When Hugo Chávez named Nicolás Maduro as his successor shortly before his death, some doubted that the former bus driver and trade unionist would be able to keep the ranks of Chavismo together without the charisma and popularity of the commander.
But Maduro has been in power for more than ten years without any apparent internal challenges within the Chavista ranks and surrounded by figures who were also heirs of Chávez and who have remained faithful squires of a government that is now facing one of the greatest crises of legitimacy seen in Latin America in recent times.
Cilia Flores, Diosdado Cabello, Vladimir Padrino and the brothers Jorge Rodriguez and Delcy Rodriguez They are considered the most authoritative voices of the government headed by Maduro, whose re-election for a third term as president of Venezuela is questioned inside and outside the country, after the National Electoral Council – which proclaimed him the winner – did not disclose the results of the elections of July 28 detailed by each voting table, as provided by law.
For more than a decade, they have occupied key positions in the ruling party, not as simple representatives, but as voices with their own weight in decision-making.
Four of them, in fact, They appear on the list of top leaders of Venezuela’s ruling United Socialist Party, just behind Maduro and “eternal leader” Hugo Chavez. The only one who does not appear there is Padrino, who, as a member of the Armed Forces, is constitutionally prevented from having official political activism.
All of them are under personal sanctions by the United States and European Union governments, measures that those affected reject and question.
BBC Mundo analyses who are some of the main members of the power circle around Maduro in Venezuela.
Cilia Flores, the “first combatant”
“First female fighter”this is how Nicolás Maduro baptized his partner, Cilia Floresduring the 2013 presidential campaign in Venezuela, following the death of Chávez.
Her gesture was a recognition of the fact that “Cilita” – as Maduro affectionately calls her – has had a political career of her own that not only distances her from the traditional role of first lady, but also makes her a political powerhouse.
The life of this lawyer specializing in Criminal and Labor Law began to change in 1992 when she joined the legal defense team of the military who participated in the failed coup d’état led by Chávez in February 1992.
At that time, he joined Chávez’s political movement and met Maduro.
Following Chávez’s electoral victory in 1998, Flores held important positions. She was elected deputy in 2000 and, in 2006, became the first woman to preside over the National Assembly, succeeding Maduro in that post.
Chávez appointed her Attorney General of the Republic in 2012, a position she held until the president’s death in March 2013.
She was the first vice president of the PSUV and has been a member of the National Assembly since 2015. She was also part of the controversial National Constituent Assembly elected in 2017, in elections in which the opposition did not participate.
In September 2018, it was subject to sanctions by the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).
Numerous members of his family have also been under the watchful eye of the US authorities.
In 2019, Washington sanctioned his three sons (Walter, Yosser and Yoswal Gavidia Flores), as well as his cousin Carlos Erick Malpica Flores, considering them key pieces for the Colombian businessman Alex Saab and his partner Álvaro Enrique Pulido Vargas had access to Venezuelan officials “allowing them to pay the bribes required to obtain government contracts.”
Malpica has held the positions of National Treasurer and Vice President of Finance of the state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), among others. OFAC lifted sanctions against him in 2022, within the framework of the dialogue between Washington and the Maduro government.
In addition, two of Flores’ nephews, Efraín Antonio Campo Flores and Franqui Francisco Flores de Freitas, were sentenced in December 2017 in a New York court to 18 years in prison for drug trafficking.
When they were arrested, Flores said it was a kidnapping by the US anti-narcotics agency, which was intended to harm her politically.
Both were pardoned and released in 2022 thanks to a deal between the Biden and Maduro governments in exchange for seven Americans imprisoned in Venezuela.
Although over the years Flores seems to have opted to publicly assume more of the image of first lady, few doubt that she plays an active role in defining government policies and some even consider her to be the power behind the throne.
“Cilia has her own personality and, in fact, at one point Maduro projected her image a lot, as if he intended to launch her as his replacement at some point, but that didn’t catch on,” says Nícmer Evans, a Venezuelan political scientist who supported the Chavista project and is now a critic of Maduro’s government.
“I think she decided to retreat in that sense, but she has not lost her power, she has her autonomy,” he added.
Diosdado Cabello
On the evening of December 8, 2012, when Hugo Chávez announced to Venezuelans that he had to travel to Cuba to undergo another cancer operation, Diosdado Cabello was sitting to his right and Maduro to his left.
In his last public address, the late president designated Maduro as the chosen one to succeed him. Since then, Cabello has been seen as Chavismo’s number 2.
