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It's been more than a week since the U.S. seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife and took them to New York to face trial. The Justice Department says Maduro played a central role in a conspiracy to traffic cocaine for decades. NPR's Ryan Lucas reports on the challenges for prosecutors in trying to prove those allegations.
RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: The Justice Department's case against Nicolás Maduro can be boiled down to something like this. For more than 20 years, Maduro and other top Venezuelan officials allegedly worked hand in hand with drug cartels to ship tons of cocaine into the United States. Maduro has pleaded not guilty, and there's still a long road ahead. But ultimately, if he goes on trial, it will fall to prosecutors to take the disparate threads of what they say is a sprawling drug trafficking conspiracy and have it make sense for a jury. A complex drug case like this presents its own particular challenges for prosecutors, including the intense spotlight that comes with such a high-profile prosecution.
ADAM FELS: Obviously, you've got a lot of pressure because there's obviously been an enormous amount of time, money, blood, treasure, sweat invested in bringing some of these individuals to trial.
LUCAS: Adam Fels was one of the lead prosecutors in the trial of Mexico's Sinaloa cartel leader, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, who was convicted in 2019 and sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years. Fels, who is now in private practice, says part of the pressure stems from the challenge of marshaling all of the evidence that investigators have collected over the years. In the Maduro case, that means going through the material directly tied to him, but also the mountains of information gathered in other federal cases brought against high-level Venezuelan officials over the past 15-odd years.
FELS: They will absolutely go through everything because it's going to take a little time for this trial to move forward. And so there may be witnesses they don't even know about at this point that they're going to try to use their law enforcement partners to try to locate.
LUCAS: The passage of time presents another challenge for witnesses who may be asked to testify about a specific meeting or conversation that took place more than a decade ago.
FELS: It's well-known people's memories fade over time, and so that's obviously a large concern. And that's where some evidence, physical evidence, can really come into play.
LUCAS: Physical evidence, Fels says, can go a long way to help corroborate witness testimony that dates back in time. Then there is the nature of the witnesses themselves and their credibility, since in a sprawling multidecade narcotrafficking case, witnesses usually have a background in drug trafficking or violence, says Gina Parlovecchio, who was another lead prosecutor in the El Chapo trial.
GINA PARLOVECCHIO: So of course, you're always concerned that the jury is going to be turned off by the conduct that these types of individuals have engaged in.
LUCAS: In Maduro's case, prosecutors allege a drug conspiracy that dates back to 1999 involving other senior Venezuelan officials, Maduro's wife, as well as leaders of drug-trafficking organizations. Parlovecchio, who's now in private practice, says the vast arc of time involved presents its own complications when trying to tell a straightforward story to a jury.
PARLOVECCHIO: I think, you know, being able to knit together different scenes, if you will, or incidents that happen and sort of interspersed over, you know, multiple decades is always a little bit challenging, and showing the defendant's ongoing engagement in the conspiracy.
LUCAS: Eventually, prosecutors will have to stitch those scenes together for a jury if, down the road, the case against Maduro goes to trial.
Ryan Lucas, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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