He has survived a drone assassination attempt, an invasion by mercenaries and derecognition as his country’s legitimate leader by more than 60 nations.
But can Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro survive Donald Trump?
The US president has ratcheted up the pressure in recent months, calling Maduro an illegitimate leader and a “narco-terrorist” and doubling a reward for his capture to $50mn. The US has dispatched the biggest naval task force to the Caribbean since the Cuban missile crisis and American bombers and spy aircraft have flown close to Venezuela’s coast.
But Trump has not defined a final objective beyond saying “we just have to take care of Venezuela” and Maduro is resorting to a tactic he has used many times before: offering Washington back-channel negotiations and dangling the possibility of a future change of government.
Should Trump decide on regime change, the revolutionary socialist leader would be up against a vastly more powerful foe but could call on survival skills he has honed over the past 12 years.
Drafted in as leader after his mentor Hugo Chávez died of cancer in 2013, Maduro has proved a wily operator, defying initial assessments that he would be a caretaker without the authority or charisma to last.
“He’s been strategic and focused on his survival since day one,” said Risa Grais-Targow, director of Latin America at the Eurasia consultancy. “The conditions of his succession forced him to consolidate power quickly; he inherited a divided United Socialist Party of Venezuela, with various internal rivals.”
Maduro sidelined potential challengers, both civilian and military — and his leadership endured. This month he celebrated his 63rd birthday with the release of a government-sponsored propaganda film about his life.
In recent days, he has alternated a message of defiance with peace overtures to the US, breaking into John Lennon’s “Imagine” at a rally and publishing a video of himself on Instagram dancing to a “peace song”.
Caracas meanwhile sent a back-channel message to Trump that Venezuela’s leader might be willing to step down in two years, but the White House rejected the offer, according to news reports. Maduro on Wednesday brandished a sword during a march in Caracas, pledging to “defend every inch of this blessed land”.
Maduro heads a revolutionary socialist movement that has held power continuously since 1999. It controls the armed forces, the police, the courts and Congress as well as large tracts of the economy.
Lubricating the government machinery, say former US and Venezuelan officials, is a web of state-sanctioned corruption. Loyalty is rewarded not with high salaries — the bolívar currency is virtually worthless — but with commissions from rackets including cocaine trafficking, illegal gold mining, black-market oil trading and smuggling. Officials’ complicity makes them more reluctant to contemplate a change of regime because of the risk of prosecution.
A former US law enforcement agent who investigated Venezuelan drug trafficking said Maduro, like Chávez before him, played a significant role in the cocaine trade.
“He’s the head of a rogue nation state that has a whole military infrastructure moving cocaine,” said the now-retired agent.
Surrounding Maduro is a small cadre of trusted top officials. Delcy Rodríguez, vice-president, holds sway over the economy and the oil industry, while her brother Jorge, a trained psychiatrist, presides over Congress and has acted as Venezuela’s chief negotiator with foreign governments.
Vladimir Padrino López, defence minister for the past 11 years, has maintained the regime’s tight grip over the armed forces and acted as a link to Moscow, which supplies most of Venezuela’s weapons. He and interior minister Diosdado Cabello, who controls the police and prisons, guarantee control and ensure dissent is swiftly repressed.
“Maduro is more intelligent than people think, and is surrounded by very capable people,” said a former leader from the Caribbean who negotiated with him.
He has survived several attempts to unseat him. In 2018, explosions were heard close to where he was speaking at a military event in Caracas and the government later said he had escaped an attack by drones laden with explosives. Two years later, the government said it had repelled an attempt by a group of Miami-based mercenaries to invade Venezuela and capture Maduro, killing some of the invaders and capturing others.
The most high-profile attempt to push Maduro out came during Trump’s first term, when the US led a coalition of more than 60 countries in announcing they no longer regarded him as the legitimate president and would instead recognise Juan Guaidó, the then-opposition leader.
Guaidó set up an alternative government, sent “ambassadors” overseas and took possession of some Venezuelan assets abroad. But he never secured control over the levers of power inside the country and fled to Miami.
Maduro also survived “maximum pressure” sanctions during Trump’s first term and has since won limited relief in exchange for promises of democratic reforms that he then failed to deliver.
For those inside Venezuela, betraying or abandoning the regime comes at a potentially heavy price: they would risk torture, imprisonment and death. An investigation by Human Rights Watch in 2019 documented how the feared military counter-intelligence agency, DGCIM, and the SEBIN civilian intelligence service had detained and tortured military personnel accused of plotting against the government.
The UN’s independent fact-finding mission concluded in 2022 that the SEBIN and DGCIM had used torture and sexual violence to silence opposition. Some of these violations amounted to crimes against humanity, it said.
Active agents describe a culture of fear and suspicion within the intelligence services, where Cuban counter-intelligence agents keep watch and loyalties are constantly questioned. “It’s better to keep quiet in the hallways because you never know who is listening,” one said.
A union leader who trained in Cuba and briefly worked as a bus driver, Maduro has also projected an outsized public persona around which the government has built something of a cult.
Venezuela’s state broadcaster VTV invented a cartoon character called Super Bigote, or Super Moustache, in 2021 modelled on Maduro and his trademark bushy black whiskers. The animated series shows Super Bigote in his trademark blue cape swooping in to fight US imperialism and economic sanctions. The revolutionary socialist government distributed millions of Super Bigote toys to build loyalty.
Ahead of last year’s presidential election, state media sought to portray a softer image of Maduro, showing him dancing and singing. It broadcast a documentary that dwelled on his youth playing baseball.
But the attempt to rebrand one of the world’s most notorious authoritarians fell flat. According to an opposition count of official tally sheets collected from polling stations, Maduro lost the election by a mile, winning less than 20 per cent of the vote.
That did not stop Maduro from declaring victory. He refused requests from foreign governments to produce evidence supporting his “win” and was inaugurated for a third six-year term last January.
“Maduro may act the fool at times and speak bad English, but Maduro is no fool,” said one former Venezuelan military officer now living outside the country. “Nothing moves in Venezuela without Maduro knowing about it. And he has been governing now for almost as long as Chávez.”
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