As Nicolás Maduro was paraded before the cameras in the New York offices of the US Drug Enforcement Agency over the weekend, he seemed to exude confidence, despite his extremely parlous condition. The former Venezuelan president walked towards photographers, hours after US forces dragged him out of his bed in Caracas, and smiled. In English, he wished members of the press a “good night” and a “happy New Year”.
Watching, I was immediately propelled back in time.
It was the same swaggering self-confidence that I encountered when I met him 18 years ago in the Venezuelan capital. And it suggests that Maduro’s capacity for self-belief, but also for calamitous miscalculation, has not changed over the intervening years.
Back in February 2007, Maduro was serving as Venezuela’s foreign minister. A former bus driver, he owed his position to a meeting in 1993 with a prison inmate, Hugo Chávez. Maduro, sympathetic to the aims of failed coup plotters led by Chávez, was visiting Yare prison. Chávez invited him into his cell and revealed his undiminished ambition to one day lead a successful Bolivarian socialist revolution in Venezuela.
“That day, I left levitating,” Maduro later recalled. “My mind went to the future. I said: ‘This is the way’. I had no doubt.”
Thus began his rise in Chávez’s inner circle, and his own path to the Venezuelan presidency.
Maduro, left, when he was foreign minister, alongside then president Hugo Chávez during a press conference in Paris (Photo: Antoine Gyori/AGP/Corbis via Getty)But in 2007, when I met him, there was no indication he might one day find himself governing the country, nor eventually be on America’s “Most Wanted” list for narco-terrorism. Maduro was at that point Chávez’ wing-man on the world stage, and as foreign minister was perpetually eclipsed by his more charismatic boss.
Our encounter almost did not occur, due to Maduro’s own pigheadedness. I was in Caracas producing a series of news stories for America’s public television network, and Maduro offered us a sit-down interview.
At the time, US-based journalists were not beating a path to the foreign minister’s door – indeed, most US journalists could not even secure permission to enter the country. But the government appeared to covet the opportunity to give Maduro access to the viewing public, and – even more importantly – to the movers and shakers in Washington who would be watching.
We were told to arrive at the ministry at 9am and prepare for an interview that was expected to begin an hour later. We dutifully arrived, went through security checks and were escorted to the room where the interview would be conducted. By 10am, we were raring to go.
Of Maduro, there was no sign.
By 11am, we were told he was “running late”. By midday, we knew he was in the building because we had seen him walking up a staircase. But as the hours ticked by, delay piled upon delay, despite constant promises that he would be with us shortly.
Maduro with Iran’s then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran in 2007 (Photo: Atta Kenare/AFP)At 4pm I decided we were engaged in a fool’s errand, and that Maduro must have rethought the wisdom of sitting down with US television.
Our foreign ministry minders assured us he was still coming but could not tell us when. By 6pm, my patience was gone. We started packing up our equipment on the assumption that we had been played into wasting an entire day that could have been better spent on the streets of Caracas interviewing residents about the early stages of the country’s economic collapse.
Our decision led to a sudden flurry of activity. Fearing Maduro would accuse them of allowing us to leave, officials urged us to stay and promised he would arrive “soon”.
Maduro finally showed up around 7pm. He was all smiles and firm handshakes but offered no word of apology. Rather, he exuded the cock-sure certainty that a group of mere journalists would understand that the weight of the world was heavy on his shoulders.
In the interview, he waxed lyrical about Venezuela’s journey and promised the country’s riches would trickle down to the people. He and Chávez sought “a Latin America that can combat poverty… build a productive, diversified economic system that allows the building of internal wealth and the distribution of that wealth through social programmes that create stability”.
Venezuelan security forces firing tear gas and water cannon at students demonstrating against constitutional reforms sought by Chávez in 2007 (Photo: Yuri Cortes/AFP)It was elegantly expressed nonsense, projected with confidence, a gleam in his eye and the wave of a cigar. Maduro seemed delighted by the fact that he had captured a US film crew for an entire day, even if he came within a hair’s breadth of missing his opportunity to get his message in front of Washington’s leaders.
At the time, US oil giants were still engaged in joint ventures with Venezuela’s state oil company. The full-scale crackdown on opposition figures had not yet begun.
Today, Maduro faces the greatest challenge of his life. Having reportedly eschewed Donald Trump’s offer last month to fly into gilded exile in Turkey, he was so confident the US wouldn’t come after him that just last week he drove around the centre of Caracas for a TV interview with a Spanish journalist. Maduro’s wife, Cilia Flores, sat on the back seat pouring them both coffee from a flask. Today, she is also in a New York jail awaiting trial.
Maduro is once again exuding confidence, this time about his chances of beating the US Department of Justice at its own game.
He will hope to persuade the courts that his arrest was illegal. That may work, given the Trump administration is still struggling to provide any justification for what Maduro will argue was his extra-judicial kidnapping on sovereign Venezuelan soil.
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Alternatively, he may use his detailed knowledge of covert US activities that have taken place across Latin America dating back decades to secure a plea bargain by promising not to spill embarrassing US intelligence secrets.
In a picture taken shortly after his arrest and arrival in New York, Maduro is shown handcuffed but offering two thumbs-up and a sly smile to the cameras, as DEA agents gather around him for a group photo.
As I learned when I met him all those years ago, Maduro loves to push the envelope, even if it risks being a disastrous error of judgement.
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