Who is Cilia Flores, Venezuela’s ‘first combatant’?

In the early hours of January 3, the United States’ Delta Force abducted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, from the presidential residence in the capital, Caracas.

The operation, which was paired with attacks on the Venezuelan capital that killed at least 40 people, according to Venezuelan officials, extracted the country’s first couple to New York in the US, where they are expected to be put on trial as early as Monday.

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But who is Cilia Flores, Venezuela’s so-called “first combatant”?

Early life

Flores, 69, was born on October 15, 1956, in Tinaquillo in central Venezuela. She grew up in areas of western Caracas that CNN has described as “working-class neighbourhoods”.

She graduated from Universidad Santa Maria in Caracas as a lawyer specialising in labour and criminal law. Her rise to prominence came when she led the team that provided legal assistance to military leader Hugo Chavez in 1992, after he attempted to overthrow then-Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez.

Flores reportedly helped secure Chavez’s release from prison in 1994, setting up his eventual successful run for president in 1999.

She would become an important member of the Chavismo movement, named for Chavez. It was through the Chavismo movement that she met her future husband, Maduro, who is 63 and calls her “Cilita”. The two have been partners for more than three decades.

She has three children from a previous marriage.

Political career

Flores’s rise to fame came not solely through her position as Maduro’s partner. In fact, she built her own political standing before becoming Venezuela’s “first combatant”, the Chavismo term used instead of “first lady”.

In 1999, Chavez was elected president. A year later, in 2000, Flores was elected to Venezuela’s National Assembly, the federal legislature, representing Cojedes, her home state.

She was re-elected in 2005, and in 2006, she succeeded Maduro to become the first woman to preside over Venezuela’s parliament.

In 2009, Flores became the second vice president of Chavez’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela, and in 2012, Chavez appointed her attorney general.

After the death of Chavez in 2013, Maduro succeeded him by winning an election against opposition candidate Henrique Capriles. In July 2013, Maduro and Flores married after more than two decades together.

Her new position as “first combatant” saw Flores remove herself from the limelight and begin to work behind the scenes.

However, in 2017, she returned to politics after she was elected to the Constituent Assembly, a group that was elected to draft a new Venezuelan constitution. In 2021, she was elected once again to the National Assembly.

At the time of her abduction, she was still serving as a deputy in the National Assembly.

Inside Venezuela, she has been accused of nepotism by appointing close family members to important political positions.

Capture and charges

Flores’s role as part of Maduro’s inner circle has brought international repercussions as well. She was sanctioned by the US and Canadian authorities in 2018 after the Organization of American States said the Maduro government had committed crimes against humanity.

After her abduction on Saturday, she is expected to appear with Maduro in a New York court, possibly as early as Monday. While Maduro was seen exiting a plane in the US, Flores was not.

She has been indicted in New York’s Southern District, with US Attorney General Pam Bondi issuing her charges that mirror those against Maduro, including “Narco-Terrorism Conspiracy, Cocaine Importation Conspiracy, Possession of Machineguns and Destructive Devices, and Conspiracy to Possess Machineguns and Destructive Devices against the United States”, according to a post on X by Bondi.

As for Flores, she is “accused of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in 2007 to arrange a meeting between ‘a large-scale drug trafficker’ and the director of Venezuela’s National Anti-Drug Office”, according to the newspaper The Guardian.

Flores’s nephews were previously arrested in the US and, in 2017, were sentenced to 18 years in prison for conspiring to traffic cocaine into the US. They were released in 2022 as part of a prison swap with Venezuela for seven imprisoned US citizens.

The US claims that Flores’s nephews were caught on recordings that prove they intended to send hundreds of kilograms of cocaine to the US from Maduro’s presidential hangar in Venezuela.

The US has attacked boats carrying Venezuelan nationals at least 30 times in recent months, killing more than 100 people.

It claims the boats were carrying drug smugglers, even though the Trump administration has not provided public evidence that there were drugs on board the boats, that they were US-bound, or that the victims of the attacks belonged to banned organisations, despite US claims.