Nicolás Maduro
has survived 10 years of a stormy and rocky government, whose presidency has been questioned and rejected since the same April 14, 2013 when he assumed power as a result of
dubious and fraudulent elections
, which have never been clarified for his own advantage.
The doubtful origins of his first electoral victory with 50.66% and his internationally unrecognized presidential re-election in 2018 have marked his performance throughout his government, described as the worst
Venezuela has had
in all of its contemporary history.
In Venezuela, the presidential term is 6 years and there is no second round.
His rival Henrique Capriles Radonsky, who was the standard-bearer for the opposition in 2013 and who obtained 49.09%, went so far as to say on the Ana Rosa Program on Spanish television that Maduro had stolen the elections from him because he
refused
a scrutiny audit by
a difference of 0.33 points
of the vote after having recognized his victory.
Capriles, who is competing in the opposition primaries on October 22, being the favorite of the Madurismo, assures that he did not fight electoral theft to "avoid a civil war
.
"
He recently also said that he opposed the popular revolt of 2014, led by Leopoldo López, currently in exile in Madrid.
Usurper or fraud?
But if doubts about whether Maduro, 60,
was born in Colombia or Venezuela
, are added to his obscure electoral origin, then the country's presidency poses the dilemma of whether power is in the hands of
an ambitious usurper
or
a great phony
who has managed to deceive half the world.
Maduro's famous phrases
Chávez's little bird / April 2013
A month after the death of the former president, Maduro said the following during his first speech in the presidential campaign: "I entered a small chapel this morning (...) Suddenly a small bird entered and circled me three times up here
He stood on a wooden beam and began to whistle, a nice whistle.
I stared at him and whistled at him too.
The little bird looked at me weird.
He whistled for a while, turned me around and left and I felt the spirit of him Chávez.
“Christ multiplied penises” / August 2013
One of the most remembered “maduradas” occurred in 2013, when he made a mistake when citing the Bible and said: “You have to go school by school, child by child, high school by high school, community by community.
Get in there, multiply, just as Christ multiplied the penises... sorry, the fish and the loaves.
Will you excuse the expression? ”, She tried to apologize.
“Millions and Millions” / August 2013
In a speech in front of the crowd in Caracas, the president made the word million feminine.
“Today we have millions and millions of Bolívars,” he said of his party supporters.
Maduro had this slip at an event that commemorated the 200th anniversary of Simón Bolívar's entry into Caracas.
“Those capitalists who steal like us” / November 2013
Slip or confession?
Maduro affirmed during a press conference with small and medium-sized merchants that "capitalists speculate and steal like us."
“I want to tell you here, pay attention to small and medium-sized businessmen in this country, those businessmen you know are just as much victims of capital, of capitalists who speculate and steal as we are;
because they are squeezed by the so-called suppliers and wholesalers, they are squeezed in shopping malls, they are squeezed doubly”, he stated before the microphones, without retracting what he had said.
The collective “self-suicide” of the economy / January 2014
In a statement before Parliament to offer his 2014 management report and announce economic measures to combat the crisis, Maduro said that "it would be a collective self-suicide of the country's economy."
This in rejection of the creation of a system with a single exchange rate at 30 or 40 dollars, which was proposed by some economists.
“Bolivar was orphaned by his wife” / March 2014
"Bolívar's rich boy died without a shirt, because he gave all his wealth to the cause of the country, to independence, and left a mark on the ethics that should drive the future of our country," Maduro explained during a speech at a radio and television network from the state of Aragua.
However, the Chavista leader affirmed that Bolívar was "orphaned by his wife", we assume that he wanted to express that he was widowed.
He said like this: "He was orphaned by his father at 3 years old, orphaned by his mother at 9, just at 17, 18 years old he was orphaned by his wife," said the president.
Maduro confuses the "Gremlins" with the "Grinch" / December 2014
The always controversial president of Venezuela confused the "Gremlins" with the "Grinch", a character from a children's story who hates Christmas.
Maduro's statements were made during the march against US imperialism and where he also confused the date on which the Christmas holidays are celebrated.
