Nicolás Maduro believes that his predecessor and political father, the late Hugo Chávez, appeared earlier than him within the type of a small hen and a butterfly. He additionally thinks that celebrating Christmas two months early – by presidential decree – helps “lift the spirits of Venezuelans.”
He confuses “gremlin” with “grinch,” invents phrases in Spanish, and infrequently makes one linguistic slip after one other. The selections and statements of Venezuela’s president could be so eccentric that many Venezuelans and Latin Americans have a reputation for them: “maduradas.”
He has, nonetheless, confirmed for years that underestimating him generally is a mistake for his critics.
Mockery of Maduro existed even earlier than he took office as president of Venezuela in 2013, when he was only one amongst a number of potential successors to the cancer-stricken leader, regardless of having served as international minister and vice chairman. Maduro acquired solely minority help from followers of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), and his circle, based on experiences, was in robust rigidity with supporters of the influential Diosdado Cabello, then president of the National Assembly, for being the chosen one in a rustic dominated by uncertainty.
But, overwhelmed by sickness, at first of December 2012, Chávez put an finish to inside disputes and unequivocally blessed Maduro to guide chavismo and Venezuela. The “son of Chávez” then inaugurated a authorities by which, 12 months after 12 months, he defied criticism of his electoral system, protests, sanctions, arrest warrants, doable rebellions, worldwide isolation, and hypothesis about his future.
The leader mocked by some is now the longest-serving president in energy in Latin America: 12 years and 7 months. Maduro survived predictions and mock, however alongside the way in which, Venezuela misplaced thousands and thousands of inhabitants, 72% of its financial system, democratic legitimacy within the eyes of a lot of the world, and plenty of of its most necessary worldwide allies. The Venezuelan president says he now faces an “existential situation.” Will he have the ability to defy predictions once more and survive the navy and diplomatic stress from US President Donald Trump?
“If some unforeseen circumstance should arise that prevents me from continuing as president of Venezuela, my firm opinion, as firm as the full moon, is that, in that scenario, which would require calling presidential elections, you should choose Nicolás Maduro,” mentioned Chávez in December 2012, hours earlier than touring to Cuba to proceed his remedy. The president would return to Caracas solely to die, however the title of his heir was already clear.
Maduro himself says he doesn’t know why Chávez selected him amongst a number of candidates as a result of he by no means aspired to “be president.” “But he was preparing me,” he mentioned shortly after Chávez’s demise.
The son of a political activist from a conventional Venezuelan get together, Maduro started getting ready very early. As a pupil, he joined the Socialist League and commenced working as a bus driver for the Caracas Metro.
His activism made him a union leader, from the place he jumped into politics. Union and political exercise allowed him to satisfy two decisive individuals in his life: Cilia Flores and Chávez.
Flores was a younger lawyer, and Maduro was a rising union leader. She was one in every of Chávez’s authorized defenders over the 1992 coup try. Flores and Maduro visited him in Yare jail.
The path of affection, politics, and loyalty started. Flores grew to become Maduro’s associate and, finally, the primary lady to guide the National Assembly and the particular person many at the moment see because the “power behind the throne,” Carmen Arteaga, PhD in Political Science and professor at Simón Bolívar University, informed NCS. And he grew to become the “son of Chávez.”
When Chávez was elected president in 1999, Maduro entered the National Assembly. As the then-president gained energy inside and out of doors Venezuela, Maduro climbed the ranks, first within the National Assembly after which in authorities as “a good second, always obedient,” Ronal Rodríguez, researcher on the Venezuela Observatory at Colombia’s Universidad del Rosario, informed NCS.
“Maduro was always an underestimated leader. There were many possible successors when Chávez fell ill. But none achieved what he did: on one hand, Cuban support, and on the other, distributing power within chavismo,” mentioned Rodríguez.
Maduro’s relationship with Cuba spans a long time and has numerous types and mysteries. One of the few unauthorized biographies of Maduro – “De Verde a Maduro: el sucesor de Hugo Chávez” (a play on phrases, since “maduro” additionally means ripe; “From green to Maduro: The Successor of Hugo Chávez”) – says that the present president might have been skilled in revolutionary politics on the island throughout his youth.
Neither he nor official biographies point out this alleged expertise. But Maduro did construct, first with the federal government of Fidel and Raúl Castro, and later with Miguel Díaz-Canel, a bond that’s among the many most necessary for at the moment’s Venezuela. And that, based on former officers of Trump’s first administration, was decisive for the president to anticipate and include, by means of Cuban safety companies, the opposition rebellion of April 2019, amongst different issues.
