Five Venezuelan families presented a federal civil lawsuit in Brooklyn against Nicolás Maduro, accusing him of having authorized the murder of at least 1,300 people by an elite police force between 2017 and 2020, marking an unusual attempt to hold a head of state accountable in U.S. courts.
The action was brought by the Centro Guernica 37, an international non-profit legal organization, under the 1991 Torture Victims Protection Act, which allows for civil suits to be filed in federal courts against foreign officials accused of extrajudicial executions carried out in the performance of official duties.
This is the third legal front that Maduro is facing simultaneously on U.S. soil, alongside the criminal proceedings for narcoterrorism in the Southern District of New York and a money laundering investigation in Miami.
The victims and their testimonies
The claimants are three mothers, a father, and a woman whose two brothers died during police operations of the regime, as detailed by the newspaper The New York Times.
They all appear under pseudonyms to protect them from retaliation.
The direct victims are five young men and a teenager, presumably executed by agents of the Special Actions Forces (FAES) in their own homes or nearby.
The testimonies describe a brutal pattern: the forces would storm into poor neighborhoods at dawn, forcing men and boys to kneel, shooting them, and then staging the crime scenes by placing weapons or drugs next to the bodies.
Jane Doe 1, whose 20-year-old son was murdered in 2017, was emphatic: “I am not asking for anything, I am demanding. The State killed my son.”
Jane Doe 3 reported that the agents killed her son in his room and ransacked the house: "The police stole my granddaughter's PlayStation and so much of my son's clothing that I had to buy him a suit to bury him."
Jane Doe 2, whose son was murdered in 2018, explained the motivation of the families: “The real motive for us taking this step is the impunity in our country. If it weren't for that, we wouldn't have had to turn to international instances.”
The FAES and international support
The lawsuit claims that the FAES were created by Maduro in 2017 under the pretext of combating crime, but in practice, they operated as a political tool to suppress dissent and terrorize low-income neighborhoods.
The judicial document directly refers to them as a "death squad" or "extermination group."
A UN report documented that Venezuelan security forces killed at least 6,856 people in 18 months between 2018 and 2019.
As of September 2020, the organization reported over 2,000 deaths in that year alone, with an average age of 26 years among the deceased.
Far from distancing himself from the abuses, Maduro publicly defended them in 2019, weeks after a critical UN report: “All support for Faes in their daily work of ensuring the safety of the people. Long live Faes!”
The FAES were officially dissolved in 2021, but their members were reassigned to other units similarly marked by brutality.
The Independent International Mission of the UN, in its December 2025 report, concluded that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the President, the ministers of Interior and Defense, and other high-ranking military and political officials may be regarded as responsible for ordering or otherwise contributing to the commission of the documented crimes.”
The debate on immunity and the Bolivian precedent
Maduro has been held at the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center since January 3, 2026, when he was captured in Caracas by U.S. special forces.
In his criminal process, he faces charges of narcoterrorism for which he could receive life imprisonment; his next hearing has been postponed to July 22 due to logistical complications of the 2026 World Cup.
The plaintiffs' lawyers anticipate that Maduro will try to invoke his immunity as head of state.
The lawyer Almudena Bernabeu responded: "She will claim it, but the case law is on our side."
His colleague Michael Reed Hurtado emphasized that "no one is above the law."
The closest precedent is that of former Bolivian president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, who was sentenced in 2018 by a jury in Fort Lauderdale to pay 10 million dollars for extrajudicial executions, marking the first case of a Latin American head of state judged under the same law now being applied against Maduro.
The lawsuit seeks compensation for punitive and compensatory damages without specifying a specific amount.
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