Just a few days ago, Nicolás Maduro was dancing at rallies, lighting up Christmas trees and launching an AI-generated music video called “Peace Forever” that showed him walking through the jungle with a robed, Jesus-like figure by his side.
By Saturday morning, such efforts to project confidence in the face of mounting US pressure had seemingly come to naught. In an astonishing US military operation, the 63-year-old Venezuelan president and his wife were kidnapped by special forces during a Caracas dawn raid and flown to the US.
It is not the first time that Maduro has faced a Donald Trump-supported effort to oust him from power.
In 2019, he withstood a US-backed attempt by opposition leader Juan Guaidó to persuade the military to topple the regime, which fizzled out. Maduro also survived a 2018 drone attack at a military parade and a botched mercenary incursion in 2020.
But in the annals of Latin American coups, a US-led extraction operation of such speed is almost certainly a first. It also takes the country into uncharted territory.
Under the Venezuelan constitution, power should now pass to vice-president Delcy Rodríguez. But the US does not recognise Maduro as a legitimate president because of a 2024 presidential vote that the opposition and election monitors say he stole. Venezuela’s opposition says the country’s rightful president is instead exiled politician Edmundo González, who won by an independently verified margin of two-to-one.
Maduro had an unlikely rise to power when he assumed the revolutionary mantle of his predecessor and mentor, the leftist strongman Hugo Chávez, after his death in 2013. Yet, for all his apparent buffoonery, he is known to be a cunning and ruthless operator who relishes playing the role of David to the US Goliath.
“He’s a very intelligent man who is always thinking about how to get what he wants out of any situation,” said one regional leader who has dealt with Maduro. “And he surrounded himself with very loyal, but competent, people.”
Born into a working-class Caracas family, one of four children, Maduro became a militant rather than graduating from high school. After a year’s socialist education in Havana, he returned to his home city to become a bus driver and union leader of the metro system.
Elected to Congress after Chávez won the presidency in 1998, Maduro became speaker of the National Assembly, then foreign minister in 2006. His ostensibly easy-going manner and revolutionary fealty eased his rapid ascent.
If Chávez asked him to break with Bogotá, fix ties with Bogotá, insult Washington, nurture Tehran or schmooze Beijing, he complied.
In 2012, Chávez, gripped by terminal cancer, anointed him as successor. The following year Maduro narrowly won presidential elections amid allegations of fraud. Any hopes that this would herald a more moderate government soon evaporated as security forces cracked down on protests.
Maduro freely dispensed patronage to consolidate his power, with authority over the state oil company and import system giving him economic control, while subordination of the courts ensured legal domination.
Mismanagement of the country grew. Venezuela, with the world’s biggest proven oil reserves, should be a rich nation. Instead, under Maduro’s rule, it suffered one of the stiffest contractions ever suffered by an economy, anywhere. Since 2013, Venezuelan GDP has shrunk by almost 80 per cent to $83bn, according to IMF data, with US sanctions adding to the effects of graft and mismanagement.
Corruption flourished, making for a jarring juxtaposition with the pride that Maduro took in being, as he claimed to be, “a man of the streets” and one of Latin America’s few remaining anti-imperialist, leftist leaders. As many as 8mn Venezuelans fled the country, according to UN figures.
In 2015, two years after he became president, a video circulated showing Maduro’s son showered in dollar bills at a wedding — despite an acute shortage of foreign currency that had forced the country to slash food imports. The country currently ranks 178th out of 180 countries in Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index.
Indeed, one reason Maduro and his inner circle have been so reluctant to cede power is because of the indictments and international sanctions they could face when out of office, including for alleged human rights abuses and drug smuggling.
In 2020, in an indictment filed in a Manhattan federal court, US prosecutors accused Maduro of being a leader of a drug-trafficking network run by Venezuelan military officials called the Cartel of the Suns, named because of the sun-shaped insignia on members’ shoulders. In July, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on the group for being a specially designated global terrorist entity that supported Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel.
Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, has described the Cartel de los Soles — the group’s name in Spanish — as being “one of the largest criminal organisations that exist in the [western] hemisphere”.
On Saturday Pam Bondi, the US attorney-general, said Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores “will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts”.
Additional reporting by Joe Daniels in Rio de Janeiro