Do we like Nicolás Maduro?
Our score: 1 out of 10. A UN mission found his government's crackdown was a crime against humanity, and we found no verified good deeds to set against it.
Maduro's origin story is the bit his fans love. He was a unionised bus driver on the Caracas subway and rose through the union. In 1986 he did a year of ideological training in Cuba, then left driving to join Hugo Chávez's movement. He became a lawmaker, National Assembly president and foreign minister, and Chávez named him successor before he died in 2013.
The scandal that ended his run is a big one. In January 2026 he was taken to New York, where a 25-page indictment accuses him and his wife of working with drug cartels to ship thousands of tons of cocaine into the US. It also alleges they ordered kidnappings, beatings and murders. He pleaded not guilty and told the judge “I am a decent man”. His defence calls his arrest a kidnapping that breaks international law, and none of the charges has been proven.
The harm check starts with his 2024 re-election. The electoral council he controls declared him the winner but didn't publish vote totals. The Carter Center said the vote “cannot be considered democratic” and that it couldn't verify the result. The attorney general then issued arrest warrants for the opposition candidate and Maria Corina Machado. A UN fact-finding mission concluded the crackdown that followed amounted to persecution, a crime against humanity, and said it left 25 people dead.
On LGBTQ+ people, the record is poor. In 2023 police detained 33 men at a gay bar and sauna in Valencia. Trans legislator Tamara Adrian linked the raid to Maduro courting evangelical voters, and activists said the state was forming an alliance with anti-rights groups. Maduro's own words on the raid weren't in the reporting we read, and the attorney general did recommend dropping the charges. On women and the climate, we didn't find anything solid enough to cite.
The latest chapter is a legal slog. In March the judge said he wouldn't dismiss the case, and questioned why Washington was blocking Venezuelan funds for Maduro's lawyers. A trial is pencilled in for mid-2027. In September his lawyer filed a motion arguing heads of state are immune from prosecution. A hearing on it was set for 17 November, but the judge's death this week puts the schedule in doubt.
The good stuff is thin, and we won't pad it. His union days and his rise from the bus depot are real. From custody, he and his wife posted a statement urging “dialogue and respect”. That's about all we found that we could source, which isn't much against the record above.