Maduro deepened his ties with the Castros when he grew to become Chávez’s international minister in 2006, and have become a “key player” in 2011, when the then-president fell ailing and traveled to Cuba for remedy. From then on, he was the important thing hyperlink in managing the strategic relationship between the Castros and chavismo.
That relationship helped Maduro strengthen his place to be the successor to Chávez, who had the charisma and affect that none of his potential heirs possessed. And additionally to grease a story first perfected by Fidel Castro after which by Chávez himself – each leaders within the Latin American left. It was an anti-imperialist and anti-US narrative, amplified by geopolitical alliances with historic US rivals.
Maduro leaned on that epic from the very begin of his first administration. The “son of Chávez” acquired his blessing, however not all his votes. In the April 2013 elections to decide on the late president’s successor, the chavista candidate defeated opposition leader Henrique Capriles by simply 1.59% of the vote. Six months earlier, within the October 2012 presidential elections, Chávez had crushed Capriles by a margin of 9.5%.
Suspicious for years of the federal government’s electoral transparency, Capriles and the opposition refused to simply accept the outcomes. Even chavismo itself, by means of Cabello, confirmed Maduro its dissatisfaction with the consequence and referred to as for self-criticism.
He responded that it was a “legal, fair, and constitutional” victory and celebrated chavismo’s continued rule.
But there started the sample that finest defines the self-proclaimed defender of “popular and revolutionary democracy” to this present day: contested elections, opposition within the streets, allegations of repression and persecution of dissent, and distribution of advantages inside chavismo to keep away from inside challenges and retain energy. Outside Venezuela, the “Maduro model” relied on the help and “know-how” of the normal US adversaries: China, Russia, and Iran.
From 2013 onward, all nationwide elections have been shrouded in doubts and controversies among the many Venezuelan opposition, worldwide organizations, and even allied governments: the 2017 constitutional elections, the 2020 legislative elections, and the 2018 and 2024 presidential elections. The 2015 parliamentary elections have been, in reality, received by the opposition, however chavismo used political maneuvers to neutralize that victory. Time and once more, elections have been adopted by opposition challenges and marches and, as documented by the United Nations in its experiences, repression and demise.
Maduro defended these processes as “transparent” and his electoral system as “reliable.” He resisted, clenched his fist, and overcame challenges even when many thought he wouldn’t. This occurred, greater than ever, in 2024, when not even Colombia and Brazil, ruled by leftist presidents Gustavo Petro and Lula da Silva, acknowledged the outcomes of the elections by which Maduro supposedly defeated the opposition of Edmundo González Urrutia and María Corina Machado and achieved his second re-election.
“The Maduro case is an unusual case of regime survival in a region where, faced with similar challenges, other regimes fell,” says educational and Amherst College professor Javier Corrales in his guide “The Rise of Autocracy: How Venezuela Transitioned to Authoritarianism.”
For Venezuelans, the value of Maduro’s survival technique was and is, nonetheless, excessive and measured in lives, exile, and poverty. Since 2017, a number of UN companies and the International Criminal Court (ICC) have been tasked with enumerating that value, typically even with the collaboration of the Venezuelan authorities itself, in an try and chase away the specter of a global arrest warrant for Maduro for crimes in opposition to humanity.
Year after 12 months, experiences described a rise in human rights violations, “coordinated in accordance with state policies and part of a course of conduct that is both widespread and systematic, thus constituting crimes against humanity,” as famous in a 2020 UN mission report. “The mission found reasonable grounds to believe that authorities and security forces have planned and executed large-scale human rights violations since 2014.”
“The evidence obtained by the mission during this investigative cycle confirms that the crime of persecution based on political motives continues to be committed in Venezuela, without any national authority showing willingness to prevent, prosecute, or punish the serious human rights violations that constitute this international crime,” concluded Marta Valiñas, rapporteur of the report.
Excessive pressure, arbitrary detentions of protesters and opposition leaders, sexual violence, torture, extrajudicial executions – all are current, based on UN experiences, in Maduro’s handbook for managing dissent.
In response to every accusation or worldwide investigation, Maduro and his authorities resort, as they’ve from the start, to the well-known anti-imperialist narrative. “It is very concerning that the high commissioner gives in to the pressures of anti-Venezuelan actors and makes biased and untruthful statements, presenting ideologized speculations as facts,” Maduro’s authorities responded in 2021 to Michelle Bachelet, then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Bachelet was Chile’s first socialist president for the reason that return of democracy to the nation. Maduro’s confrontation with Bachelet, then a UN diplomat, was an indication that the Venezuelan authorities was additionally starting to lose the help of the Latin American left.
