Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, has picked a general indicted in the United States on drug-trafficking charges to be his new interior minister, in response to what he called an “attack” by the US on his government.

Maduro announced late on Tuesday that Néstor Reverol, a former head of the Venezuelan anti-drug agency and director of the national guard, would now oversee the interior ministry charged with internal security, just one day after US prosecutors unsealed an indictment against him. Reverol previously help the post of interior minister under the late president Hugo Chávez.

Maduro said Reverol’s appointment was to show support for the general in the face of what he called “attacks from the empire”, referring to the United States.

“As interior minister, he broke the world record for capturing traffickers; that is why they want to make him pay – the DEA and all the US drug mafias,” Maduro said. “That’s why I have named this brave, combative, experienced man.”

The US indictment paints a different picture of Reverol, and his former deputy in the national anti-drugs office. In an indictment filed in Brooklyn federal court, and unsealed on Monday, US prosecutors said Reverol and Edylberto Molina, now a military attache posted in Germany, allegedly took bribes from drug traffickers when they headed the country’s drug agency.

From January 2008 to December 2010, Reverol, 51, and Molina, 53, allegedly alerted traffickers to future drug raids or the locations of law enforcement officers, prosecutors said. The two men also allegedly obstructed investigations to allow drugs to leave Venezuela ultimately bound for the United States, arranged for the release of people arrested in drug cases, and for that of cash and drugs seized by law enforcement, prosecutors said.

Reverol has denied using his positions to facilitate the trafficking of cocaine.

At least five other former Venezuelan officials have been charged in the US courts with drug-related crimes, including the former head of the Bolivarian Intelligence Service and of the investigative police force, CICPC. And two nephews of Maduro’s wife face charges of conspiracy to import 800 kilos of cocaine into the US after they were arrested in Haiti in November.

Maduro is under growing political pressure at home after Venezuela’s election board approved the first step in an opposition campaign to force the president from office.

The national election board said that opposition petitions had been signed by at least 1% of voters in every state – enough to start the process towards a recall referendum.