The fact that Cabello was seated on the right has been considered by some to be a coincidence in relation to what is believed to be his ideological position, since for years he was seen as one of the Chavista leaders ideologically closest to the right.
Strictly speaking, Cabello has been declaring himself a socialist for years, but he has not always been one, according to political scientist Nícmer Evans.
“Nobody remembers that while Chavez in 2005 said that socialism would be built in Venezuela and began the process of 21st century socialism, Diosdado Cabello was governor and it took him two years to say the word socialism in a speech”, Evans tells BBC Mundo.
Many consider him ideologically closer to “military nationalism” than to the revolutionary left.
As a lieutenant, Cabello participated in Chávez’s failed coup in February 1992. He spent 22 months in prison for that uprising until he was granted an amnesty declared by then-President Rafael Caldera.
Since Chavez came to power, Cabello has held numerous important positions, including his recent appointment as Minister of the Interior and Justice.
Cabello was executive vice president during the brief coup d’état that occurred on April 11, 2002, so He was in charge of the presidency for a few hours until Chávez was restored to power.
Coincidentally, shortly after that episode, Chávez appointed him to the position he now occupies again: Minister of the Interior.
Cabello has also been Minister of the Secretariat of the Presidency, Minister of Infrastructure, Governor of the state of Miranda, President of the National Assembly, as well as President of the controversial National Constituent Assembly elected in 2017, in elections in which the opposition did not participate.
There has been much speculation about an alleged rivalry between Cabello and Maduro. But Cabello has rejected these accusations and, on several occasions, has said that he and Maduro are brothers because they are -politically- “sons of Chávez.”
Evans believes that Cabello operates in alignment with Maduro.
“Diosdado does not articulate anything that is not coordinated with Maduro”This does not mean that they do not have differences, but the fact is that I am sure that he understands when it is his duty to be subordinate, which makes it very difficult for that leadership to be broken by that,” he says.
Although his participation in the 1992 coup ended his military career, he has been seen as A man with influence in the barracks. Various analysts point out that this has diminished in recent years, partly due to the retirement in 2020 of officers of the same promotion.
The ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), of which he is first vice president, is seen as his other source of power.
In 2018, Cabello was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department, as were his brother José David Cabello and his wife Marleny Josefina Contreras Hernández.
“We are imposing sanctions on figures such as Diosdado Cabello, who exploit their official position to engage in drug trafficking, money laundering, embezzlement of state funds and other corrupt activities,” they said in a statement.
In 2020, the US government offered a $10 million reward for information leading to Cabello’s arrestwho is accused of allegedly belonging to the so-called “Cartel de los Soles,” a group of Venezuelan officials who allegedly provided support for narco-terrorist activities of the FARC in Colombia.
Cabello has repeatedly denied these accusations.
Since 2014, he has had a weekly television program called “Con el mazo dando” (With the hammer giving), in which he defends his political positions and, as his name suggests, attacks his political rivals inside and outside Venezuela.
Vladimir Godfather
Traditionally in Venezuela, defense ministers used to last one year in that position. That changed radically when Maduro appointed Vladimir Godfather Lopez in October 2014.
Almost ten years later, this general-in-chief still holds that position, making him One of the longest serving defense ministers in Venezuela’s history.
Padrino was an important player during the brief coup against Chávez in April 2002, as he commanded an armored unit stationed in Fuerte Tiuna (Caracas) that refused to join the uprising.
In July 2012, Chavez promoted him to second in command of the Army and chief of staff. That occasion is remembered because when presenting a military parade, Padrino referred to the soldiers as “patriots, Bolivarians, socialists, anti-imperialists, revolutionaries, trained and equipped to assume the sacred duty of defending the nation.”
Despite the criticism they arouse, these labels are not foreign to her. In fact, on her X profile He describes himself as a “Bolivarian soldier, determined and convinced to continue building the socialist homeland”.
Maduro promoted him to general in chief in 2013 and a year later he became the Minister of Defense.
According to Sebastiana Barráez, a Venezuelan journalist specializing in military issues, Padrino has played a key role because when he assumed that position there was a situation of “internal reorganization” within the Armed Forces as a consequence of Chávez’s death.
“When Padrino López arrived, there were many power groups within the military institution and he – who is not a man of confrontation – managed to make them cohabit within the Armed Forces and that each group could understand that it benefited from this peace agreement among all. Of course, that meant giving economic and power quotas to some of those sectors,” Barráez told BBC Mundo.
