Ilektra A. | Red Phoenix Correspondent | Oregon–

In the early morning hours of Jan. 3, 2026, the United States carried out a large-scale military incursion into the territory of the sovereign nation of Venezuela. Over 100 USAF planes conducted bombing runs in several locations throughout the country, most notably in the capital city of Caracas, where a joint task force comprised of US Army Special Forces and the DEA invaded the home of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, murdering his security detail, and abducting him and his wife, Cilia Flores. After the dust had settled, the death toll had risen higher than 100, including 32 Cuban soldiers and military officers who were stationed in the country to help protect its people following heightened US military aggression. 

The Trump regime claimed it lawfully arrested Maduro and Flores as ‘narcoterrorist fugitives’, responsible for “coordinating a widescale drug trafficking operation for the purpose of importing narcotics into the United States” to finance their own supposedly ‘illegitimate regime’. The US government has presented absolutely zero concrete evidence to back up these blatantly false charges against President Maduro and First Combatant Flores, and has even overtly admitted that the real reason they abducted the pair is because they stood in the way of obtaining Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, the largest on the planet. 

Much of the coverage of this heinous and cowardly act of violence and aggression towards the people of Venezuela and their legitimately elected government focuses on President Maduro himself, a man who has been in the US-NATO imperialist bloc’s crosshairs since he succeeded the late Hugo Chávez as President in 2013. But not very much attention has been given to his wife, First Combatant Cilia Flores, who has her own lengthy and inspiring professional and political background. So, who is she, where did she come from, what drove her into political life, and what, despite the lies and false accusations of ‘corruption’ and ‘nepotism’ levied towards her, motivated her work in the past and continues to motivate her to this day?

Early life and political career

Cilia Flores was born on Oct. 15, 1956 in the rural farming town of Tinaquilo, Venezuela. She grew up in a poor, working-class neighborhood in western Caracas, and despite coming from modest means, went on to attend Universidad Santa Maria in Caracas, graduating with a degree in criminal and labor law. 

After future President Hugo Chávez’s unsuccessful 1992 coup attempt against then-President Carlos Andres Perez (who himself would be impeached for embezzling government funds a year later), Flores led Chávez’s legal defense team and ultimately secured his release from prison in 1994, paving the way for his election as President in 1999. In the wake of Chávez’s release from prison, Flores became involved with the Chavista movement, which sought to unfetter Venezuela from the shackles of US imperialist domination and alleviate the economic hardship experienced by working class Venezuelans in the wake of the country’s 1980s financial crisis. It was during this period of time that she met her future husband, Nicolás Maduro Moros, who was himself a working-class man involved in the progressive, anti-imperialist social movement that would go on to be called the Bolivarian Revolution, (its namesake comes from Simón Bolívar, an early 19th century anti-colonial revolutionary who played a key role in liberating Venezuela and several other South American countries from Spanish rule.) 

In 2000, Flores was elected as a Deputy in the Venezuelan National Assembly, representing her home state of Cojedes. Shortly after, she was appointed to serve as Chair of the Political Command of the Bolivarian Revolution, an organization tasked with carrying out the bulk of Hugo Chávez’s progressive social welfare policies, including the nationalization of the country’s oil industry in order to use the wealth it generated to fund social programs for the working poor, such as free healthcare, food distribution, education, and the construction of tens of thousands of new affordable housing units. Compared to the demagogic politicians of the United States, she is an outstanding representative of the working people and their interests, instead of the monopolies. She was subsequently reelected to the National Assembly in 2005, and a year later became the first woman in Venezuela’s history appointed to serve as President of the National Assembly, a position she filled from 2006 to 2011. During her tenure, Flores was also elected to be the second President of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), and was appointed by Chávez to be Venezuela’s Attorney General in 2012.

After Hugo Chávez’s untimely passing from cancer in 2013, Nicolás Maduro was elected by the people of Venezuela to succeed him as President, and he and Flores married after being partnered for over two decades, at which point she became Venezuela’s ‘First Combatant’, a fitting title given her role in carrying out the tasks of the Bolivarian Revolution. In 2015, she was again elected as a Deputy in the National Assembly, asserting she would continue to use her seat to “defend the social rights of citizens and the achievements of the Bolivarian Revolution.” She was reelected for the fourth time in 2021, and was still serving as a National Assembly member at the time of her abduction on January 3, 2026.

False accusations and charges

In 2018, Cilia Flores was sanctioned by the United States government after it accused her of complicity in the Maduro government’s supposed ‘crimes against humanity’, of which it had zero concrete evidence. Then-US Secretary of the Treasury Steve T. Mnuchin was quoted as saying “President Maduro relies on his inner circle to maintain his grip on power, as his regime systematically plunders what remains of Venezuela’s wealth.” What Secretary Mnuchin was referring to, of course, is that the Bolivarian Republic uses the oil wealth of the country to feed its people and not line the pockets of US imperialists, militarists and oil-baron capitalists.

What’s more, Flores has also been accused by some of ‘nepotism’ and ‘corruption’, since at one point, several government positions were staffed by relatives of hers. In a 2013 interview with Spanish periodical La Vanguardia, she defended the presence of her family members in the government, stating that her “family got in based on their own merits… I am proud of them, and I will defend their work as many times as necessary,” and affirming that the supposed number of her family members that were in government positions was highly exaggerated as part of a blackmail campaign by right-wing domestic opposition to Flores and PSUV.

The Trump regime’s stated rationale for abducting First Combatant Flores and President Maduro is that they are supposedly fugitives from justice and are responsible for trafficking “colossal amounts of deadly and illicit drugs” into the United States, leading to “countless Americans” dying from drug overdoses. At no point has the regime and its imperialist mouthpieces in the bourgeois media offered so much as a shred of concrete evidence to back up these blatantly false accusations, but that unfortunately didn’t prevent the US military from conducting targeted airstrikes on Venezuelan and Colombian fishing boats over 30 separate times, killing over 100 people, before going on to do even further harm to the people of Venezuela by invading their country, killing another 100+ people, and kidnapping President Maduro and First Combatant Flores in the dead of night amidst a manufactured blackout. 

At the time of writing, Maduro and Flores are still being illegally imprisoned at Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) Brooklyn, a federal jail in New York with a “documented history of power outages, staffing shortages and detainee complaints.” Flores’ lawyer said she sustained “significant injuries” during her capture by US forces and is in need of an X-ray and medical evaluation because she may have a fractured rib. During her first court appearance along with her husband on Jan. 5, she was seen with several bandages on her face. This is what they receive by the capitalists for their services to the Venezuelan people! The First Couple’s next court appearance is scheduled for March 17.

The American Party of Labor in no uncertain terms condemns to the fullest degree the unforgivable, hostile acts perpetrated against the people of Venezuela by the Trump regime on Jan. 3, including the violent military incursion into the Bolivarian Republic leading to the deaths of over 100 civilians and military personnel, and the illegal abduction and detention of President Maduro and First Combatant Flores based on patent lies and false charges of ‘narcoterrorism’ without the smallest shred of solid proof.

The APL recognizes the real reason for these actions as nothing short of yet another attempt at regime change against a country that both has resources the United States wants, and itself wants to assert its independence from imperialist domination and chart its own path.

No criminal, imperialist war against Venezuela! Free President Maduro and First Combatant Flores! No more blood for oil! 

Categories: Anti-War, International, U.S. News, Venezuela