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Nicolás Maduro

president of Venezuela since 2013

Nicolás Maduro (born 23 November 1962) is a Venezuelan politician who has served as the 46th President of Venezuela since 2013 and previously served under President Hugo Chávez as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2006 to 2013 and as Vice President of Venezuela from 2012 to 2013.

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, 23 November 2015
Like you, people of the United States, we Venezuelans are patriots. And we shall defend our homeland with all the pieces of our soul. Today Venezuela is united... we demand the cessation of the aggression that seeks to suffocate our economy and socially suffocate our people, as well as the cessation of the serious and dangerous threats of military intervention... We appeal to the good soul of the American society, victim of its own leaders, to join our call for peace, let us be all one people against warmongering and war. ~Open Letter To The People Of The U.S. (10 Feb 2019)
We are concerned about what the US and its closest allies are doing with respect to Venezuela, brazenly violating all imaginable norms of international law and actually openly pursuing the policy aimed at overthrowing the legitimate government in that Latin American country... Together with other responsible members of the international community, we will do everything to support President Maduro’s legitimate government in upholding the Venezuelan constitution and employing methods to resolve the crisis that are within the constitutional framework... ~ Sergey Lavrov (29 January 2019)

Quotes

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  • Your national representatives...want to invade and intervene in Venezuela – they say... in the name of democracy and freedom. But it’s not like that... is as false as the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq...
  • The political intolerance towards the Venezuelan Bolivarian model and the desires for our immense oil resources, minerals and other great riches, has prompted an international coalition headed by the US government...a criminal commercial and financial blockade, which has been aggravated by the dispossession and robbery of our financial resources and assets in countries aligned with this demented onslaught...
  • This complex multiform aggression is carried out with total impunity and in clear violation of the Charter of the United Nations, which expressly outlaws the threat or use of force, among other principles... for the sake of peace and the friendly relations between the Nations....
  • Like you, people of the United States, we Venezuelans are patriots. And we shall defend our homeland with all the pieces of our soul. Today Venezuela is united... we demand the cessation of the aggression that seeks to suffocate our economy and socially suffocate our people, as well as the cessation of the serious and dangerous threats of military intervention... We appeal to the good soul of the American society, victim of its own leaders, to join our call for peace, let us be all one people against warmongering and war.

President Maduro's speech at the United Nations General Assembly (excerpts), 26 September 2018

