The president of Venezuela, , is in the news these days due to the growing tensions with the United States due to the persecution of boats of alleged drug traffickers in the southern Caribbean Sea. The military deployment ordered by , his North American counterpart, unprecedented since the Missile Crisis of 1962, encourages speculation about the possibility of a coup ordered by Washington that will overthrow him from power.
Now, the Chavista has gone from being an alleged cooperator in drug trafficking to a terrorist, because the US considers him the ringleader of the , a network that Caracas denies exists, even more so that it has its president in charge. They even offer themselves to anyone who helps hunt them down.
The tension now focuses on the attempt to close Venezuelan airspace by the US, which is feared to be the anticipation of some type of surgical attack against drug warehouses or landing strips on Venezuelan soil. Maduro warns that he is prepared for whatever comes, (in his own way). In the last few hours, at least, more encouraging news has arrived: , although it is not yet understood.
The man who was Hugo Chávez’s successor at the head of the Miraflores Palace is well known for his questioned leadership (the majority in the international community reject his last electoral victory, which is illegal according to various sources) and for his opposition to opponents and dissidents, but did you know these other small details of his biography?
1.- His full name is Nicolás Maduro Moros and was born on November 23, 1962. The date is well known and is even celebrated massively, but the place is something else. Officially, he was born in Caracasthe capital of Venezuela, but the opposition has repeatedly insisted that he did so in Cúcuta (Colombia)where his mother comes from. It is not a minor detail, as Mariano Rajoy would say, because the national Constitution says in its Only those born in it can preside over the country. Even Maduro himself and his team have given four different versions of where he was born and investigations have been initiated in the House to clarify it. Ultimately, in 2016, the Supreme Court declared that there was “incontrovertible evidence” about his birth in Caracas. Maduro, today, has dual nationality, Venezuelan and Colombian.
2.- He was born into a family of middle class who owned an apartment in Caracas. His mother, Teresa de Jesús Moros, was a Colombian housewife. His father, Nicolás Maduro García, was union leaderfirst from a social democratic center and then from a more leftist split. During the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1953-1958), Nicolás Sr. went into exile to neighboring Colombia, persecuted for planning a frustrated strike in the oil sector. He put down roots there for a while. Maduro has three sisters: María Adelaida (official and with a certain role in its administration), Josefina and Anita.
3.- Very little is known about Maduro’s childhood.which fuels this theory that he was born in Colombia and grew up there for a few years. There are references to the 11 in Caracas. At 12, in his high school, he had the first contact with politics: He began to serve in a leftist student organization. It’s called Rupture. At the age of 15 he had to change secondary schools because They expelled him for leading a student mobilization. By 1978, he was already in the young cadre of the Socialist League, in which he held regional and national positions.
4.- Young Nicolás did everything in his youth: started a rock band in the 1980s called Enigma, which was even heard on national radio stations. He played guitar and bass. His specialty was covers of groups like Iron Maiden. There are images from the time that show him with his eternal mustache but with longer hair. He was also part of a smaller group, Madera, of which most of its members died in a shipwreck. It was in the Orinoco River, in 1980. Now, when he can, he repeats that he loves it David Bowiebut what we see him most is dancing cumbia, not so much rock.
He also played baseball (of which he is passionate) and went on to participate in the Second National Youth Sports Games of 1980, in the position of pitcher (pitcher). An American scout saw him and offered him take it to the US league. He declined the offer.
5.- Maduro has never been to university. In the Venezuela of those years, if you finished high school the normal thing was to start a career later, but the current president preferred to dedicate himself to working on his own: he became bus driver in the national public company that provided service to Caracas, Metrobus. His former boss has given interviews saying he was an employeean assessment that must be put in context: that young man had a hard time union delegatefollowing in his father’s footsteps. And Maduro did much more in parallel to his eight-hour job: first, he worked as a shadow union member. And then, he founded two centers: SITRAMECA, for transport employees, and the Bolivarian Workers’ Force, closer to the Chavismo that was beginning to be popular (1995), of which he was the top manager.
6.- Yes, you can see how his career was heading towards politics. First, it was bodyguard of José Vicente Rangela progressive presidential candidate, who did not eat a single bagel in 1983. Then, from ’86 to ’87, He studied at the Cuban school for training left-wing leaders, Ñico López, in Havana.with a scholarship from his party. He has always said that he admires Fidel Castro.
Maduro succeeded Hugo Chávez, but without being from his initial clique. They met for the first time in 1992 and met firmly two years later. In the year of the Expo and the Games, the current president of Venezuela helped mobilize soldiers and armed civilians in what was known as the first coup attemptwhich failed and ended with the arrest of Chávez and the other coup officers. Ripe ran away by the same route by which he tried to hide the rebels: the Caracas metro tunnels that he knew so well. Together with other union members, he went to prison to see Chávez, who entrusted them to act as a liaison with more soldiers, preparing the second coup of that same 92. It was Maduro’s turn. codename “Green”.
