Updated January 5, 2026 at 4:13 PM EST
MEDELLÍN, Colombia — On New Year's Eve, just three days before U.S. military personnel would rouse him from sleep and deliver him to a New York City jail, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro drove through the center of Caracas, narrating the city's landmarks to a friendly interviewer.
As he steered, he lingered on history and nostalgia. He recalled a 1959 speech by Fidel Castro in downtown Caracas, marveled at his childhood home, and, after 40 minutes of conversation, finally acknowledged the U.S. warships gathered off Venezuela's coast.
"If they want oil, Venezuela is ready for U.S. investment like Chevron," Maduro said in a video broadcast by state television. "Whenever they want it, wherever they want it and however they want it."
The olive branch he appeared to be extending was, of course, too little and too late for the Trump administration, which said it had been negotiating the terms of his exit. But it revealed how Maduro, 63, has long moved at his own pace, indifferent to deadlines imposed by adversaries.
His rise had been slow, beginning in youth politics and shaped by the mentorship of the country's most powerful figure, Hugo Chávez. Maduro's fall, too, unfolded over years. As president, he presided over more than a decade of policies that sent Venezuela's economy into free fall and helped drive the migration of millions from the country.
"I think this is the effect of negligence and a lack of empathy for Venezuelan society," said Boris Muñoz, a Venezuelan journalist who interviewed Maduro as a lawmaker in 2003 and has reported on him since. "There were many moments when he could have stepped aside or corrected course, and he didn't do it. He just kept going."
When Maduro assumed the presidency in 2013, Muñoz wrote a profile for the Mexican magazine Gatopardo, where he details how the leader was shaped by far-left politics from an early age.
He grew up with his parents and three siblings in a two-bedroom apartment in southern Caracas. His father held leadership roles in a local workers union, and as a teenager Maduro, sponsored by the Socialist League, spent a year in Havana studying politics. When he returned, he drove a bus and rose to lead a workers union in the Caracas metro system.
After Chávez swept to power in 1998, defeating the once-dominant center-left Acción Democrática and center-right Copei parties, Maduro was elected to Congress. In 2006, Chávez elevated him to foreign minister, placing him at the center of a political project obsessed with Simón Bolívar, the early 19th century Andean colonial liberator, born in Caracas. Bolívar dreamed of Spain's former colonies in Latin America uniting against the outside world, a spirit that Chávez embraced, frequently invoking Bolívar's name in speeches and including it in the new name the country adopted under the constitution Chávez put in place in 1999: the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
"Chávez had an army of spokespeople, but Maduro was prominent among them," Muñoz said. "He was very loyal, and he was a very good surrogate for Chávez's wishes and whims."
The loyalty proved decisive. Before dying of cancer in 2013, Chávez handpicked Maduro as his successor, entrusting him with a country already buckling under the weight of dependence on oil, and the realization that prosperity was coming to an end.
Venezuela had ridden a boom fueled by historically high oil prices — the lifeblood of its economy and virtually its sole export — but that cushion collapsed not long after Maduro was sworn in as president in 2013. As the writer Alma Guillermoprieto observed in her recent book, The Years of Blood, Chávez got lucky: "He had the good fortune to die before the bill arrived for the havoc he wreaked on the economy."
Maduro soon presided over the collapse of what had once been one of Latin America's most prosperous economies.
His government leaned heavily on the state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela S.A. to dispense patronage and shore up political loyalty. As deficits mounted, authorities ordered the Central Bank of Venezuela to print money, a move that rendered the local Bolívar currency effectively worthless, said José Guerra, an economist who spent two decades at the Central Bank and served in the National Assembly from 2015 to 2021.
The result was economic devastation on a historic scale. From 2012 to last year, Venezuela's gross domestic product shrank by nearly 80%, according to figures from the International Monetary Fund. Inflation in 2018 exceeded 65,000%.
The collapse set off one of the largest migration movements in the world. At least 7.9 million Venezuelans have fled the country, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency, seeking safety and the means to feed their families. Many have crossed the often deadly rainforest passage of the Darién Gap linking Colombia and Panama on their way to the United States. Most have remained elsewhere in Latin America.
"Maduro received an economy in crisis, and he made things worse by naming people to top positions who knew nothing about governing," Guerra says.
Opposition to the regime became more apparent, as Maduro scrambled to control a process he deemed as democratic. In 2024 the Carter Center for Democracy, the only independent group allowed to monitor Venezuela's presidential election, said the Maduro government imposed so many restrictions — including barring leading opposition candidate María Corina Machado from running — that the vote could not be considered legitimate.
Based on 81% of ballots tallied by opposition poll watchers, the Carter Center said opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia won in a landslide with 67% of the vote. González fled the country, Machado was forced into hiding, and Maduro declared himself the winner.
The U.S. Justice Department's case against Maduro connects Venezuela's economic collapse to accusations of drug trafficking, alleging he was responsible for running a vast drug-trafficking operation flooding narcotics into the United States. In his New Year's Eve interview, he rejected claims that he was the head of a "narco-terrorist" crime organization, and said the true objective of the U.S. was to seize Venezuela's natural resources.
Maduro made his first appearance in federal court in New York on Monday, as did his wife Cilia Flores, after the two were captured by U.S. forces over the weekend. They pleaded not guilty to the charges.
In a video posted on Saturday by the White House, two U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents in New York grip his arms and escort him away as he stands tall, smiles and wishes onlookers a happy new year — a strongman formed in the certainties of a revolution, but with the consequences of his rule finally closing in.
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