Nicolás Maduro

Episode 20  |  Nicolás Maduro was easy to underestimate. 

He was mocked as a bus driver, an idiot, and dismissed as a weak successor to Hugo Chávez. But behind the jokes was a far more experienced political operator—one shaped by Cuba and increasingly dependent on an informal alliance with Diosdado Cabello. 

This episode looks at the man Maduro really was, the crisis he inherited, and how the alliance that would define Venezuela’s next chapter began to take shape. 

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Transcript

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Speaker 2 0:04

This is the Venezuelan National Assembly, April 30th, 2013. Just 16 days after Nicolas Maduro was elected president. The country was still reeling from the election. Maduro had officially defeated Henrique Capriles by less than two percentage points. The opposition refused to accept the result without a full audit. And Diosdado Cabello, the president of the National Assembly, and one of the most powerful men in Chavismo, had responded by announcing that opposition deputies would not be allowed to speak in parliament until they recognized Maduro as president. The tensions had already turned violent. Two weeks earlier, opposition deputy William Davila had been beaten over the head with a microphone during a fight on the floor of the National Assembly. He needed 16 stitches. Some government deputies celebrated that. The Chavista deputy Elvis Amoroso tweeted, What he got was well deserved, and if they want, we'll give it to them on the streets, too. Then, on April 30th, opposition deputies arrived at the National Assembly and discovered that their microphones had been removed. On Diosdado Cabello's orders. After hours of delay, the microphones were restored and the session finally began. But less than 30 minutes later, Cabello once again announced that the opposition would not be allowed to speak. So the opposition protested. They blew horns and vuvuzuelas. They unfurled a massive banner that read, "Golpe al Parlamento." Coup against the Parliament. And then the chamber exploded. Pro-government deputies rushed at the opposition benches. Deputies were punched, kicked, thrown to the floor. Deputy Maria Corina Machado, today's Nobel Peace Prize laureate, stepped up to the podium to where Diosdado was to denounce the violence. That's when Chavista deputy Nancy Asensio grabbed her by the hair, pulled her to the floor, and kicked her repeatedly in the face. Diosdado Cabello watched all of this from his chair, laughing. Julio Borges suffered a fractured cheekbone. María Corina Machado suffered a broken nose. Americo de Grazia was hospitalized after being beaten by several government deputies and being pushed down a staircase. They are there by fraud. And who continue to fight until it becomes reality. Private media had been barred from the chamber. The doors were locked. And when the fighting began, the National Assembly's official television channel cut the audio and pointed its camera toward the ceiling. Fortunately, deputies had their phones. The videos escaped. And Venezuelans watched as pro-government deputies beat their elected representatives inside the institution that was supposed to embody political debate. This was Nicolas Maluros Venezuela, and he had been president for less than three weeks. The April election had left Venezuela split almost perfectly in half, and the opposition wanted one thing: a full audit. Instead, the government treated the refusal to recognize Maduro as an act of insubordination. Diosdado Cabello removed opposition deputies from important committee positions and temporarily withheld their salaries. Then, in July, the Chavista majority stripped opposition deputy Richard Mardo of his parliamentary immunity, so that prosecutors could pursue accusations of supposed money laundering and tax fraud. The opposition argued that the vote itself violated the Constitution. But that was the trap that the Venezuelan opposition now found itself in. The ruling party insisted that everyone had to respect the institutions. But the ruling party controlled the institutions. It was a player on the field, but it was also the referee. It counted the votes. It audited the votes. It controlled the courts that decided whether the rules had been followed. And it controlled the institutions that could punish anyone who refused to accept their decisions. Submit, and you legitimize a system designed against you. Resist, and you could be accused of refusing to respect democracy. Years of institutional manipulation had created an impossible political dilemma for the Venezuelan opposition. And Chavez had spent 14 years teaching his movement that the opposition was not simply a political rival. It was an enemy, an enemy of the people. An enemy ultimately that could be treated like traitors, not like fellow Venezuelans. That political culture that Chavez created remained. But unfortunately for Maduro, he had also inherited something else. An economic time bomb. When Chavez died, the Venezuelan economy was already beginning to crack. Within months it became impossible to ignore. Milk, eggs, sugar, rice, coffee, flour, cooking oil, toilet paper, basic products began disappearing from store shelves. And Venezuelans learned a new routine. You waited in a line to enter the supermarket, then another line to reach whatever ration product had arrived that day, and then another line to pay.

Speaker 6:19

For the past year, long lines at supermarkets and shortages of basic products have become the new norm.

