Assessing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro

There Was No “Peacetime” Collapse Under Maduro

Anti-Maduro Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodríguez estimates that Venezuela’s per capita income declined by 71% between 2012 to 2020. Rodríguez (2025: 7, 255) called it “the biggest peacetime economic collapse in modern history” and attributed half of its lost oil production in this period to U.S. sanctions. Dating Venezuela’s decline back to 2012 is problematic because Venezuela continued to grow until 2014, albeit with increasing difficulty, during the initial year and a half of Maduro’s presidency (Emersberger, 2021). But Rodríguez’s use of the word “peacetime” is an even bigger problem. The U.S. was perpetrating grave acts of war against Venezuela for at least a decade before Trump finally bombed Caracas. That fact is obscured by the impunity with which the U.S. attacks other countries.

In the last quarter of 2014, high oil prices which had greatly boosted Venezuela’s export revenue plummeted by half and remained low in subsequent years. There was always reason to suspect that the collapse of oil prices was orchestrated by the U.S. and its allies to hurt Iran, Venezuela and Russia - in other words, that it was an act of war. There was no credible economic analysis that oil prices were headed for collapse. Several prominent analyses said in 2012 that oil prices would remain high until 2035 (Emersburger and Podur, 2021: 143). Today, Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has exposed the capacity of the U.S. and allied nations to manipulate global oil prices - preventing them from rising as high as they should despite a massive disruption to supply. Even the pro-establishment Economist magazine has noticed. It accused oil futures markets of being in a “stupor” (Economist, 2026). While nobody can yet prove that the 2014 oil price crash was orchestrated by the U.S., the thesis should be taken very seriously. I now believe that the thesis is correct even though Justin Podur and I took an agnostic position on it years ago (Emersberger and Podur, 2021: 283).

President Barack Obama deliberately aggravated Venezuela’s difficulties after oil prices collapsed by imposing damaging economic sanctions on the country early in 2015. Then, in 2017, President Donald Trump dramatically intensified U.S. sanctions and began threatening Venezuela with a military attack. Throughout the rest of his first administration, Trump ratcheted up the economic sanctions.

One could make an argument that wartime conditions in Venezuela began as far back as 2002. That year, the U.S. supported a military coup in Venezuela in which Washington-funded groups were involved. (Emersberger and Podur, 2021: 85-86) Subsequently, U.S. actions against Venezuela would be considered acts of war if carried out against the U.S. Certainly, it is false to say that by 2017 Venezuela was undergoing an economic collapse during “peacetime” as Francisco Rodríguez stated. By 2018, Trump's sanctions had already been linked to tens of thousands of deaths (Weisbrot and Sachs, 2019). In short, Venezuela was undeniably at war years before Trump bombed Caracas on January 3, 2026.

Anti-Imperialism And Sovereignty

The U.S. has sometimes overthrown former friends: Ngo Dinh Diem (Vietnam, 1963), Saddam Hussein (Iraq, 2003), and Manuel Noriega (Panama, 1990) are examples. These cases demonstrate that being assassinated or kidnapped by the U.S. is not enough to establish credentials as an anti-imperialist. But when Maduro was kidnapped on January 3, 2026, thirty-two Cuban soldiers died fighting to defend Maduro along with a larger number of Venezuelan soldiers (Telesur, 2026). Zero Cubans died defending Manuel Noriega even though Cuba denounced the lethal U.S. incursion in Panama.

Cuba’s deep commitment to Maduro, and vice versa, is obviously one based on shared anti-imperial values. One would have to deny that Cuba is part of an anti-imperial struggle to dismiss the meaning of its extremely close alliance with Venezuela. Despite enduring years of U.S. aggression, Maduro did not distance Venezuela from Cuba to smooth relations with the U.S. like former Soviet premier Gorbachev did. Furthermore, Maduro’s support of Evo Morales in opposition to the U.S.-backed coup in 2019 was much stronger than that of other leftist leaders in the region, some of whom initially refrained from condemning his overthrow (Maduro, 2019).

Equally important, Maduro (2018) maintained the deep commitment of his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, to the Palestinian cause and provided complete solidarity to Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva when he was railroaded into prison in Brazil with Washington’s help.

Venezuela, unlike Cuba in the 1960s, did not count on the backing of a powerful nuclear-armed ally willing to make a red line out of a U.S. invasion. Throughout his rule, Maduro refrained from backing down on numerous bold and progressive foreign policy positions, even though he had ample incentive to do so.

