaine traffickers in exchange for allowing them to smuggle drugs through Venezuela to the US and Europe. The cartel’s name refers to the gold suns worn on Venezuelan generals’ epaulettes.
Maduro and Flores, along with his son and other senior government officials, are also charged with gun offences and with collaborating with traffickers that Washington considers terrorist organisations, including the Sinaloa cartel, based in Mexico, and the Venezuelan street gang, Tren de Aragua.
Maduro has long protested both his own innocence and that of his wife, claiming they are the victims of American smears. When sanctions were imposed against her in 2018, he declared: “Don’t mess with Cilia… her only crime is being my wife.”
That, in Washington’s eyes, may clearly be crime enough.
The Telegraph, London
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