Until now, the family had chosen to keep the case low-profile. However, this discretion was shattered on May 22. On that day, the former governor of Florida and current Republican senator from that state, Rick Scott, condemned the situation on his X account (formerly Twitter): “Nelson Rivero is another victim of Maduro’s brutal dictatorship. Father of two daughters whose only ‘crime’ was wanting a better future for their family. Nelson was arbitrarily detained by the DGCIM in 2023 without a court order. Since then, he has remained unjustly imprisoned in Tocuyito, cruelly separated from his daughters and family.”
Rivero’s relatives had requested Scott’s intervention in the case, aware of his influence in the political circles of Washington DC and the oversight that is now exercised from the U.S. capital over Venezuelan affairs.
In a phone conversation with Armando.info, Rivero’s wife, the plastic artist Armary Prado, elaborated on what Senator Scott had stated in his post: the true fault of Rivero and his family would have been “to enter their family environment; that was our sin.”
This refers to the circle of Marcos Antonio Campos Flores, a lawyer, who has run for mayor of San Diego (northeast of Valencia) twice, backed by the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and with the support of governor Rafael Lacava. However, his connections are even more significant for this narrative than his political affiliation and university degree: he is the nephew of the former First Lady of the Republic or First Combatant, Cilia Flores, and brother of Efraín Antonio, one of the two so-called narco-nephews, captured in November 2015 in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, as part of an undercover operation by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA); they were tried in the United States and sentenced in 2017 to 18 years in prison, but eventually the Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration released them as part of a prisoner swap with the Caracas regime.
It was certainly a bad time for the Riveros to cross paths with him.
Campos Flores has been the main accuser of Nelson Rivero before the judiciary. His ties to the ousted presidential family, his status as a lawyer, and his partisan identification gave him a provincial power that he exploited to eliminate enemies, including Nelson Rivero, although the Rivero family does not yet fully understand the reason for such unbounded malice. What they can confirm is that, due to this animosity, Nelson Rivero has been away from his home for three years, imprisoned in the infamous Tocuyito Prison since October 2025.
After the capture of his elevated aunt—now awaiting trial in New York—on January 3, and under the interim leadership of Delcy Rodríguez—who has sought to erase any perks from the overthrown Maduro regime—Marcos Antonio Campos Flores still retains enough power to keep an individual imprisoned arbitrarily, a power he flaunts.
Unknown numbers among recently acquainted
The charges against Nelson Rivero, according to what is read in the file of the Sixth Prosecutor’s Office of the Public Ministry of the Judicial Circumscription of Carabobo state, are classified as three crimes: illegal arms trafficking, conspiracy, and organized crime. All crimes supposedly committed to the detriment of the Venezuelan state and not against Marcos Antonio Campos Flores, who is depicted in the file as the accuser.
What is the basis of the accusation? Two facts recorded in the file. In the first, dated May 16, 2023, a teacher from the Juan XXIII Educational Unit in Valencia received a gift box containing an explosive, although the document does not specify what type. The other incident, the date of which is not detailed in the record, involved Marcos Antonio Campos Flores: a “threatening message via WhatsApp toward his family” that Cilia Flores’ nephew allegedly received. The document does not specify when Campos Flores received the message or its exact content.
The General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence (Dgcim) reportedly traced the origin of the threat back to the cellphone with phone number 00584142286804. It determined that from that same number, a taxi service was ordered that delivered the explosive package to Juan XXIII School. Subsequently, according to the file, “the results of the investigation showed the relationship of the calls and geographic trajectory of the phone line 00584142286804 with line 00584144817444.” The latter number corresponded to Nelson Rivero’s cellphone. With that single clue, the Dgcim had little trouble closing the case.
In August 2023, the formal accusation was made, endorsed by a provisional prosecutor, Ángelo José Dorta Sivira, and three auxiliary prosecutors: Gabriel José Almea Hernández, Michael Gabriel Quintero Silveira, and Isa Hereda Duarte. The first three were detained in September 2025, as part of a purge that then-Attorney General Tarek William Saab described as “a new exemplary and significant operation against degraded elements of the justice system.”
Lawyer Ramón Cardona, defender of Nelson Rivero, confirms that the three sanctioned prosecutors currently enjoy alternative measures to imprisonment, while his client has now spent three years behind bars.
Dangerous relations
In summary, this is the judicial story that has unfolded until recently. However, the human story contains more details, including the description of the place and moment when Nelson Rivero and Armary Prado committed their “sin.”
It all began in 2021, a time when Campos Flores was running for mayor of San Diego on behalf of the PSUV for the elections on November 21 of that year. The official propaganda portrayed him as a cheerful young man and a BMX rider, destined to finally take the traditional stronghold of the opposition in that middle-class anti-Chavista canton.
“Everything was super casual,” recalls Armary Prado, daughter of Armando Prado, a long-time Larense militant of the Movement for Socialism (MAS), who was the general director of the Iribarren Mayor’s Office during Macario González’s tenure from 1995 to 2000. In September 2025, González was detained by officials of the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (Sebin) and remained missing for 68 days. He was released in February 2026.