Speaker 2 6:25

Long lines at the supermarkets are normal, and business leaders blame the government's strict currency controls, but the government claims that business owners are hoarding the food to sell on the black market. Annual inflation reached 56% in 2013. And Maduro had an explanation. Sabotage. We won't count on the bourgeoisie. We are going to radicalize the revolution. Enough is enough. No more smiles. No more smiles for the bourgeoisie. He who could not maintain his economic activity can leave. But whoever we find in conspiracies and sabotage to prison. They must be imprisoned. Y pagar lo que la hacen pueblo for what they've done to the people. According to Maduro, the opposition was waging an economic war hiding products. Foreign interests were conspiring against Venezuela. The United States was attacking the revolution. It became one of the central narratives of Maduro's presidency. La guerra económica. The economic war.

Speaker 7 7:49

La guerra económica, la guerra económica es un monstruo mutante.

Speaker 2 7:52

But it wasn't CIA agents who emptied Venezuela's supermarket shelves. The root of the crisis went way back. Under Chávez, the Venezuelan state had expropriated hundreds of businesses involved in agriculture and food production, along with millions of hectares of farmland. Many of those businesses subsequently collapsed under state management. But for years, Chávez used oil money to import what the country could no longer produce after domestic production was destroyed. Food, medicine, consumer goods. By this point, roughly 70% of what Venezuelans consumed was imported, and the government often resold imported food at enormous subsidies, sometimes absorbing most of the cost itself. As long as oil was above $100 a barrel, the system could limp along. But it was extraordinarily fragile. Venezuela was increasingly consuming things that it did not produce, using dollars generated entirely by oil. And at the same time, government spending continued to explode. When the dollars weren't enough, the state printed bolivares. That created inflation. The government responded with price controls, which then created another problem. Imagine it costs a farmer 200 bolivares to produce a carton of eggs. But the government says you can only sell it for 100 bolivares. The farmer loses money every time he sells eggs. Eventually, he just stops producing them. The government could order prices downward, but it couldn't order products into existence. By the end of 2013, shortages had become a part of everyday Venezuelan life. And Venezuelans were beginning to ask an increasingly obvious question. Was Maduro actually capable of running the country? Because listen, Maduro was very easy to make fun of. He had neither Chávez's charisma nor his instinct for television. And he definitely did not have Chávez's ability to dominate a room. From almost the moment he became president, Maduro became a punchline. During the 2013 presidential campaign, he traveled to Savaneta, the small town in Barinas where Chávez had been born. There, Maduro told Venezuelans about something that had happened to him that morning. Then it landed on a wooden beam and whistled.

Speaker 7 10:34

So Madudo whistled back.

