Venezuelan leader defiant in face of Us-backed bounty

VENEZUELAN president Nicolas Maduro stood defiant in the face of a $15m (£12.1m) bounty offered by the US for his arrest on drug trafficking charges.

He called Donald Trump a “racist cowboy” and warned that he is ready to fight should the US and neighbouring Colombia dare to invade.

Mr Maduro’s remarks came hours after the US announced sweeping indictments against the socialist leader and several members of his inner circle for allegedly converting Venezuela into a criminal enterprise at the service of drug traffickers and terrorist groups.

One indictment by prosecutors in New York accused Mr Maduro and socialist party boss Diosdado Cabello, head of the rubber-stamp constitutional assembly, of conspiring with Colombian

rebels and members of the military “to flood the United States with cocaine” and use the drug trade as a “weapon against America”.

Mr Maduro, who fashions himself an everyman hero of the Latin American left, said the charges were politically motivated. He said they ignore US ally Colombia’s role as the main source of the world’s cocaine and his own role in facilitating peace talks between Colombia’s government and that country’s rebels over the past decade.

During a televised address, Mr Maduro said: “Donald Trump, you are a miserable human being. You manage international relations like a New York Mafia extortion artist you once were as a real estate boss.”

Some of Mr Maduro’s most venomous rhetoric ever against Mr Trump also came with a threat of military force: “If one day the imperialists and Colombian

oligarchy dare to touch even a single hair, they will face the Bolivarian fury of an entire nation that will wipe them all out.”

Earlier, Venezuela’s chief prosecutor opened an investigation against opposition leader Juan Guaido for allegedly plotting a coup with retired army general Cliver Alcala, who after being named in the US indictments said he had stockpiled assault weapons in Colombia for a cross-border incursion.