Poor administration, battle financial system, exodus and sanctions
The anti-US campaign narrative was additionally utilized by Maduro and his authorities to justify Venezuela’s dire economic numbers.
These figures, typical of battle economies in different international locations, starkly expose the weak administration of a Maduro who managed to get Venezuela to start out rising solely in 2021, eight years after taking energy. Today, the Venezuelan financial system is 28% of what it was in 2013, based on the IMF.
Behind this collapse is the decline of Venezuela’s main source of income over the previous 50 years: oil. Targeted by energy struggles, chavista disputes, and lack of funding, PDVSA, the corporate that controls oil manufacturing and advertising, collapsed. The common fall in oil costs since 2014 didn’t assist both. Today, oil export revenues are simply 20% of what they have been in 2013, based on OPEC+ knowledge.
Maduro and his authorities blamed and proceed accountable US sanctions for the financial collapse. But it was solely in 2019 that the Trump administration imposed sanctions on PDVSA; till then, the measures have been geared toward punishing Maduro and his officers individually.
Unlike in different international locations, poor financial administration didn’t alter Maduro’s management over Venezuela. But it did change the nation’s make-up. Overwhelmed by repression and poverty, which at its worst affected 90% of the inhabitants, thousands and thousands of Venezuelans chose to leave for locations the place the long run appeared doable. Venezuela’s exodus, together with Syria’s, is among the many largest displacement crises worldwide: almost eight million Venezuelans now dwell in different international locations.
Maduro’s Venezuela is a succession of crises that pressured Venezuelans into exile however, on the similar time, strengthened the president, who blames sanctions for the exodus. “Maduro is more skillful than most people think; he always knew how to take advantage of circumstances and turn crises around,” says Rodríguez.
To do that, Maduro started constructing, as quickly as his authorities began, a steadiness of energy by which he grew to become the guarantor. Essential on this map have been, from the beginning, the Armed Forces, a sector with which Maduro had little relationship earlier than being anointed by Chávez.
“Someone once explained this to me: with Chávez, the military thought they had to thank him for the prominence they had. With Maduro, it’s the other way around. He has to thank the military and give them concessions like positions or entire economic sectors, so they tolerate him. He turned Venezuela into a confederation in which he is the manager,” Amherst College educational Javier Corrales informed NCS.
Also key on this power-sharing scheme, which Corrales compares to what the Castros imposed in Cuba, have been the oldest chavista leaders, comparable to Cabello or the now disgraced Rafael Ramírez, former president of PDVSA, amongst different positions, or Tareck el-Aissami, former vice chairman of the nation.
But, as in any closed energy regime, some succumbed, underneath allegations of supposed corruption, and went into exile or ended up in jail. Many others continued and at the moment aren’t solely a part of the steadiness of energy and financial administration but in addition of worldwide justice investigations into alleged crimes in opposition to humanity.
Maduro distributed energy, cash, and duties and, in doing so, ensured his survival.
In the “confederation” of actors that dominate Maduro’s Venezuela, paramilitary teams that, based on the UN, participated within the cycle of opposition repression throughout essentially the most intense social unrest of current years, additionally play a central position. The “colectivos” are additionally a key instrument in Maduro’s steadiness of energy and his future.
“They are a highly armed sector. They are the regime’s sheriffs. And they have a lot to lose if the government falls,” says Corrales.
Former Trump and Biden officers share Corrales’s evaluation. There are so many authorized and supposedly unlawful actors concerned in Maduro’s authorities, so many pursuits at stake, that the president’s sudden departure may unleash chaos and a fair worse drama than what has been corroding Venezuela for years.
Almost 13 years after Chávez proclaimed him his chosen one, Maduro faces one other disaster, one which Trump’s second administration hopes would be the final.
With numerous techniques, the US coverage of weakening Maduro has, in recent times, been as intense because the Venezuelan president’s anti-US rhetoric.
It spanned a number of administrations and included financial sanctions, exorbitant arrest warrants, detention of kinfolk for alleged drug hyperlinks, arrest and launch of the alleged “front man,” granting and canceling oil licenses, direct dialogue and secret talks, and even a plan to permit free, truthful, and clear elections that led, in 2024, to elections by which the opposition led by Machado stunned the world. Nothing labored, neither threats nor dialogue with a Maduro who additionally proved to be an professional in stalling and delaying negotiations.
The Venezuelan leader now faces the biggest US naval and air blockade deployed within the Caribbean in a long time. US and Trump’s navy stress is rising, and Maduro is as soon as once more attempting to defy the chances. Will he succeed?