Venezuela Downfall Diaries: Maduro’s Last Drive Before New York Cell

On New Year’s Eve, Nicolás Maduro toured Caracas on state TV, offering oil overtures as U.S. warships waited offshore. Three days later he was in a New York City jail, his rule’s economic wreckage and migration waves still haunting Venezuela.

A late olive branch on New Year’s Eve

On New Year’s Eve, Maduro drove through central Caracas as if filming a travelogue. He narrated landmarks to a friendly interviewer, recalled a 1959 speech by Fidel Castro, and pointed toward his childhood home with practiced tenderness. Only after roughly 40 minutes did he name what waited offshore: U.S. warships near Venezuela.

Then he tried to turn force into a business conversation. “If they want oil, Venezuela is ready for U.S. investment like Chevron,” he said on state television. “Whenever they want it, wherever they want it and however they want it.”

The text says the Trump administration had been negotiating the terms of his exit. The broadcast feels like a leader insisting he still sets the tempo. Journalist Boris Muñoz, who profiled him for Mexico’s magazine Gatopardo and has tracked him since 2003, blamed “negligence” and “a lack of empathy,” saying there were many chances to correct course, and Maduro “just kept going.” In Venezuela, that stubborn pace became policy—and then became a trap.

From Havana classrooms to Chávez’s inner circle

He grew up with his parents and three siblings in a two-bedroom apartment in southern Caracas, the son of a union household. As a teenager, sponsored by the Socialist League, he spent a year in Havana studying politics. He returned to drive a bus, then rose through the unions of the Caracas metro system, learning the mechanics of organization long before he learned how to perform power on camera.

When Hugo Chávez won in 1998, defeating Acción Democrática and Copei, Maduro entered Congress. In 2006, Chávez elevated him to foreign minister, placing him in a movement that invoked Simón Bolívar, the 19th-century liberator born in Caracas, as both symbol and instruction. Under the 1999 constitution, the country renamed itself the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

That loyalty became succession. Before dying of cancer in 2013, Chávez handpicked Maduro and left him a state already wobbling on oil dependence. In Alma Guillermoprieto’s book The Years of Blood, she wrote that Chávez “had the good fortune to die before the bill arrived for the havoc he wreaked on the economy.” Under Maduro, the bill arrived in full.

The numbers behind the exodus

As president, Maduro leaned on Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. to dispense patronage and shore up loyalty. As deficits mounted, authorities ordered the Central Bank of Venezuela to print money, a move that rendered the bolívar effectively worthless, said economist José Guerra, who spent two decades at the bank and served in the National Assembly from 2015 to 2021.

From 2012 to last year, Venezuela’s GDP shrank by nearly 80 percent, according to the International Monetary Fund. Inflation in 2018 exceeded 65,000 percent. In Caracas, those figures meant wages that expired overnight, hospitals without supplies, and an economy of improvisation where planning itself became risky. Families learned to price bread in minutes, as the currency lost meaning in real time, everywhere, daily.

At least 7.9 million Venezuelans have fled, the United Nations Refugee Agency says, searching for safety and the means to feed their families. Some crossed the deadly rainforest route of the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama on the way toward the United States. Most remained elsewhere in Latin America, carrying Venezuela outward in accents, remittances, and absence.

In 2024, the Carter Center for Democracy, the only independent group allowed to monitor Venezuela’s presidential election, said restrictions—including barring opposition candidate María Corina Machado—were so severe the vote could not be considered legitimate. Based on 81% of ballots tallied by its observers, it said opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia won with 67 percent. González fled the country, Machado was forced into hiding, and Maduro declared himself the winner.

Now the ending is being written in the United States. The Department of Justice case against Maduro alleges he ran a trafficking operation flooding narcotics into the United States. In the New Year’s Eve interview, he rejected being the head of a “narco-terrorist” organization and said Washington’s true objective was to seize Venezuela’s natural resources.

He is scheduled to make his first appearance Monday in federal court in New York. In a White House video posted on Saturday, two U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents grip his arms and escort him away as he stands tall, smiles, and wishes onlookers a happy new year—an old revolutionary posture meeting the fluorescent certainty of custody, while Venezuela waits to learn what comes after downfall.

Outside the courtroom, Venezuela’s diaspora keeps counting losses, remittances, and unanswered questions.

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