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Full text online

  • Yesterday, the President of the United States announced, precisely on this same platform, new and alleged economic and financial sanctions against our country in the sanctuary of the law and international legality. Did the United Nations System know that the unilateral sanctions, using the dominion, the status of the currency and the financial persecution are considered illegal from the standpoint of international law?
  • Venezuela is subjected to a permanent media aggression... to justify an international intervention. We know that it is an intended international intervention, a military intervention to control our country. At global level, a file has been forged through the media against our country to pretend a humanitarian crisis that uses the United Nations concepts to justify a coalition of countries led by the Government of the United States, and their satellite governments in Latin America, to get its hands on our country. A migration crisis, that goes without saying, has been forged by several means, aimed at diverting the attention from the real migration crises in the world...
  • Yesterday, the President of the United States, in this very platform, threatened the governments of the world to submit to its designs, to its orders and to cooperate with its policies in the United Nations system, or he would act accordingly. Venezuela has been attacked with a fierce diplomatic offensive at all of the United Nations system bodies, supported by satellite kneeled governments blackening the honor of the peoples that they are called to represent.
  • Venezuela has been subjected to permanent political aggression. On September 8th, the New York Times published an article evidencing the participation of officials of the White House and the government of the United States, in meetings to bring about a military coup and cause a change of government, a change of regime in Venezuela. The investigation published by the New York Times – replicated by the Times magazine, the Washington Post and the world press – simply confirmed the conspiracy, the permanent aggression by factors of the government of the United States against a constitutional and strengthened democracy; a democracy supported by the people, such as the Venezuelan democracy...
  • Should Latin America and the Caribbean accept these methods that so hurt our region in the entire 20th century? How many military interventions? How many coup d’états? How many dictatorships were imposed during the long and dark 20th century in Latin America and the Caribbean, and who did it favor? Did it favor the Peoples? What interests did they represent? The interests of the transnational companies, the unpopular interests; long dictatorships, like Augusto Pinochet’s in Chile, were faced by our peoples due to the stubbornness of the American elites...
  • We bring our homeland’s truth to this honorable UN General Assembly; after the failure published and announced by the New York Times of these illegal, unconstitutional and criminal attempts of regime change, after the democratic presidential election, last May 20th, when I, Nicolas Maduro Moros, obtained 68% of the popular votes through free elections – the 24th election in 19 years, of which 22 have been won by the revolutionary forces of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, at different levels of approval, against the opposition forces of our country; after the failure of the attempted military coups, candidacies and electoral tactics supported by Washington...
  • Last August 4th, I was a victim of a terrorist attack with drones that tried to kill me in a military event on one of the main avenues in Caracas. If it had been executed as planned, it would have been a massacre, an assassination of the institutional, political and military high command of our nation....the terrorists... who attacked me... were captured by the security... agencies. The 28 perpetrators were captured...are convicted and sentenced. As I informed... different governments of the world, all the investigations about that terrorist attack indicate that it was prepared, financed and planned in the territory of United States of America... I would like to ask the United Nations system to appoint a special delegate of the Secretariat of the United Nations to conduct an independent investigation internationally about the implications and responsibilities of this terrorist attack.
  • We bring good news from a country that has not given up and shall not do so. Good news from a nation that is consolidating its democracy... a country that is building its own social model, its own welfare state by means of new formulas to protect its elders, its pensioners, its children, its young people, its women, the neediest sectors, its working class.
  • Venezuela is a country which advocates for and is committed to the construction of a pluripolar and multicentric world, where all the different regions (Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, Europe, and North America) can live together in balance and peace, respecting our cultures, religions, idiosyncrasies, identities and economic and political models.
  • There is not a unique economic model; we must not allow the imposition of a single cultural model, a single political model; they intend to impose a single thought for humanity. I say no. We vindicate the cultural, religious and political diversity of humanity...we advocate for the emergence of such a world of justice. We assume and declare our solidarity with the Arab people of Palestine; justice shall arrive to Palestine so that their historic territories, established in 1967 by this United Nations Organization, are respected.
  • 200 years ago, our region was plagued by colonies, slavery and injustice. 100 years ago, as peoples, we struggled for freedom. Today, in the 21st century... the opportunity has come. Undoubtedly, in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, with Simon Bolivar’s revolutionary ideas, with the example and legacy of Commander Hugo Chavez – whose voice still resonates here in this room demanding justice and justice for the world, demanding the cessation of the imperial practices of threats, coercion and extortion against peoples – we can say that in 20 years of revolution, the last 3 have been the hardest years: years of harassment, aggressions and attacks.
  • Venezuela is a friendly country. Venezuelans do not hate the United States; on the contrary, we appreciate the United States, their culture, their arts, their society. We differ from the imperial concepts that took over the political power in Washington since the foundation of that nation. In 1826, our Liberator Simon Bolivar said prophetically: “The United States appear to be destined by Providence to plague America with hunger and misery in the name of liberty”. It was a prophetic vision.... We believe in the political dialogue as a way to find solutions and solve conflicts.
  • I welcome all those... who wish to help respecting the country’s sovereignty, without interfering in Venezuela’s internal affairs so that they can support us, join us in a process of sovereign dialogue for Venezuela’s peace, democracy, justice, future and prosperity; a noble nation which deserves peace, a future and the best.
 
Four centuries of white supremacy in Venezuela by those who identify their ancestors as European came to an end with the 1998 election of Hugo Chavez, who won with the overwhelming support of the Mestizo majority. This turn away from white supremacy continues under Maduro, Chavez’s chosen successor... ~Greg Palast

