On July 14, 2026, a federal judge in Florida issued a default judgment against Nicolás Maduro, businessman Alex Saab, five other former Venezuelan officials, and the group known as the "Cartel de los Soles," ordering them to pay more than 314 million in damages to three American citizens who say they were kidnapped and tortured in Venezuela. None of the defendants answered the lawsuit or appeared in court, so U.S. District Judge Darrin P. Gayles, of the Southern District of Florida, resolved the case without a trial.
A regime described as a "criminal enterprise"
In his 19-page ruling, Gayles didn't stop at simply condemning the defendants: he described the structure behind the kidnappings as a full-blown "criminal enterprise" built to prop up Maduro's hold on power. The judge wrote that the abductions were among a series of crimes "committed in order to support Maduro's dictatorial rule over Venezuela," carried out, in his words, to generate ill-gotten gains. According to MercoPress, the total was calculated by assigning more than $20,000 for each day of captivity, adding further sums for the torture itself, then tripling the whole amount as the underlying statute allows.
Three different stories of captivity and abuse
The plaintiffs — Jerrel Kenemore, Jason Saad and Edgar Marval — didn't endure the same timeline of suffering, even though their allegations echo one another: electric shocks, stress positions, repeated beatings. Kenemore, a Texas-based computer specialist who was living in Colombia, was abducted near the border in 2022 and held for 643 days; Saad, originally from Alabama, spent roughly 557 days in custody after being arrested at a local market. Marval, a Florida-based businessman, appears to have been held for a considerably shorter stretch — just over four months — though by his account he suffered the harshest treatment of the three. All three say the physical and psychological aftereffects persist years later. Similar allegations of abuse by Venezuelan intelligence agencies are also reportedly under review by International Criminal Court prosecutors.
The original lawsuit also named Delcy Rodríguez, now Venezuela's acting president, but her lawyers succeeded in April in getting her excluded from the final judgment by invoking the immunity U.S. law extends to sitting heads of state. The plaintiffs dispute that reasoning, arguing that the constitutional basis for her term has already expired and that this should strip away that protection. The dispute remains unresolved and could still spawn a separate case against her.
A precedent that's already three years old
This isn't the first legal blow of its kind against Chavismo. Back in January 2023, Judge Federico A. Moreno, of that same district, had already ordered $153 million paid to Venezuelan lawyer Carlos Marrón and his family over 878 days of detention and torture they say they endured. With two judgments of this scale in just three years, Miami's federal courts have become the venue of choice for claims like these against the Chavista apparatus.
Alex Saab's unexpected reversal of fortune
One of the men now ordered to pay, Alex Saab, finds himself in a strikingly different position than he was in 2023, when he was traded for the three Americans. In February 2026, he was arrested again in Venezuela as part of a joint operation between U.S. and Venezuelan authorities, reportedly with the Rodríguez government's cooperation, and extradited to the United States a second time, where he now faces fresh charges. His abrupt shift — from diplomatic bargaining chip to defendant handed over by the very government that succeeded Maduro — adds another layer of tension to the case.
Why actually collecting on the judgment will be far harder than it sounds
Winning the case is only the first hurdle. Washington froze the Venezuelan government's assets on U.S. soil back in 2019, and any attempt to seize them still requires specific authorization from the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). The most visible pool of such assets is PDV Holding, the parent company of the Citgo refinery, whose court-ordered sale in Delaware was awarded in November 2025 to Amber Energy, an affiliate of Elliott Investment Management, for roughly $5.9 billion — a lower bid than some rivals offered, but seen as more likely to actually close. Even so, that deal remains stalled: as of the most recent reporting available, OFAC still had not issued the final license needed to complete it, while Rodríguez's own interim government was fighting in court to reclaim Citgo's boards. In short, the asset pool Kenemore, Saad and Marval would theoretically draw from is anything but settled, and it's contested by multiple creditors as well as by the Venezuelan state itself.
Maduro's capture reshuffles the board
Everything shifted on January 3, 2026, when U.S. forces captured Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in Caracas and transported them to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where they remain held while facing federal narco-terrorism charges in a Manhattan court. Rodríguez was sworn in as acting president days later. Having Maduro in U.S. custody could, in theory, open new avenues for tracing assets or financial interests tied to him, though his lawyers in the civil case maintain that the criminal proceeding and this damages judgment remain legally distinct tracks.
For now, the $314 million judgment stands mainly as a symbolic acknowledgment of three people's suffering and one more entry in a growing list of U.S. court rulings against Chavismo. Whether that acknowledgment will ever translate into an actual payout remains, as of today, very much an open question.
