Nicolás Maduro’s regime is all about strength and exercising control over his opposition. | Jesus Vargas/Getty Images
Behind the crippling economic and political situation in Venezuela is Nicolás Maduro.
After years of high inflation and a tumultuous relationship with the United States, the president of Venezuela faces a country waiting for political intervention. US President Donald Trump wants to oust Maduro, a former revolutionary turned anti-democratic leader, and recently said his “days are numbered.”
Maduro’s regime is all about strength and exercising control over his opposition. His demeanor, rise to power, and relationship to his adversaries are pivotal to understanding where Venezuela goes next.
Host Noel King spoke with Jon Lee Anderson, a staff writer for New Yorker magazine, to understand the leader and how he got here. Anderson is a veteran journalist who has interviewed Maduro on multiple occasions.
Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Nicolás Maduro — you interviewed him in 2017. Pretty rare interview. What is he like as a person?
He’s a big man. He’s about 6 foot-4 or -5. He’s at least 250 pounds. He’s warm in person; he likes to hug; he’ll break into song if he’s with the right crowd or dance.
Maduro doesn’t have quite the same magnetic persona that his mentor and predecessor Hugo Chávez did. There has always been a pretty florid opposition in Venezuela, and [Maduro] has cracked down hard on them. He comes from the urban left. He was also a left-wing union organizer. He had some training in Cuba. He is not a democrat. He sees himself as a revolutionary.
I point this out to Americans because I think there’s this idea that obviously it’s a kind of touchstone. We all talk about democracy as the ultimate ideal. Well, people who see themselves as revolutionaries in the Marxist sense do not regard themselves as democrats. They regard themselves as revolutionaries, and it presupposes a different set of assumptions about the way you proceed once you have power. And in the case of Nicolás Maduro and his military comrades who uphold this regime, it is about not giving up power.
How did he get into power? You said Chávez was his mentor. Did Chávez hand the presidency over?
He did. From a very early time, Maduro made himself useful and very close to Chávez. He was foreign minister for about six years, and then he became his vice president. Chávez discovered that he had cancer in about 2011, early 2012. And privately knew he was dying. And he had a televised moment when he told the Venezuelan nation that he hoped to be around. But if anything happened to him, Nicholas Maduro was going to be their next president. Chávez died in 2013. And that’s exactly what happened.
To look at Venezuela today from the US is to see a country that is an economic basket case, a country that people desperately want to flee because they are so poor. What was Venezuela like when Maduro took over?
From 2003 or 2004 until about 2012, 2013, you had this worldwide spike in oil prices that brought in about a trillion dollars to Venezuela. It’s a massive amount of money. The oil prices in the world, they went up to a hundred, and it was $150 a barrel at one point. They dropped precipitously right around the time Nicholas Maduro succeeded Chávez in office. The effect on Venezuelan society was immediate.
Maduro showed an incapacity and inability to turn on a dime. So it’s been this kind of push me–pull you, very no-holds-barred, very polarized environment ever since.
And look, one doesn’t know the ultimate truth, but there’s a consensus that he’s stolen every election ever since. So ever since then, Maduro’s been in a corner. There’s very little to find in the way of infrastructure and investment. Where did those trillion dollars go? There was an effort at a social welfare system that never really existed before. On the other hand, a lot of it was ripped off. There was a huge amount of corruption.
Who is Maduro’s opposition? When and how do they start to form inside of Venezuela?
There’s always been an opposition to El Chavismo, which is the term given to the political movement that Hugo Chávez founded. Over time, [the movement has] been effective at grinding down most of the opposition. Having said that, there’s always someone who emerges from the murk and bears their chest to the regime and shakes their fist. And in the past couple of years, it’s been this woman, she’s been around a while, but she’s now emerged as the top dog of the opposition, the kind of saving grace of non-Chavista Venezuela. And that’s Maria Corina Machado.
She campaigned vigorously against Maduro and was declared to be illegitimate on fairly specious grounds by the country’s electoral tribunal, which is another way they neutralize the opposition. Now, she is clever, and she’s also very connected with Americans and other political groups outside. She found a retired former diplomat who wouldn’t harm a fly and who nobody in Venezuela knew as her strawman candidate: Edmundo González.
And he ran in the elections last summer against Maduro. But everybody knew if they voted for him, they were really voting for her and that somehow she would emerge from behind him. And all the evidence suggests that Edmundo González, fronting for her, won the election.
But of course Maduro is still president.
I wanna bring Trump into this. Donald Trump takes office in 2016, and he and Maduro seem to genuinely dislike each other. Is this just a case of an American president and a Venezuelan president really disliking each other because they have very different goals and ambitions? Or is there something unique about the Trump-Maduro relationship?
The very first meeting that Donald Trump in his first term had with his colleagues in Latin America, the first words out of Donald Trump’s mouth was, “I want to invade Venezuela” or “Let’s invade Venezuela,” something like that. And they were shocked. And they said, “Well, Mr. President, that’s probably not a good idea.”
And it went on from there. So he came into office, back in 2017, wanting to overthrow Maduro. Maduro had been vilified by the conservative American emigre community since he took office, as had Chávez before him. They were seen as a new Cuban revolution, Castro Chávismo.
And of course, Trump is Mar-a-Lago. And who is around him in Florida? Look at the panoply of characters that are there. You have an extremely conservative political environment. You have Colombian Americans, Venezuelan Americans, Cuban Americans, then others who have emerged as we’ve all seen over the past years as very effective lobbyists on behalf of the political opponents to anything smelling of the left in Latin America.
President Trump wants Nicholas Maduro out. How easy or hard would that be?
Chávez did a great deal to inculcate a new generation of soldiers and young officers with an ideology that was anti-imperialist, therefore anti-American.
So there’s several scenarios that I could see the Americans trying. Land attacks. Drone airstrikes against supposed drug transshipment points, which might or might not be isolated posts in the jungle or possibly military garrisons where they claim they’re colluding with narco traffickers as a way to destabilize or frighten Maduro.
Option two would be an assassination strike or an attempt to cause real damage, demoralizing damage to the armed forces and the regime itself. And thus make it appear weak in the face of the population, in the hopes that the population who — polls would suggest — love and cherish Maria Corina Machado would pour into the streets demanding the ouster of the regime.
I think by now most people believe that even if they were to change Maduro, it wouldn’t settle the country. How would Maria Corina Machado simply replace him in power? Would the Americans have to come and form a praetorian guard around her to protect her? I think if you ask most Venezuelans what they would like, they would like Maduro to leave and [for] there not to be any American military intervention. And I don’t know that those two are [happening] at the moment. We don’t know whether those two are mutually irreconcilable or not.
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