On New Year’s Eve, just three days before American military personnel pulled him from his bed and took him to a prison in New York, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was driving through downtown Caracas, describing the city’s tourist spots to a friendly interviewer.
While driving, he paused for history and nostalgia. He recalled a speech by Fidel Castro in 1959 in downtown Caracas, marveled at the house where he spent his childhood, and after 40 minutes of conversation, finally acknowledged the presence of American warships gathered off the Venezuelan coast.
“If they want oil, Venezuela is ready for American investments like those from Chevron,” Maduro said in a video broadcast by state television. “Whenever they want, wherever they want, and however they want.”
The conciliatory gesture he seemed to be offering was, of course, insufficient and too late for the Trump administration, which claimed to be negotiating the terms of his exit. But it revealed how Maduro, 63, has always operated on his own timeline, indifferent to deadlines imposed by his adversaries.
“I think this is the effect of negligence and lack of empathy for Venezuelan society,” said Boris Muñoz, a Venezuelan journalist who interviewed Maduro when he was a congressman in 2003 and has followed him since then. “There were many moments when he could have stepped aside or corrected course, and he didn’t. He just kept going.”
When Maduro assumed the presidency in 2013, Muñoz wrote a profile for the Mexican magazine Gatopardo, detailing how the leader was shaped by far-left politics from an early age.
He grew up with his parents and three siblings in a two-bedroom apartment in southern Caracas. His father held leadership positions in a local workers’ union, and as a teenager, Maduro, sponsored by the Liga Socialista, spent a year in Havana studying politics. Upon returning, he became a bus driver and went on to lead a Caracas subway workers’ union.
After Chávez came to power in 1998, defeating the once-dominant center-left Democratic Action and center-right Copei parties, Maduro was elected to Congress. In 2006, Chávez appointed him foreign minister, placing him at the center of a political project obsessed with Simón Bolívar, the early 19th-century Andean colonial liberator born in Caracas. Bolívar dreamed of uniting the former Spanish colonies in Latin America against the outside world, a spirit that Chávez embraced, frequently invoking Bolívar’s name in his speeches and including him in the new name the country adopted under the constitution Chávez implemented in 1999: the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
“Chávez had an army of spokespeople, but Maduro stood out among them,” Muñoz said. “He was very loyal and an excellent representative of Chávez’s wishes and whims.”
That loyalty proved decisive. Before dying of cancer in 2013, Chávez chose Maduro as his successor, entrusting him with a country already staggering under the weight of oil dependence and the realization that prosperity was coming to an end.
Venezuela had enjoyed a boom driven by historically high oil prices—the lifeblood of its economy and practically its only export—but that windfall collapsed shortly after Maduro took office in 2013. As writer Alma Guillermoprieto noted in her recent book, The Years of Blood, Chávez got lucky: “He had the luck to die before the bill came due for the chaos he caused in the economy.”
Maduro soon presided over the collapse of what had once been one of Latin America’s most prosperous economies.
His government relied heavily on the state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. to distribute favors and ensure political loyalty. As deficits grew, authorities ordered the Central Bank of Venezuela to print money, a measure that rendered the local currency, the bolívar, practically worthless, said José Guerra, an economist who worked for two decades at the Central Bank and was a deputy in the National Assembly from 2015 to 2021.
The result was economic devastation on a historic scale. From 2012 to last year, Venezuela’s gross domestic product shrank by nearly 80%, according to International Monetary Fund data. Inflation exceeded 65,000% in 2018.
The collapse triggered one of the world’s largest migratory movements. At least 7.9 million Venezuelans have fled the country, according to the UN Refugee Agency, seeking safety and means to support their families. Many crossed the dangerous and often deadly Darién jungle linking Colombia to Panama on their way to the United States. Most, however, remained in other Latin American countries.
“Maduro received an economy in crisis and made the situation worse by appointing people to key positions who understood nothing about governance,” Guerra says.
Internal opposition to the regime became more evident as Maduro struggled to control a process he considered democratic. In 2024, the Carter Center for Democracy, the only independent group authorized to monitor Venezuela’s presidential elections, stated that Maduro’s government imposed so many restrictions—including banning the main opposition candidate, María Corina Machado—that the vote could not be considered legitimate. Based on 81% of ballots tallied by its observers, the center said the opposition candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, won by a wide margin with 67% of the vote. González fled the country, Machado was forced into hiding, and Maduro declared himself the winner.
The U.S. Department of Justice’s case against Maduro links Venezuela’s economic collapse to drug trafficking charges, alleging he was responsible for leading a vast narcotics trafficking operation that flooded the United States with drugs. In his New Year’s interview, he rejected allegations that he was the head of a ‘narcoterrorist’ criminal organization and said the real U.S. goal was to seize Venezuela’s natural resources.
He is scheduled to appear for the first time on Monday in a federal court in New York. In a video posted Saturday by the White House, two U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents in New York hold him by the arms and escort him, as he stands tall, smiles, and wishes those present a happy new year—a leader forged in the certainties of a revolution, but with the consequences of his rule finally catching up.
Source: npr.org by Jorge Valencia