3 days ago - During the later years of Maduro's presidency, pro-government police and military forces launched the "Liberation of the People Operation", which they stated targeted street gangs and non-state paramilitary formations which they alleged had taken control of poor neighbourhoods. The operations reportedly resulted in thousands of arrests and an estimated 9,000 deaths, with the Venezuelan ...

1 month ago - Venezuela is stable, open for business and on a path toward a more democratic and prosperous future.” Patience, in other words, remains the strategy. But Ramirez, who has been tracking Venezuelan public opinion through the transition, said the data shows that patience has a shelf life. “People are giving a blank check,” he said. “But that blank check is not eternal.” Ronal Rodríguez, a researcher and spokesperson for the Venezuela Observatory at Universidad del Rosario in Bogota, one of the leading academic centers tracking Venezuelan affairs in the region, offered perhaps the most precise summary of where things stand. “Everything has changed,” he said, “and nothing has changed.” What has changed, he argued, is who controls access to Venezuela’s wealth. What has not changed is the structure underneath. “Many believed that Nicolás Maduro’s departure would trigger a democratic transition,” Ronal Rodríguez said.

December 1, 2020 - Maduro and his inner circle have continued to imprison civic, military, and political leaders and have used the distribution of food as a tool for social control. Since retaining power, the Maduro regime continues to disregard and repress the voices of the Venezuelan people in their calls for a return to democracy.

July 22, 2026 - Mr. Rips is a lawyer and writer · A lot has happened in the half year since U.S. Special Forces kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and his wife, Cilia Flores, but if you can think back that far you might recall that the Trump administration insisted the mission wasn’t an invasion; it was an “extradition.” It was a legal matter, that is, to be followed by a criminal trial. Many legal scholars, commentators and government officials lined up to endorse that choice as lawful, despite Venezuela’s immediate insistence to the contrary. But when Mr. Maduro’s case next makes its way to court, on July 22, federal prosecutors could encounter one rather significant obstacle: Our courts don’t have the authority to handle his case. And the law that says so was signed by the United States of America

1 month ago - Upon taking office as president, Maduro took over control of a national economy suffering from a shortage of basic goods, high inflation, widespread unemployment, and regular disruptions in electricity. Under Chavismo, the Venezuelan economy had become largely reliant on federal stimulus programs rooted in profits accrued from the national oil industry.

June 11, 2026 - Diplomats say Venezuelan officials now rarely allude to their former boss. Gunson believed Maduro’s disappearance from official discourse reflected how he had alienated not only regime opponents, but his own movement too, during a disastrous stint in power when the economy shrank by 70% and millions of people fled abroad. “Maduro just took them – from 2013 onwards – [into] a complete cul-de-sac … So my sense is that the majority of people on the Chavista side wanted to see the back of Maduro,” he said. Compounding public fury over the economic collapse was widespread annoyance at the dictator’s frivolous on-screen antics – particularly his constant displays of dancing and crooning on state TV. “Maduro was so tone-deaf. Maduro’s singing and dancing stuff … was really irritating to a lot of people. I think even on the Chavista side [people thought] …

January 3, 2026 - Nicolas Maduro ruled Venezuela with a heavy hand for more than 12 years, presiding over deep economic and social crises and resisting pressure from domestic opponents and foreign governments for political change.

July 25, 2026 - The two had been under house arrest for their alleged connection to antigovernment protests in 2014, but the Maduro-backed Supreme Court ordered their rearrest, spurring a fresh wave of international condemnation. Originally scheduled for December 2016 but postponed by the election commission, gubernatorial elections were held in Venezuela’s 23 states in mid-October 2017. Preelection preference polling had indicated that the opposition was poised to gain control of a majority of the states for the first time in some two decades.

December 1, 2020 - Slide towards Dictatorship: On January 10, 2019, Nicolás Maduro illegally assumed the presidency of Venezuela, despite the lack of free and fair elections. As he has done for years to retain power, Maduro arbitrarily jails or bans prominent political leaders and uses the distribution of food as a tool for social control.

