Nicolás Maduro

Biography

Nicolás Maduro was born in Caracas in 1962 into a working-class family. He worked for years as a bus driver for the Caracas Metro and became a trade union leader. In the early 1990s he joined Hugo Chávez's MBR-200 movement and campaigned for Chávez's release after the 1992 coup attempts, and in the late 1990s he helped found the Fifth Republic Movement that backed Chávez's 1998 presidential campaign.

Elected to the National Assembly in 2000, he was its president from 2005 to 2006, foreign minister from 2006 to 2012 and vice president from October 2012. After Chávez died in March 2013 he became acting president and won the special election that April.

His rule brought shortages, falling living standards and mass emigration, and protests in 2014 and 2017 were met with repression. After the opposition won the National Assembly in 2015 he governed through the Supreme Tribunal, the electoral council and the military, and a Constituent Assembly elected in 2017 sidelined the legislature. His disputed 2018 re-election led the National Assembly to recognise Juan Guaidó as interim president in 2019, and evidence indicated that he lost the 2024 election he claimed to have won. United Nations investigators and rights groups accused his government of thousands of extrajudicial killings, which he denied.

On 3 January 2026 he was captured in a U.S. military operation in Caracas and taken to the United States to face drug trafficking charges, to which he pleaded not guilty. Delcy Rodríguez took over as acting president.