Quotes about Maduro

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Most recent first

  • Two years ago, on April 30, 2019, the Venezuelan people took to the streets to reclaim their democracy from the illegitimate rule of Nicolás Maduro. Yet for now, Maduro still clings to power. In so doing, he has driven what was once the wealthiest country in Latin America — with the world’s largest proven oil reserves, its second-largest gold deposits, and one of the highest literacy rates in the region — into abject, grinding poverty.
    • Marshall Billingslea in [1] , Yahoo, May 2021
  • The size and variety of corruption schemes employed by the regime is dizzying. Over the past two decades, the late Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro and their cronies plundered at least $300 billion from state assets (according to several of Chávez’s own former ministers). At the same time, they racked up a massive amount of debt; experts place the amount owed to creditors at more than $150 billion. The situation is so bad that the International Monetary Fund recently made clear that the Maduro regime is cut off from receiving its $5 billion in special drawing rights, because the IMF knows that Maduro will simply steal the money.
    • Marshall Billingslea in [2], Yahoo, May 2021
  • Of all the rapacious schemes employed by Maduro and his cronies, the most heinous was the one run for the benefit of Maduro himself: profiting from the starvation of his own people. By blocking humanitarian aid from outside the country, he made Venezuelans increasingly dependent on the so-called CLAP program — a food-box distribution. By overbilling on sole-source contracts and purchasing substandard products, Maduro and his front men stole as much as 70 percent of the money that was meant to feed the most desperate Venezuelans.
    • Marshall Billingslea in [3]
  • In September 2018, Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro visited China, where he met with China’s President Xi Jinping and signed a series of important agreements on trade and culture. Toward the end of his stay, Maduro said that the two countries had built “a relationship of mutual benefit, of shared gain.” Among these agreements was one that highlights the depth of the collaboration: this was for China to participate with the Great Venezuela Housing Mission (GMVV) to build more than 13,000 homes in the El Valle parish in Caracas. The focus of the international media has been on the oil trade between China and Venezuela, and in the aid from China to Venezuela; but the connections go deeper, into the social life of the people who are struggling to emerge from deprivation...
    China, Arreaza (foreign minister of Venezuela) says, trades with countries without interference in their internal affairs. This is quite different from the Western model, notably that overseen by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which pushes for structural adjustment alongside loans. Because China respects the sovereign choices of a country, Arreaza told me, “China has proven to be a reliable partner for the region and it can continue to play a key role in our development for many years to come.”
  • Every major U.S. war of the last several decades has begun the same way: the U.S. government fabricates an inflammatory, emotionally provocative lie which large U.S. media outlets uncritically treat as truth while refusing... questioning or dissent, thus inflaming primal anger against the country the U.S. wants to attack... exactly the tactic used on February 23, when the narrative shifted radically in favor of those U.S. officials who want regime change operations in Venezuela... they vehemently stated that the trucks were set on fire, on purpose, by President Nicolas Maduro’s forces.
  • That lie – supported by incredibly powerful video images – changed everything. Ever since, that Maduro burned trucks filled with humanitarian aid was repeated over and over as proven fact on U.S. news outlets. Immediately after it was claimed, politicians... U.S. news stars and think tank luminaries... took a leading role in beating the war drums...
  • The humanitarian trucks were not set on fire by Maduro’s forces. They were set on fire by anti-Maduro protesters who threw a molotov cocktail that hit one of the trucks. And the NYT’s video traces how the lie spread: from U.S. officials who baselessly announced that Maduro burned them to media outlets that mindlessly repeated the lie.
  • Chávez had died a year earlier, in 2013, after fourteen years as president. A former soldier, he called himself a socialist and a revolutionary and he delighted in thumbing his nose at the United States, the imperial power to the north, to which he sold most of his country’s oil. His successor was Nicolás Maduro, a less talented politician who styled himself as the ideological heir of the man he called the eternal comandante. In Maduro’s short time as president, there had been waves of protest, the economy had begun to contract, inflation was soaring, and shortages of food and other goods were becoming acute.
    • William Neuman, Things Are Never So Bad They Can't Get Any Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela (2022)
  • I asked what she thought about the government. She told me that the government gave people what they needed. This was a Venezuelan truism, whether or not it was true in practice: Venezuela was a petrostate, and in the eyes of its citizens, it existed to parcel out the riches pumped from the ground. What did she think about Chávez? She said that he was her comandante. And Maduro? The son of the comandante. That was all.
    • William Neuman, Things Are Never So Bad They Can't Get Any Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela (2022)