August 5, 2024 - As bad as life has been for Venezuelans over the past decade, it could have been worse. For all the suffering, the repression of political dissidents, the exodus of a quarter of the population and other horrendous acts, it was still a country where—unlike Cuba and Nicaragua—political speech was not completely restricted, and some trappings of democracy were maintained, apparently because Nicolás Maduro and his backers cared at least somewhat about global opinion and maintaining economic linkages to their neighbors and other Western democracies.

July 24, 2024 - Ms Machado has since become Mr Maduro's most formidable opponent, managing what had eluded others before her - to unite the notoriously divided Venezuelan opposition behind one leader. During his 11 years in power, Mr Maduro has managed to run rings around the opposition time and time again, aided by the fact that opposition leaders often seemed to spend more time attacking each other than concentrating on beating him.

December 13, 2025 - As the Trump administration escalates pressure on Venezuela, experts warn that Nicolás Maduro’s downfall could open the door to a successor "even worse" than the dictator himself and unleash a landscape dominated by drug cartels, guerrilla factions and armed warlords who have embedded themselves across Venezuela for decades. Venezuela today is less a centralized dictatorship and more a patchwork of criminal territories controlled by cartels, Colombian insurgents and regime-aligned militias. Analysts told Fox News Digital that U.S. policy now confronts not only Maduro but also an entrenched ecosystem of non-state armed groups that could seize power in a post-Maduro vacuum. Roxanna Vigil, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former U.S. national security official focused on Latin America, said the trajectory is now binary. ... Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro brandishes a sword during an event at the military academy in Caracas, Venezuela, Tuesday, Nov.

January 8, 2026 - A twenty-five-page indictment [PDF] released on January 4—the day before Maduro’s trial began—alleged that the Venezuelan leader worked with drug cartels to transport thousands of tons of cocaine into the United States. If convicted, Maduro could face life in prison. He and his wife pleaded not guilty in court on January 5, and the pair repeatedly asserted their roles as president and first lady, and claimed they were prisoners of war. Maduro’s lawyer, meanwhile, raised “questions about the legality of his military abduction.” That same day, several countries, including U.S. allies, condemned the operation at a UN Security Council meeting. CFR Senior Fellow Matthew C. Waxman, an expert in national security law, indicated that Washington does not have international law on its side. “The UN Charter prohibits force against another state except with Security Council backing or in self-defense,” he told CFR.

January 28, 2019 - And yet, despite the outrage from within and beyond Venezuela, he remains a commanding figure there - and not just because of his 1.90m (6ft 3in) stature. ... Many followers of the country's leftist Bolivarian Revolution say that while he lacks the magnetism of Mr Chávez, the president is a loyal defender of his legacy. ... In August 2017, Mr Maduro controversially set up a new constituent assembly with the power to rewrite the constitution, or to bypass and even dissolve the opposition-led National Assembly.

July 22, 2026 - Nicolas Maduro is a politician who succeeded Hugo Chavez as president of Venezuela in 2013 upon Chavez’s death. As world oil prices fell and the collapse of the Venezuelan economy was accompanied by widespread shortages of food and medicine, Maduro’s rule was challenged and became increasingly authoritarian.

March 17, 2025 - Venezuela’s tyrant, Nicolás Maduro, has a habit of surpassing his own repressive feats every now and then. The latest wave of repression gives a stunning indication of how far he is prepared to go to hold on to power in the face of massive rejection. At the end of January, Maduro’s government gave the military the authority to shoot protesters. A few days later, he threw in jail the owners of supermarket chains and pharmacies whom he accused of creating an artificial scarcity for conspiratorial reasons. Then he ordered his thugs to beat up Leopoldo López, the iconic opposition figure incarcerated at the Ramo Verde military prison, before placing him in solitary confinement. On February 19, he sent intelligence agents to kidnap Caracas mayor Antonio Ledezma, a leading critic, from his office. A couple of days later it was made public that Ledezma was joining López at Ramo Verde on sedition charges.

April 3, 2026 - After Maduro became president in 2013, his government began trying to curb a soaring murder rate by signing nonaggression pacts with Tren de Aragua and other armed groups, an arrangement that ultimately allowed them to become more powerful.

He has had friends buy up key outlets, orchestrated newsprint shortages, and criminalized articles that “call into question legitimately constituted authority.” · “It’s been a big year for Maduro,” said Drew Sullivan, editor of OCCRP and one of the judges.