“When December 31 comes around we will be hugging each other.
Let's have a merry Christmas.
Do you know what the Gremlins are?
They don't know what the Gremlins are.
A monster who hates Christmas, ”said the president during his speech.
"Dolphins and dolphins"
“You have to do like the dolphins… and the dolphins… do you know how dolphins sleep?
Dolphins when they sleep, half of the brain is awake, with all its functions, so as not to sink, not drown.
And the other half, rest.
This is how we should do it.
One eye open… and another one too.”
The Venezuelan authorities will work "35 hours a day" / August 2015
The Venezuelan president was also the subject of ridicule on social networks after a speech in which he said that the Venezuelan authorities will work "35 hours a day" to preserve security on the border with Colombia.
"Gustavo González López (Minister of the Interior and Justice) is dedicated 35 hours a day, at all times, with his work team, vice ministers, police directors, to all these operations to liberate and protect the people of the OLP. (…).
This is an infinite task,” Maduro said.
“With Chávez I did not doubt a millimeter of a second” / August 2015
The error this time was not on the political level, but on the measurement units when using millimeters to refer to a part of a second.
"When I met Commander Chávez, I did not hesitate for a second to be by his side and tell him, you, command, that we are going towards victory and count on me forever," Maduro said.
Photo:
Back to the Future / January 2019
On the occasion of a presentation before members of the Venezuelan Armed Forces, the president assured that he was able to travel to the future... and return to tell what is happening there: "Be sure that everything will be fine and that we will come out stronger and more wise of all this situation.
A handful of immature improvisers will not be able to harm the republican life of Venezuela," said the president during an inspection of the preparations for the 2019 Sovereignty Military Exercise. "Rest assured.
I tell you for sure.
I already went to the future and came back and saw that everything goes well and that the civic-military union guarantees peace and happiness to our people", concluded the Bolivarian leader, who has just started a second term not recognized by a large part of the international community.
"Galactic" tourism for "extraterrestrial beings" to visit Venezuela / February 2023
"Tourism is the secret weapon for the development of the new Venezuelan economic model, for the new stage of Venezuela's economic renaissance. Tourism, tourism and more tourism. National tourism, international tourism, and if possible also galactic, let the aliens come to Venezuela," he said on Wednesday, during a working day broadcast on state television.
"Now that there are UFOs in the United States. Have you seen? Balloons and UFOs, aliens come to Venezuela. Now that we have digital robots. I am a digital robot, the people are digital robots."
The truth is that this bus driver and union member of the Caracas Metro,
without presenting his high school diploma
from his studies but with a record of medical rest filed in his subway file, has never presented a clean and transparent certificate of electoral origin to to be president of Venezuela.
He did not do so in either of the two presidential elections.
He also did not present his birth certificate to clear up doubts about his promotion.
The man from Havana
Cuban President Raúl Castro and his Venezuelan counterpart Nicolás Maduro, in Havana, in April 2013. Photo EFE
Being the “man from Havana'', as the Castro brothers defined him for having taken a political course for cadres in Cuba in his adolescence, earned him the opportunity to become the bridge and spokesman
for the Castroites
before Commander Hugo Chávez.
Throughout these 10 years, the Cuban influence has been shared with that of the Ecuadorian Rafael Correa in the last 3 years, especially in the Venezuelan economy.
Before being president,
Maduro was chancellor
for six years during which he cultivated and deepened relations with his leftist, radical and terrorist peers, from the Sao Paulo forum, from the Middle East (with Hezbollah and Hamas) and Asia.
It was the days of the
$100 a barrel oil boom
when I could charter 240-passenger planes with friends and family.
The then President of Venezuela Hugo Chávez and his Foreign Minister Nicolás Maduro in the Miraflores Palace, in 2011. Photo EFE
Before dying of sudden cancer,
Hugo Chávez presented him as his heir
.
It was a kind of political testament.
"Vote for Maduro
,
" he said dying, on his deathbed in December 2012, before leaving for Cuba for the last time.
