When Hugo Chávez launched his revolution with an early morning coup against the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez, a young boy was sleeping in his bed. He woke up the next morning, February 4, 1992, to the news that the coup plotters, led by the brown man with the sharp face, then called Chávez, had failed. The skirmish had left about thirty bodies around the Miraflores Palace. The lieutenant colonel, wearing a red beret, took historical responsibility for that moment and went to the Yare prison, where he talked to a plaster bust of Simón Bolívar when he wasn’t reading political theory. That dawn planted the seed for a legend that would grow over the next decade. The boy who woke up to all the commotion on the radio and television got a call Nicolas Maduro Moros and he was about to turn 30. His career as a driver for the Caracas Metro had just begun.
Looking back, Maduro's life is full of more or less sweet anecdotes. In addition to the myth built around the figure of Chavez -sometimes exaggerated and often misinterpreted-, erecting an effigy in his name is not at all easy. In his biography it is difficult to find heroic moments, scenes of revolutionary courage. Bolívar and Chávez held guns, Maduro a baseball bat and the steering wheel of a metrobus. This last presidential campaign, with which he is seeking his second re-election, has been a good moment to rewrite passages of his existence. A well-produced film with professional actors in the style of The Wonder Years has been appended to a book. At one point, a voice-over of the character playing a grown teenager asks: “Would it be better to go play in the big leagues of the United States or stay in my country to make the revolution?” That dilemma has never existed, neither because of an outstanding revolutionary nor because of a baseball prodigy.
Maduro was born on November 23, 1962, in a private clinic in Caracas. She received her early education at a nun’s school. He was part of a middle-class family living in an apartment building. A father, a left-wing economist, founder of the Popular Electoral Movement and activist in the Socialist League, and a housewife mother who is not often talked about – very pious and God-fearing, as she recently said. Also, three older sisters graduated from university. Nicolás was the little one.
His arrival in the world coincided with the decade of guerrilla uprisings, when the myth of the Cuban revolution had already emerged. Fidel Castro. These were also the first years of Venezuelan democracy, after the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez. Governments repressed demonstrations, detained students and tortured them in the basements of police stations. Nicolás was hardly a child. In his film, that era is introduced with the murder of the father of Jorge Rodríguez, now his main political actor, by the military intelligence services. An episode that has little to do with him. Due to his recurring digressions during his rallies or his television appearances, he spent a lot of time in front of the television, zapping between Spiderman, Starsky and Hutch And columboAs a teenager, he was already a student at a public high school, where he drove his father's Ford Fairlane, and his main dilemmas were whether to devote himself to baseball, music in a rock band, or politics, where he had already become active in the left-wing group Ruptura y then in The Socialist League.
He eventually ended up in Havana, where he studied at a training school for leftist political cadres. Upon his return to Venezuela, he joined the MBR 200, Chávez’s civil-military revolutionary movement. He visited Chávez in prison, whom he already admired with burning passion. At that time, he also crossed paths with Cilia Flores, then a lawyer who joined the cause of the release of political prisoners who would eventually become the first lady. Maduro had another previous marriage about which very little is known, except that a son was born who bears his name and who follows in his footsteps into politics. Cilia added three other children that Maduro sponsored to that family. Together with Cilia and other staunch members of Chavismo, such as current Attorney General Tarek William Saab, Maduro fought for clemency for Chávez’s release and achieved the dismissal of the case during the administration of President Rafael Caldera, two years after his arrest. The year was 1994.
In the 25 years of the revolution, Maduro has been a city councilor, deputy, president of the parliament and chancellor for six years, leaving behind the seal of Chavista petrodiplomacy, briefly vice president of the Republic and head of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela. Since December 8, 2012, nothing more and nothing less than the heir to the legacy of the revolution, by decision of Chávez himself, who chose the boy who slept the night he entered Caracas with the tanks. Chávez announced this during a televised event, while terminally ill with cancer, shortly after he was re-elected. That was his farewell, his political testament. “You choose Nicolás Maduro,” he said, looking at the camera. On your right, God given haircomrade in the fight, comrade, the favorite in the line of succession. On the left, Nicholas, the anointed, the chosen one. That image would help people later imagine a supposed rivalry between the two. There was none and there will not be. The union of Maduro and Cabello has been fundamental for Chavismo to remain in power so many years later.
The mission that the commander left him before he died led him to become president on April 14, 2013, a month after he was buried, and to be re-elected at all costs in 2018 in elections in which the application for the card was declared invalid. which brought together the opposition coalition, the MUD, and which was not recognized by a large part of the international community, which accused fraud. A crisis of legitimacy began, the waters in which it has swum in recent years.
Many thought that he would not survive in office like this, isolated and dogged by US sanctions. His own people would cut off his head, alarmed by his lack of leadership. They did not give him the talent to overcome a situation like this. They were wrong. Maduro has managed to silence all internal dissent, no one challenges his seat. He retains control over the structures, even stronger than Chávez. He sees himself as a survivor. Those around him consider it unfair to sanctify Chávez, who gave him a country on the brink of economic collapse, with GDP falling by a third, the oil economy dismantled and a quarter of the population forced to emigrate. He resisted, he thinks as he looks in the mirror. With growth forecast at 4% this year, he claims that the worst is over and that Venezuela can look forward to a decade of recovery under his leadership.
To exercise leadership under the shadow that usually cloaks heirs, Maduro has had to build a more military government than that of Chávez himself. He exercises an authoritarian presidency with a staggering toll of human rights violations and hundreds of political prisoners, the first Latin American country to reach the International Criminal Court. That and other issues have pushed him into international turmoil, to the point of becoming a pariah. Some signs of openness toward Colombia and the White House in recent years have given him some public weight. But diplomacy has been limited to Russia, Cuba, China, Iran and Turkey. Maduro is confident that he can defeat the opposition in the elections this Sunday, without cheating, and demonstrate to the world—at least that is what he and those around him say—that he is a legitimate president, loved by the people. If he becomes president in 2030, he will have ruled Venezuela for many more years than Chávez. The commander arrived earlier, while he was sleeping, the power was reserved for him later, without haste.
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