Sovereignty And Democracy

Without an anti-imperial struggle there can be no sovereignty. Without sovereignty there can be no real democracy. That is why the very first article of Venezuela’ constitution prioritizes its sovereignty. There is no such thing as “free and fair” elections in any part of the world where the U.S. can threaten voters with harsh measures should Washington’s preferred candidate be defeated. Under dire enough conditions, a majority may vote to submit to US domination. Such a choice cannot be called sovereign, democratic or legitimate. Another factor that needs to be considered is when support for the U.S.-endorsed candidates implies fierce repression of their political opponents.

Some claim Maduro stole the July 2024 election from the party of María Corina Machado. Even if one accepts the unplausible claim that her candidate Edmundo González Urrutia received seventy percent of the vote, as she claimed, those alleged results could never be legitimate. A comparable situation would be if Trump were to use lethal economic strangulation to achieve victories over Democrats.

The official vote tally Maduro received in 2024 is very similar to what he received in 2018, when the economy was in far worse shape. Critics may argue that in 2018 major US-backed opposition parties boycotted. Indeed, they also attacked the most prominent challenger to Maduro in that election, Henri Falcon, for defying the boycott. Falcon was threatened with US sanctions for doing so. However, those factors lowered the opposition vote tally. They did not inflate Maduro’s. As Justin Podur and I explained in our book, there is no credible basis for claiming Maduro's vote tally was inflated through coercion or any other type of fraud in 2018.

The vote for Maduro represented a very loyal Chavista vote to have supported him under the dire conditions of 2018. (Emersberger and Podur, 2021: 24-35). It is not credible to argue that his support evaporated in 2024 when economic conditions had much improved.

The main reason some people distrust the results is because the National Electoral Council did not publish a breakdown of the vote by polling stations in 2024 as it did in 2018. That objection ignores the lesson of the 2019 presidential election in Bolivia which transparently provided the results as they came in. The Washington-based Organization of American States and the mainstream media distorted the facts and in doing so paved the way for the subsequent military coup.

Avoiding Civil War

Maria Corina Machado has supported Trump’s policies in all their extensions: his bombing of Caracas on January 3; his sending Venezuelan migrants to prison in El Salvador; Washington-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza; and multiple U.S.-backed efforts to overthrow Venezuela’s government dating back to 2002 when she signed the infamous Carmona Decree. ¹ If Machado ever reached power in Venezuela, she would most likely slaughter tens of thousands of Chavistas, or, in attempting to do so, would drive the nation into civil war that would devastate the lives of millions. Columbia’s decades-long civil war, which for years produced the world’s highest number of internally displaced people, offers some idea of what a Machado government could do. But we are living in a post-Gaza genocide world, so even the horrors of Colombia’s civil war might be surpassed.

Maduro, like Hugo Chávez before him, played by the rules of capitalist-based liberal democracy. That meant being overly tolerant of US-backed subversives in Venezuela. Maria Corina Machado was never arrested despite engaging in decades of U.S.-backed sedition. Similarly, the Washington-glorified Juan Guaidó wandered freely throughout Venezuela for years proclaiming himself the interim president of Venezuela.

Partly due to the influence of left-wing intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, some leftists believe that traitors like Machado who champion the invasion of their nation must have political rights. Castro and Che understood the folly of that idea and unapologetically denied political rights for agents of the U.S.-backed fifth column in Cuba. Maduro could not have done that - even if he wanted to- because he did not have an ally like the former USSR to back him up.

Social Justice Defeated Sanctions

Maduro’s government deployed various strategies to guide Venezuela through its war with the U.S. while remaining committed to social justice. One of the most salient programs was his expansion of the public housing program, Mission Vivienda. Chávez had launched the program which delivered slightly less than half a million units by the time Maduro took office in 2013. By 2025, it had delivered 5.2 million units. On the economic front, Maduro’s government was succeeding to counter the effects of the Washington-imposed U.S. sanctions. Beginning in 2020, Venezuela’s economy returned to growth. It was for that reason that Trump resorted to bombing Caracas and kidnapping Maduro.

Maduro did not fail: the u.s. Changed for the worse

Maduro was in no position to resist the U.S. militarily as Iran has done. Iran is bigger and with three times the population, much farther from the US, has experience fighting an eight-year war against Iraq, is able to inflict damage on the U.S. economically using the Stair of Hormuz, and had decades longer than Venezuela to prepare for U.S. invasion. Maduro did the best any leader could have done to keep Venezuela sovereign while virtually at war with the U.S. But all this was not sufficient in order to keep Caracas from being bombed at a time when Washington has dispensed with any pretense of abiding by laws or taking into consideration public opinion in the U.S. and beyond.