Fidel and Raúl Castro
had prepared the transition from Chávez to Maduro
.
They had even invented Chávez's electronic signature, the so-called “rabo de cochino”, to include it in the documents for the transfer of power between the CNE and the Supreme Court of Justice, while Chávez was kept in artificial life, to adapt the laws
to
the measure of the size of Maduro.
In Venezuela, the signatures of the documents before registries and notaries must be in person and not electronic.
But both the commander's signature and his gaze were painted on the city's buildings to
show the ubiquity and omnipresence of the "eternal and galactic" commander
.
protests and repression
One year after taking power, the opposition leader Leopoldo López decided to promote the 2014 protests, but they were strongly repressed during the four months that they lasted throughout the country.
The balance was
43 demonstrators killed and more than 200 imprisoned.
The president of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro Guerra renders an account of his mandate in 2018. Photo EFE
Another wave of protests broke out in 2017 with more than 100 protesters killed.
The protests have decreased in intensity but continue to be carried out by small union groups of workers and pensioners, who earn 5 dollars a month.
This is how more than 20 daily protests are organized in different cities.
There are more than 300 political prisoners between civilians and the military
after 10 years of repression and torture of dissidents in the regime's prisons.
The most important are exchanged for sanctions or foreign prisoners, depending on the interest of the moment shown by the Chavista government.
Maduro's cunning has managed to buy and divide the opposition parties to stay in power.
He will also shut down and control the
print, radio and digital
media .
Last year the regime closed almost 100 radio stations and more than 50 digital media that cannot be opened locally due to official censorship and the control that the regime imposes on the internet.
Economic destruction Maduro is King Midas in reverse, paradoxical as it may seem in the country with the largest oil reserves in the world: everything he touches turns into ruins and destruction.
In his 10 years,
more than 500,000 companies have closed
and some 700 industries have been expropriated by his regime, according to the census of the National Commerce Council (Consecomercio).
A protest against Maduro in 2019, in Caracas.
AP Photo
The national economy has suffered a brutal drop of 80% of GDP, and in the last 4 years it has improved by 40%.
Hyperinflation reached more than 35,000% two years ago.
Poverty rose from 45% to 95% of the population and today it is 82%
, according to the Encovi survey of the Andrés Bello Catholic University.
As if that were not enough, the bolivar also sank.
From 2007 to 2021, the national currency suffered a mutilation or
depreciation of 14 zeros
, forcing Maduro to push for dollarization following the advice of Correa's Ecuadorian consultants.
The critically poor sector, of 56%, no longer rummages through the garbage every day to provide their ration of a daily meal, but once or twice a week according to the polls, but the migration of 7 million Venezuelans fleeing looking for a better life abroad have not stopped.
Maduro has surprised by imprisoning some 35 executives of the state oil industry Petróleo de Venezuela (PDVSA) for an embezzlement of between
3,000 million and 23,000 million dollars
.
He has also arrested the 7 responsible for the Venezuelan Corporation of Guayana (CVG) and the former director of immigration and former governor of Trujillo, Hugo Cabezas.
But he has not put the oil super minister Tareck El Aissami, his preferred financial arm, behind bars
in a kind of open war between chavismo mafias
.
The former oil minister does not have an arrest warrant but has been in hiding since March 6.
The cause has become a kind of open war between chavismo mafias, where the detainees receive privileged treatment in the chavista judicial system.
They are even surprised by parading in their imported orange overalls (in Venezuela prisoners do not wear a uniform) without chains or handcuffs before the courts
with the "mafia dolls" of the network of corruption.
The staging of the supposed anti-corruption fight could have several readings.
It would be a retaliation or vendetta by Maduro against those involved in the loss of oil funds to finance his 2024 electoral campaign or a "purge" operation that seeks to wash face to compete in better conditions in the next presidential elections.
Caracas, special for Clarín
look too
The offensive of Nicolás Maduro: anti-corruption crusade or political purge in Venezuela?
Drug trafficking, murders, prostitution: how the "Tren de Aragua", the Venezuelan multinational crime company, works