Venezuela’s two “former” leaders, the late Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro, somehow resemble figures from the Middle East — Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Khomeini and Muammar Qaddafi. They were famous for bombastic speeches, populist slogans and zero achievements.
Who can forget Chavez’s words from the UN podium about US President George W. Bush: “The devil came here yesterday and it smells of sulfur still today.” Like the others, he waged quixotic battles, yet in reality spent his years in power besieged — only to end in defeat.
After the eloquent Chavez came Maduro, a simple man, a former bus driver and trade unionist. He followed in his predecessor’s footsteps, making mockery of the US his favorite topic.
But he failed to grasp the character of the new Caesar in the White House. He assumed Donald Trump would never get him. Instead of negotiations, he barricaded himself in his quarters and transformed the presidential palace into a heavily armed fortress.
What followed was inevitable, echoing the fate of Saddam in 2003. The Iraqi leader watched in disbelief as American columns advanced along the Tigris through the heart of Baghdad. Saddam fled in haste to Tikrit, hid in a pit on a friend’s farm and was soon betrayed by one of his own, handed over to the Americans and led away under guard.
The Venezuelan president, likewise, was taken in his pajamas to New York. Trump was blunt: Maduro’s fate is a lesson for other leaders, warning the presidents of Cuba, Colombia and Mexico against allowing drug trafficking.
Latin Americans are like us Arabs, with many of them burdened by narcissistic populist leaders.
I visited Caracas in 2007. It appeared then to be a beautiful, clean capital, at least in the Altamira neighborhood where we stayed and the El Avila area we visited on the city’s edge. The slums encircled the city. Our guide moaned that they were migrants, arriving in the millions in search of a better life in this supposedly wealthy country.
Living conditions deteriorated under the revolutionary government’s policies and armed men became a common sight in the city. They were not police but hired civilians guarding certain buildings; some were at the entrance to our hotel’s parking garage. At the time, the exchange rate stood at 2 bolivars to the US dollar. Under Chavez and later Maduro, the economy was wrecked. The currency collapsed to as much as 500 bolivars to the dollar and poverty forced more than 5 million Venezuelans to emigrate.
Why would an oil-rich country like Venezuela throw itself into continental conflicts, with its president clinging to revolutionary posturing long after the age of revolutions ended with the Cold War? The scene was strikingly reminiscent of Libya, a country rich in resources yet poor in reality.
Maduro, now in detention, was long haunted by Chavez. He ruled for more than a decade trying to imitate him. Yet while Maduro is a simple man, Chavez was driven by a deep and radical ideology.
He legitimized revolutionary rhetoric in an oil-rich country, expelled American companies and nationalized major investments. An eloquent orator, Chavez knew how to turn ideas into populist spectacle.
He styled himself as an intellectual — he was surrounded by poets and writers and he counted the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez among his friends. He cast himself in the lineage of Venezuela’s historic symbol, Simon Bolivar. Even as president, Chavez hosted a weekly television program, once speaking nonstop for eight hours.
Of course, there was a vast gap between his rhetoric and the facts on the ground, as poverty, unemployment and arrests increased.
Chavez died at 58 in a clinic in Cuba, ill with cancer, though some believe he was poisoned. He was succeeded by Maduro, an uneducated figure with wooden language, who continued to imitate Chavez politically but without Chavez’s rhetorical talents.
Trump, we know now, is a leader unlike those who preceded him in the White House. He was briefed bluntly: Venezuela, long a friend of the US, had been a thorn in its side for more than two decades. It had aligned itself with America’s adversaries, Iran, Russia and China, and had emerged as a major hub for drug financing.
His predecessors, he was told, had relied on economic sanctions and political isolation. Trump chose a different path. He moved to shorten the timeline and resolve the issue in a single stroke. He did not seek regime change; instead, he targeted Maduro and agreed to work with his deputy. Defiant leaders would do well to learn from what happened in Caracas — be careful, Trump is in search of victories.
