Venezuela's former first lady seeks home confinement due to worsening heart condition

NEW YORK -- Venezuela’s former first lady wants to be let out of jail while she and her husband await trial on U.S. drug trafficking charges.

Cilia Flores, the wife of ex-Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, “deserves the opportunity to await her trial while on home confinement” while dealing with a heart condition that has only gotten worse since she’s been in jail, her lawyers wrote in court papers filed Wednesday.

The lawyers, Mark Donnelly and Andres Sanchez, asked a judge to allow her to leave a Brooklyn federal jail for a home within the Manhattan federal court district where she and Maduro are scheduled to stand trial next June.

There, the lawyers said, she will be under 24-hour-a-day armed surveillance and will only be allowed to see visitors approved by the court and federal prosecutors. The home will be monitored by video and her calls will be recorded, the lawyers said.

Federal prosecutors have yet to file a response. A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan declined to comment. The judge, Alvin K. Hellerstein, has yet to rule on Flores’ request.

Flores, 69, and Maduro, 63, have been held at a Brooklyn jail since U.S. forces seized them from their Caracas home in a middle-of-the-night raid in early January and brought them to New York City.

Both have pleaded not guilty to charges alleging that they were part of a conspiracy to send cocaine into the U.S. In a separate court filing, they recently asked that their indictment be dismissed on the grounds that they have immunity as the leader and first lady of a foreign country.

Flores’ lawyers said that she has lived for years with a mitral valve prolapse but hasn’t received a monthly injection she needs to manage the ailment since her arrest and subsequent incarceration at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

Instead, Donnelly and Sanchez said, she has been prescribed baby aspirin, a statin, diltiazem and nitroglycerin as needed for chest pains. She has continually suffered from reflux and gastritis, has lost two molars and shed more than 25 pounds (11.3 kilograms).

Flores has been advised by doctors that she should undergo cardiac catheterization, which could lead to further heart procedures, her lawyers said. If that happens, they said, she “will need adequate time to recover from any procedures in a setting conducive to restoring her health.”

Staff at the jail “have been extremely respectful toward her and her husband,” and Flores “does not dispute that she has received excellent care from medical professionals” at the jail and hospital, Donnelly and Sanchez wrote.

But, they argued, “a detention center lacks the conditions needed for such a recovery.”