What Armary Prado describes as “casual” is explained this way: one of her half-brothers, Antonio Tovar, is friends with José Luis Martínez. On the other hand, José Luis Martínez’s half-sister, Fanny Fátima Urdaneta, is Campos Flores’ partner. The six degrees of separation compressed into a birthday party.
“My brother [Antonio Tovar] and José Luis met in China (…) a mutual friend introduced them over 15 years ago, and they became friends because they both had the same import businesses, especially for parts and machinery,” says Armary Prado, adding that her brother traveled to that country to hunt opportunities at importer fairs. Both Antonio and José Luis later coincided upon their return to Valencia, the capital of Carabobo.
“One day we were invited to José Luis’s birthday party. That party was at José Luis’s mother’s house. It was a barbecue,” continues Prado, unraveling the thread of memory. The Rivero-Prado family was already aware that one of the attendees, Marcos Campos Flores, was the nephew of Cilia Flores.
Marcos Antonio, like Efraín Antonio, is the son of Hernes Flores, Cilia’s sister known as La China, and Marco Antonio Campos.
The second time Rivero saw Campos Flores was in June 2023, at the La Esperanza School in Valencia, where their six-year-old daughter was studying (Rivero has another daughter from a previous relationship). “It was astonishing. Nelson arrived and told me: ‘Do you know who has a daughter in the school? Marcos Campos. And he greeted me. I was blown away when I saw him.’ Afterward, everyone went home,” Prado reconstructs.
Six days after that encounter, on the morning, Nelson Rivero was arrested. However, to achieve that, they first used a decoy: Antonio Tovar, Armary Prado’s maternal half-brother.
Antonio Tovar was driving to work when a Dgcim vehicle crossed his path on a highway in Valencia. There, several men approached him. There were not just counterintelligence agents. Marcos Antonio Campos Flores was there in person.
“Look at this,” Campos Flores told him, showing him the threatening message he had received via WhatsApp, “your brother-in-law sent this.”
Still not fully understanding, Antonio Tovar was given an instruction from Campos Flores that caught him off-guard: “I need you to call him and tell him you want to see him.”
Tovar obeyed the order. He called Nelson Rivero and told him he needed to meet. They agreed to meet at the parking lot of the Paseo La Orquídea shopping center, on the main avenue of Mañongo, in Naguanagua, a northern suburb of Valencia. There, the Dgcim agents were waiting to arrest him.
But Tovar wasn’t done getting out of the mess. He received another order, similar to the last: he had to call his sister, Armary Prado, to say that he also needed to see her. First, he resisted. Eventually, under threats, he acquiesced.
A few minutes later, Antonio Tovar went to pick up his sister in his car. When she came out of the building where she lives, she had her six-year-old daughter with her. When she opened the right rear door of the car for the child to get in, she saw that seated there was a uniformed woman.
She was only surprised until Tovar told her to get in the car. Through gestures, Armary Prado tried to extract from her brother some information about what was happening. In a low voice, mostly to ensure the child wouldn’t notice anything, she said she would explain soon. They arrived at the Dgcim headquarters. There, Prado learned that her husband was in prison.
That unfortunate (and false?) letter
The file that the military counterintelligence agency compiled on Nelson Rivero highlighted: “The aforementioned citizen is presumed to be involved in terrorist attacks on primary school in Carabobo state and cyber attacks through the WhatsApp platform against government entities of the State.”
Among the jumble, the Dgcim report also noted another link that would strengthen the accusation: “It is important to note that this citizen is the son of GB (RA) Nelson Rafael Rivero, who is in a state of active reserve and residing in the United States through a politic asylum due to a letter published via the virtual platform Twiuter [sic] on August 27, 2012, which undermines the military and presidential decorum of Commander Hugo Rafael Chávez Fría [sic], constitutional president and supreme leader of the Bolivarian Revolution.”
Thus, all at once, the case took on a political hue. To make matters worse, Nelson Rivero, the son, became a suspect of carrying sedition in his blood.
On the phone, in a conversation with Armando.info from the United States, Brigadier General Nelson Rafael Rivero is adamant: that letter, which identifies Hugo Chávez as “inept, resentful, frustrated, traitor, and coward,” was not written by him. “In 2012, everyone told me about the letter. But I didn’t know anything and didn’t know anything all these years. Until they arrested Nelson,” explains General Rivero.
General Rivero denies authorship of the letter that the Dgcim took as evidence to implicate his son. Credit: X from @nelsonrafaelrivuna
On the account of @nelsonrafaelrivuna, between August 23 and 27, 2012, six letters were published in which the author made allegations of corruption and accumulated debts in the Social Security Institute of the Armed Forces (Ipsfa), while expressing political opinions and even showing a request for political asylum. However, both General Rivero and his wife, Olga Sanes, insist even today that the official never had an account on that social network.
General Rivero, a graduate as a second lieutenant of the Military Academy of Venezuela in the Francisco de Paula Avendaño Promotion of July 1970, does not deny his critical and belligerent stance toward Hugo Chávez since Chávez led an attempted coup against then-President Carlos Andrés Pérez on February 4, 1992.