  • At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, in Venezuela, the authoritarian populist Hugo Chávez and his disciple Nicolás Maduro initiated a similar policy of massive spending, corruption and nationalization. The difference was that Chávez had control over the world’s largest oil reserves at a time when oil prices were soaring, so he received almost $1,000 billion that could keep that policy afloat for a little longer. That was enough for Chávez to be the left’s favourite demagogue for a while. Bernie Sanders said that the American dream was more alive in Venezuela than in the US. Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn praised Chávez for showing that ‘the poor matter and wealth can be shared’. Oxfam called Venezuela ‘Latin America’s inequality success story’. In an open letter to ‘Dear President Chávez’, luminaries of the Left such as Jesse Jackson, Naomi Klein, Howard Zinn and others state that they ‘see Venezuela not only as a model democracy but also as a model of how a country’s oil wealth can be used to benefit all of its people.’ On paper, that $1,000 billion was enough to make every extremely poor individual in Venezuela a millionaire. But still, it is not much money if you do not invest it productively and if you destroy the ability to create new wealth with nationalization and price controls. When the price of oil began to fall only slightly, it became obvious that the business sector was in a shambles and the oil industry had been demolished by corrupt mismanagement and underinvestment. The result was one of the worst economic disasters to have occurred anywhere in the world in peacetime. Between 2010 and 2020, Venezuela’s average income plummeted by an incomprehensible 75 per cent. South America’s richest country suddenly turned into South America’s poorest country with breadlines and a mass exodus from an increasingly tyrannical state. Around seven million Venezuelans have fled the crumbling country, an unbelievable 25 per cent of the country’s population. Since then, Venezuela has been less frequently mentioned as the hope of the international working class.
    • Johan Norberg, The Capitalist Manifesto: Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World (2023)
  • Since Chavez’s death in 2013, his successor Nicolas Maduro has shed his derisory label in the Western press as a “former bus driver” and become Saddam Hussein incarnate... As the journalist and film-maker Pablo Navarrete reported this week, Venezuela is not the catastrophe it has been painted. “There is food everywhere,” he wrote. “I have filmed lots of videos of food in markets [all over Caracas] … it’s Friday night and the restaurants are full.”
  • In 2018, Maduro was re-elected President. A section of the opposition boycotted the election, a tactic tried against Chavez. The boycott failed: 9,389,056 people voted; sixteen parties participated and six candidates stood for the presidency. Maduro won 6,248,864 votes, or 67.84 per cent.
  • On election day, I spoke to one of the 150 foreign election observers. “It was entirely fair,” he said. “There was no fraud; none of the lurid media claims stood up. Zero. Amazing really.”
  • Maduro is “illegitimate”, says Trump (who won the US presidency with three million fewer votes than his opponent), a “dictator”, says demonstrably unhinged vice president Mike Pence and an oil trophy-in-waiting, says “national security” adviser John Bolton...
  • People elected... Nicolás Maduro...There’s a conspiracy to undermine the will of the people... that has happened, the will of the majority of the people. They delegitimized the elections when the Carter Institute said... “these are the best elections in the world.” ...We seem to redefine or define dictator in ways that are useful [to dishonest politicians]. So you drive it into people’s consciousness... This pathology, if you drive that into people’s consciousness, that a person is a dictator, then in some sense, they accept that in ways, subconsciously, unconsciously, because it’s been drummed into their memory. No matter all the information that refutes that... free elections... transparent elections, whatever...The question is always going to be what they hear...
  • All across the so-called liberal media, the reporting and analysis on Venezuela the past weeks has been atrocious. And actually, it has been this way for a long time. We should remember that The New York Times actually openly supported the 2002 coup against Hugo Chávez. But in the wake of the recent Venezuelan elections, there has been a total uniformity to the characterization of Venezuela’s suffering and chaos as the sole fault of Nicolás Maduro. The elections are being denounced by anchors as though it’s just accepted fact that Maduro is only president because of corruption. Almost never mentioned prominently is the fact that Venezuela has been systematically targeted by the United States and its allies and its puppets in Latin America or the impact the economic sanctions have had on the country or the fact that there was an attempt to kill Nicolás Maduro with a drone packed with explosives. The story is just “Maduro is a corrupt Socialist dictator. He needs to be taken out so that Venezuela can be free.” The central role that the U.S. has played under Bush, under Obama, and now, under Trump in destabilizing Venezuela
  • Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, has been even worse. He’s Chávez without the mo. He accelerated Venezuela’s transition to authoritarianism while devastating its economy and people.
    • Matthew Continetti in [4]
  • For many media commentators, Maduro sought to strengthen his position internally by putting on display the support he counts on from powerful international allies. Fear of a U.S. military response may be a more plausible explanation for his motives.... The presence of Russian bombers in Venezuela last week and the possibility of future deployments are clear examples of the undesirable consequences of Washington’s unyielding hostility toward that nation.
  • While thousands of people gathered around Miraflores Presidential Palace to greet the re-election of President Nicolás Maduro, opposition sectors, the United States, the European Union and the Latin American right launched a predictable destabilization plan against the most recent democratic electoral process undertaken on Sunday, May 20, in Venezuela.The Venezuelan people, victims of one of the most brutal economic wars of recent times, only comparable to the blockade imposed on Cuba for more than 50 years, re-elected Nicolás Maduro as their legitimate President with more than six million votes.

See also

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