7.- Maduro became, from that moment, a faithful defender of the release of his idol. After the pardon that saved him, he began to work more with his people, to delve into politics. In ’97 he was already in the ranks of the Fifth Republic Movement (MVR), which supported Chávez as a candidate, when he won the elections the following year. He didn’t campaign much with him, it’s true; They were not close. There is a detail that accounts for this: Chávez did not let him enter the official residence of La Viñetawhere he spent his first months in power, when he went to congratulate him. I was nobody, in his eyes.
8.- They say about Maduro that He is smart, calculating and patient. So he started doing underdog work until he won over Chávez. Little by little he chained positions: deputy since 1999, head of the parliamentary faction of his Movement, seat in the Constituent Assembly, then in the National Assembly… until he reached the head of the hemicycle. In 2006 he entered the Government, in the foreign portfolio. He broke with Israel, recognized Palestine and got along very well with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya and Bashar al Assad’s Syria. Then he was vice president and, finally, he reached the position of president in 2013.
9.- When he stopped presiding over the Assembly, he sought relief at home, where he is today his wife, Cilia Flores, his partner since the mid-90s and whom he married in 2013. She is the lawyer who prepared the arguments for Chávez’s pardon, whom he met during his comings and goings from prison. The Venezuelan president had already married Adriana Guerra Angulo in 1998, with whom he had his only son, Nicolasín, in 1991. The couple divorced three years later. Flores, with whom he appears in numerous public events, brought three children to their alliance, who have also had a certain political role in official Venezuela. Between the two of them they have four grandchildren. The youngest of the Maduros is called Victoria, because she was born on the day of the last elections in which Chávez won.
The president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, kisses his wife, Cilia Flores, during a public event after his presidential inauguration, on January 10, 2025, in Caracas.
10.- Maduro says of himself that he is catholic christian and he relies on that faith to promote his interests, as when recently, in the face of the threat from the United States, he declared Jesus Christ, in an acclaimed event at the Miraflores Presidential Palace. However, it has Jewish ancestry on the father’s side, from a branch sephardic coming from Curacao. It is also related to the Indian guru Sathya Sai Babaof whom he has a portrait in his palace and whom he visited in 2005, they say it was due to the influence of his wife and his private witch. But he once told the Turkish Foreign Minister, in a meeting, that one day he could convert to Islam. He says of himself that he is a man “blessed by the strength of the people.”
11.- He has also said many times in public that spirits visit him, like that of the late Hugo Chávez. Mythical was the moment when he appeared to him in the form of a bird. It was in 2013, in the middle of the campaign, when he said that his predecessor emerged in the form of “little bird” and blessed him. “I felt it there as if giving us a blessing, telling us: ‘today the battle begins. Go to victory. You have our blessings’. That’s how I felt it from my soul,” he explained. “He stood on a wooden beam and started whistling, a nice whistle. I watched him and I also whistled at him, well. ‘If you whistle, I’ll whistle,’ and I whistled. The little bird saw me strange, didn’t it? He whistled for a while, turned around and left and I felt his spirit,” he emphasized.
He has also said that he is convinced that Chávez is “face to face with God” and that even helped appoint Pope Francisthe first American pontiff. And he has been seen talk to cows in the electoral campaign: “Are you going to support me in the Constituent Assembly?” We don’t know if there was interaction like with the little bird.
12.- Maduro has various names motesmore or less affectionate depending on where they come from: from the familiar “Nico” to the “butcher of Miraflores”, passing through “Chávez’s son” or “the bus driver”. “Blurry“is one who repeats dissidence a lot, revealing his lack of training and preparation, which he compensates with ambition. But the president does not fall short, with a list of insults which almost equals that of Captain Haddock: “devils in cassocks”, “demonic witches”, “spies”, “faggots”, “big-wigs”, “little princesses”, “sellers”, “cowards”, “slobs”, “malparidos”, “Zionist Nazis”, “social sadists”, “imbeciles”, “fools”… homophobia that distills a good part of them and we will talk another day.
13.- Maduro is also a classic when it comes to screwing up his speeches: “multiplication of loaves and penises” to the “millions and millions of bolivars”, passing through “Chavismo is a minority”the “books and pounds”, “the dolphins and the dolphins”, “a needle in a honeycomb” or his mix of Gremlin by Grinch.
A child plays with ‘Superbigote’, on December 26, in Caracas. 
14.- One of the most recurring questions on Google about Nicolás Maduro is how tall he is: well 1,90 metros, exactly the same as his northern adversary, Donald Trump. Another thing that unites them: they both have articulated dolls as if they were superheroes.
15.- He also agrees with the North American business: angular, large, full of triangles and that, , denotes little tolerance for criticisma high level of anguish, an evasive, manipulative and seductive character and, at the same time, also a sense of humor. Its rubric is this:
