Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

What do you base your disagreement on. Maduro, though in the end was proven economically incompetent and though he became too authoritarian, grew up caring for the people. He wasn't born into wealth, and he didn't grow up cheating all in his path. See:

The rise and fall of Nicolás Maduro

Jorge ValenciaJanuary 05, 2026 / 1:35 am

[...]

He grew up with his parents and three siblings in a two-bedroom apartment in southern Caracas. His father held leadership roles in a local workers union, and as a teenager Maduro, sponsored by the Socialist League, spent a year in Havana studying politics. When he returned, he drove a bus and rose to lead a workers union in the Caracas metro system.

After Chávez swept to power in 1998, defeating the once-dominant center-left Acción Democrática and center-right Copei parties, Maduro was elected to Congress. In 2006, Chávez elevated him to foreign minister, placing him at the center of a political project obsessed with Simón Bolívar, the early 19th century Andean colonial liberator, born in Caracas. Bolívar dreamed of Spain's former colonies in Latin America uniting against the outside world, a spirit that Chávez embraced, frequently invoking Bolívar's name in speeches and including it in the new name the country adopted under the constitution Chávez put in place in 1999: the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

"Chávez had an army of spokespeople, but Maduro was prominent among them," Muñoz said. "He was very loyal, and he was a very good surrogate for Chávez's wishes and whims."

The loyalty proved decisive. Before dying of cancer in 2013, Chávez handpicked Maduro as his successor, entrusting him with a country already buckling under the weight of dependence on oil, and the realization that prosperity was coming to an end.

Venezuela had ridden a boom fueled by historically high oil prices — the lifeblood of its economy and virtually its sole export — but that cushion collapsed not long after Maduro was sworn in as president in 2013. As the writer Alma Guillermoprieto observed in her recent book, The Years of Blood, Chávez got lucky: "He had the good fortune to die before the bill arrived for the havoc he wreaked on the economy."

Maduro soon presided over the collapse of what had once been one of Latin America's most prosperous economies.

His government leaned heavily on the state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela S.A. to dispense patronage and shore up political loyalty. As deficits mounted, authorities ordered the Central Bank of Venezuela to print money, a move that rendered the local Bolívar currency effectively worthless, said José Guerra, an economist who spent two decades at the Central Bank and served in the National Assembly from 2015 to 2021.

The result was economic devastation on a historic scale. From 2012 to last year, Venezuela's gross domestic product shrank by nearly 80%, according to figures from the International Monetary Fund. Inflation in 2018 exceeded 65,000%

https://www.kuow.org/stories/the-rise-and-fall-of-nicolas-maduro