When Chávez came to power in 1999, General Rivero expressed his opposition to the rise of non-commissioned officers to colonels, to the implementation of the term “civic-military”—which, for him, meant the destruction of the armed forces—and to the open relationship of the new regime with Fidel Castro. “That obedience, discipline, and subordination was all finished by Chávez,” he states. Immediately, in July 2000, he retired. Rivero then established a block-making company in partnership with his wife, daughter, and three sons. Until, in 2012, they all decided to leave Venezuela, except for Nelson Ramón, who preferred to stay to await the birth of his first daughter.
In that exile, on the night of June 22, 2023, the family learned that Nelson Rivero had been arrested. “Armary called us that night, crying. I wanted to go to Venezuela immediately, but my son, through her, told me not to, that it could be worse,” says Olga Sanes de Rivero, also on the phone from the United States.
“To me, Nelson is a dead man”
After being at the Dgcim administrative headquarters in El Trigal, Valencia, Armary Prado was taken back home. There, Dgcim officials began an extensive search. Prado asked where the corresponding search warrant was. First, a Public Ministry official replied that the procedure was being conducted exceptionally. Minutes later, she was shown a warrant received via WhatsApp.
“A search warrant must be issued by a court. There is no other way. And it must be in writing. But now they have invented the figure of search warrants through exceptions,” explains Ramón Carmona, Rivero’s lawyer, in a conversation with Armando.info.
Since the day of his arrest and for two months afterward, according to his wife’s account, Nelson Rivero was subjected to various forms of torture. On the day of his arrest, they forced him, through beatings administered between cuts, to record a video to incriminate his father in the case. During this ordeal, his wife claims he found a way not to implicate him.
“He had to read on camera. But deliberately, he did it poorly to make it clear that he was reading. He told me he would get hit too hard because he did it that way. And it turned out so badly that the video wasn’t used as evidence,” Prado explains the torturous trickery of her husband.
Lawyer Carmona also reports that Rivero was hung by his arms behind his back, causing a dislocation in his left shoulder. They also reportedly taped a manila folder to his head and, afterward, placed plastic bags over his head and suffocated him to the brink of unconsciousness.
Not everything ended there. According to his wife, Rivero was made to kneel. Once in that position, an official would hit the soles of his feet with a curtain rod. This was to force him to confess he was the one who sent the explosive to the school.
Another day, the same officials allegedly struck both of his ears simultaneously with the palms of their hands to leave him stunned. In response, the lawyer filed a request for review by a forensic team to verify his state of health. The request was received, but there was no response.
The defender filed a request on February 25, 2026, for the cessation of the charges against Rivero under the Amnesty Law, promulgated by the interim government of Delcy Rodríguez. Two days later, the request was denied. On March 16, Carmona appealed. On May 15, the appeals court declared the appeal inadmissible. “They manipulated the so-called amnesty law for their convenience,” asserts the lawyer.
In search of help, his wife has turned to Venezuelan non-governmental organizations to achieve effective release. But since he was not arrested in the context of protests or for party militancy, qualifying Rivero’s case as that of a political prisoner has not been possible.
Armary Prado, considering it an irony of circumstances, remembers that in 2022 Nelson and she finally decided to leave for the United States. For this, they married in October that year and were processed by Rivero’s sister through humanitarian parole, a measure implemented during Joe Biden’s administration. Months after Nelson Rivero’s arrest, the approval arrived. “Since Nelson was imprisoned and we thought he would be released soon due to the unfairness of the case, we requested an extension to be able to leave. In total, we waited six months. But we couldn’t,” she says.
Rivero, a mechanical engineer and spare parts businessman, has been detained in three facilities: the Dgcim headquarters in El Trigal for two days after his arrest; the headquarters of the National Command Against Extortion and Kidnapping (Conas), in La Quizanda, and, since October 2025, in the Educational Center for the New Man El Libertador, better known as Tocuyito Prison.
Armary Prado says she remembers the words that Marcos Campos Flores directed at her in the Dgcim headquarters. She claims he said: “To me, Nelson is dead. Thank God you are here [alive], but to me, Nelson is a dead man.”
“When they arrest [Rivero],” adds Armary Prado, “[Campos Flores] said things like ‘what a coincidence that the guy has a daughter in the same school. He had me all studied.’ He made it up in his mind that Nelson was after him.”
On Sunday, June 21, 2026, Nelson Rivero spent his third Father’s Day in prison. It was the third year without seeing his youngest daughter. He has explicitly instructed his wife and relatives that the girl should not be taken to the prison. His eldest daughter now lives outside Venezuela.
The trial resumed on July 14, after being suspended two months earlier. Up to this moment of publication, there have been two hearings. Nothing suggests to the family that freedom is close for him. But there has been some change. As he tells his wife, the tortures have ceased.
Sometimes a group of Dgcim officials looks at him with amazement and asks, according to Armary Prado’s account, her confined husband: “Dude, how long are they going to keep you here?” On those occasions, Nelson Ramón Rivero, when he recognizes them, notes the irony in the question: many of those who are surprised to see him still imprisoned were the same ones who at some point beat and tortured him.
