United States Seizes Maduro's Plane in the Dominican Republic

The United States has seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro's plane in the Dominican Republic. According to CNN International, the US authorities determined that its acquisition violated the country's sanctions and the aircraft was taken to the state of Florida.

 

‘Seizing the aircraft of a foreign head of state is unprecedented in criminal matters. We are sending a clear message here that no one is above the law, no one is above the reach of US sanctions,’ a US official told CNN. 

In a statement, the US Attorney General, Merrick Garland, confirmed that ‘the Department of Justice has seized an aircraft’ that was ‘illegally purchased for 13 million dollars [around 11 million euros] through a front company and smuggled out of the United States for use by Nicolás Maduro and his cronies’.

According to the Justice Department, the plane - a Dassault Falcon 900EX - was bought from a company in Florida and illegally exported in April 2023 from the United States to Venezuela via the Caribbean.

Since then it has been used to fly ‘almost exclusively to and from a military base in Venezuela’ for Maduro's international trips.

According to CNN, the US authorities worked closely with the Dominican Republic, which notified Venezuela of the seizure.

On 22 August, Venezuela's chavista-controlled Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ) validated Maduro's re-election to a third six-year presidential term in the 28 July elections - a validation of victory rejected by numerous countries that urged the Venezuelan authorities to release the detailed election results.

After the elections, Nicolás Maduro, 61, was proclaimed the winner of the presidential elections with 52 per cent of the vote by the National Electoral Council (CNE), which, however, did not release the minutes of the polling stations, claiming to be the victim of hacking.

This argument was then considered not credible by the opposition and many observers, who saw it as a manoeuvre by the government to avoid having to present the exact vote count.

The announcement of the Socialist President's re-election in the July ballot triggered spontaneous demonstrations, which were violently repressed. The protests caused at least 27 deaths and 192 injuries and 2,400 people were arrested, according to official sources.

According to the opposition, which made public the voting records obtained thanks to its scrutineers, its candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, won the elections with more than 60 per cent of the vote.

Without showing them, the TSJ said on 22 August that it had verified the voting records given to it by the government, as well as the veracity of the cyber-attack on the CNE.

The United States and ten Latin American countries rejected the TSJ's validation of the election results in a joint statement that day, arguing that Maduro's presidential victory was announced ‘on the basis of a partial results report, issued orally, with figures that showed mathematical impossibilities and without presenting the results separately’.