Speaker 2 11:26

Instead, Maduro said that Jesus had multiplied Los Penes, the penises. There were grammatical mistakes, mispronunciations, strange metaphors, and half-finished thoughts. And eventually Venezuelans invented a name for them Maduradas, Maduroisms. Some mocked him by calling him Maburro, Maduro combined with burro, donkey. And underneath all of this was his infamous resume. Nicolas Maduro had been a bus driver. As the economy deteriorated, the jokes became a political explanation. Of course Venezuela was falling apart. Look who was running it. Maduro was an idiot, Maduro was incompetent, Maluro had no idea what he was doing. And that became one of the most persistent assumptions about Nicolas Maduro. But in my opinion, it was extremely dangerous. Because Nicolas Maduro was not stupid. And he was not politically inexperienced. The story of the bus driver was true, but it's also incomplete. Maludo had spent decades in radical politics. Long before most Venezuelans knew his name, he had joined the civilian network surrounding Chavez's insurrectionist movement in the military. He later helped create Chavez's first political party, the Fifth Republic Movement. He was elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1999, then to the National Assembly. And there, Maduro discovered one of his greatest political talents. He was good at navigating power. Maduro and his partner, an eventual wife, Cilia Flores, became increasingly important inside Chavez's movement after the rupture with Chavez's old political mentor, Luis Miquilena. Former Chavista Congresswoman Amalia Saez later described why Maduro and Cilia became so useful to Chavez. Maduro and Cilia knew how to interpret Chavez's political decisions and secure the votes necessary to approve funding and enabling laws. That was invaluable. Chavez could give an order, but it was Madudo and Cilia who made the machinery move in the National Assembly. And Maduro kept rising. In 2006, Chavez appointed him foreign minister. For the next six years, Maduro became one of the principal architects of Chavez's foreign policy. He cultivated the government's relationship with China, Russia, Iran, and above all, Cuba. Maduro helped strengthen the series of new left-wing governments that had emerged across Latin America at the time. Then, in October 2012, six days after winning his final presidential election, Chavez named Nicolas Maduro vice president. Two months later, as Chavez prepared to return to Cuba for cancer surgery, he went on TV and told Venezuelans that if he could no longer continue as president, they should elect Nicolás Maduro. This was not an accident. One possible answer begins before Chavez ever became president. When Maduro was 24 years old, he traveled to Havana. From 1986 to 1987, Maduro studied at the Escuela Nacional de Cuadros Julio Antonio Media, a political training school run by the Cuban Communist Party. This was not military training, it was ideological formation. One of Maduro's Colombian classmates later remembered him as analytical and deeply engaged in debates over Latin America's future. And there have also been more dramatic allegations about Maduro's time in Cuba. Some accounts say he developed a relationship with Pedro Miret, a member of the Cuban Politburo and close ally of Fidel Castro. Retired Venezuelan general Carlos Peñalosa has gone much further, claiming that Maduro underwent a lengthy process of political formation in Cuba and was eventually tasked by Cuban intelligence into penetrating Chavez's movement. The allegation has never been conclusively proven. But it's not necessary to accept the most conspiratorial version of Maduro's biography to see the larger point here. Nicolas Maduro was deeply ideologically aligned with the Cuban Revolution. And in 2012, Cuba had an enormous interest in the survival of Chavismo. Venezuela supplied the island with oil. A lot of oil. The two governments shared intelligence relationships. Cuban personnel operated throughout the Venezuelan state. And Chavez personally regarded Fidel Castro as a mentor. So when Chávez had to choose someone who could protect the revolution after his death, Maduro offered something enormously valuable, ideological reliability. Diosdado Cabello was everything Maduro wasn't. He was military, a lieutenant who had participated along Chávez in the February 1992 coup attempt. He had been with the movement from the beginning, and unlike Maduro, Diosdado had built an enormous personal network inside the Venezuelan state. Vice President, Minister of the Interior and Justice, Minister of Infrastructure, Governor of Miranda, Minister of Public Works and Housing, President of the National Assembly. Those were all his positions. His influence extended through the military, customs agencies, state banks, infrastructure ministries, security forces, and intelligence services. His brother, Jose David Cabello, controlled Seniat, the government agency responsible for taxation and customs. And dozens of officers from Diosdado's graduating class at the military academy eventually appeared in influential positions across the state. Positions that were also very lucrative for corruption. Diosdado had spent years cultivating a reputation for corruption. In 2008, even Luis Tascon, the Chavista deputy infamous for publishing the list of Venezuelans who had signed the petition for Chavez's recall referendum in 2003, publicly attacked him. And when reporters accused Tascon of unfairly attacking, quote, poor Diosdado, he responded with a surprisingly incisive line. Diosdado Cabello is anything but poor. But corruption didn't make Diosdado weak. It made him powerful. Because Diosdado Cabello understood something fundamental about Chavismo. Power didn't come from holding office. It came from controlling the people who held offices, who ran customs, who controlled imports, who signed government contracts, who commanded military units, managed intelligence agencies, who could protect you and your interests, and who could destroy your enemies. By the end of the Chavez era, Diosdado had built a machine inside the larger Chavista machine. In some ways, he was the natural heir to the political military system Chavez had created, which made Chavez's decision to choose Maduro all the more interesting. Maduro had something Diosdado lacked, Chavez's explicit blessing. Diosdado had something Maduro lacked, the military. And after Chavez died, neither man could easily dispense with the other. Maduro could stand before the country and say, Chavez chose me. He could present himself as the inheritor of the revolution. He had relationships with Cuba, with the region's left-wing governments, with Russia and China. He had Chavez's name, but he had never been a soldier. He hadn't participated in the 1992 coup. He didn't have decades of personal relationships inside the armed forces. Diosdado did. And so the survival of Chavismo increasingly dependent on this alliance between two men: Nicolas Maduro, president of the Republic, Chavez's chosen heir, the ideological and diplomatic face of the new government. And Diosdado Cabello, president of the National Assembly, military man, patronage boss, and power broker. The man with tentacles running through the Venezuelan state. One inherited Chavez's blessing, the other had inherited much of Chavez's state machinery. And together they faced a country that was becoming more difficult to govern by the month. The economy was deteriorating. Opposition sentiment was growing. Maduro was unpopular and increasingly ridiculed. And the one man capable of holding all of Chavismo together, Hugo Chavez, was dead. For years, Venezuelans would continue laughing at the little bird, at the Maduradas, at the bus driver who somehow became president. But the joke was a distraction. It concealed something much more important. Nicolás Maduro might not have been Hugo Chavez, but he didn't need to be. Because the system Chavez left behind no longer depended on one charismatic leader. It depended on institutions that had been captured. Military officers who had been rewarded, pseudo-businessmen who had become rich, judges and prosecutors who understood what was expected of them. And men like Diodado Cabello, who knew exactly where every lever of power was located. The question was not whether Maduro was impressive enough to replace Chávez, it was whether he could learn to use the machine Chávez left him. He could. And Venezuela was about to find out just how far he was willing to go. Hey guys, thanks so much for listening. I just wanted to announce here that I've started making YouTube videos. I'm gonna do QA answer videos on YouTube Lives, but right now I have one that's bilingual, that's up on the channel, so you can check it out if you want. I'll leave the link in the description.