“Over time, Padrino minimized these internal conflicts, harmonizing the Armed Forces, somehow unifying them. And that merit is what allows him to remain as Minister of Defense after ten years, without resistance within the Armed Forces,” he added.
With Maduro in the presidency and Padrino in the Ministry of Defense, The military in Venezuela has become increasingly involved in areas other than national security. and have gained ground within the government, to the point that more than a third of the cabinet has been made up of active or retired military personnel.
In 2016, Maduro created a military company – Camimpeg – that has legal powers to exploit, search for and distribute oil. He also gave them control of the so-called Mining Arc, an area in the south of the country that contains one of the largest gold reserves in the world.
Regarding the level of influence that Padrino exerts within the military institution, political scientist Nícmer Evans states: “The Armed Forces today are Padrino López.” He then adds: “And Padrino López is Maduro.”
Jorge Rodriguez
Jorge Rodríguez became a well-known figure for all Venezuelans in 2003 when, as head of the National Electoral Council (CNE), he played a central role in organizing the referendum to revoke the mandate of President Chávez.
At the time, Rodríguez was the president of the National Electoral Board, a key body in this vote that ended with a victory for Chávez.
The opposition launched this process in October 2003, but it was not until August 2004 that the referendum was actually held. Many analysts believe that The delay in calling for elections was crucial for Chávez to regain his lost popularity through the creation of social assistance programs known as missions.
“The electoral body implemented a variety of mechanisms aimed at preventing the recall referendum from being called. These procedures included the artificial delay and lengthening of all phases of the process, the discretionary cancellation of requests and signatures, and the imposition of a phase of objection to one million signatures considered dubious by the CNE,” wrote political scientist Miriam Kornblith, who was rector of the CNE between 1998 and 1999, in an academic article published in 2009.
At that time, both the CNE and Rodríguez framed all these requirements and procedures within the framework of the regulations in force in Venezuela.
In any case, after Chavez’s electoral victory, Rodriguez assumed the presidency of the CNE for two years and, in 2007, Chávez appointed him as executive vice president of the RepublicSince then, he has been a reference within Chavismo.
He was mayor of Caracas for nine years, Minister of Communications, and is currently president of the National Assembly.
But this psychiatrist’s political experience predates Chavismo. As a student at the Central University of Venezuela, he actively participated in politics and became president of the Federation of Student Centers.
Together with his sister, the current vice president and oil minister, Delcy Rodríguez, he is one of the main operators of the Maduro government, with whom they share political roots since the president was a member of the Socialist League, a revolutionary left-wing movement created at the end of the 1960s.
One of its founders was Jorge Antonio Rodríguez, father of Jorge and Delcy, who died in 1976 of a heart attack at the age of 34, presumably as a result of the torture he was subjected to by the political police who arrested him in connection with the kidnapping of William Frank Niehous, vice president in Venezuela of the American company Owens-Illinois.
Beyond his bureaucratic positions, Jorge Rodríguez has led Maduro government delegations that have negotiated with both the opposition and foreign governments in recent years. like the United States.
He is considered the electoral strategist of Chavismo and, in fact, was head of Maduro’s campaign command ahead of the July 28 elections.
Some analysts see Rodriguez not only as Maduro’s right-hand man, but also as his potential replacement.
“He is the intellectual figure that Maduro has left after a drain of intellectual capacity as a consequence of the autocratic future of the system,” says Nícmer Evans of this politician who in 1998 won the prestigious annual short story contest of the Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional.
“Rodríguez preserves his capacity for free thinking within a hegemonic structure and I have no doubt that he maintains his presidential aspirations,” he added.
Delcy Rodriguez
Like her brother Jorge, Delcy Rodríguez is a key player that the Maduro government has used as a political operator both outside and inside Venezuela.
The current executive vice president, who has only recently added that of oil minister to her list of positions, first joined the cabinet when she held the position of minister of the Office of the President for a few months during the Chávez government.
But it was after Maduro came to power when has held numerous positions at the top of the Executive Branchbeing Minister of Communication and Information, Minister of Economy and Chancellor.
She was also the first female president of the controversial National Constituent Assembly elected in 2017.
“Delcy works in tandem with her brother. She is a little less intellectual, more operational. They are well-educated people who have filled a void as a result of the total abandonment of capable people in the government,” says Nícmer Evans to BBC Mundo. “It is not for nothing that they both hold so many positions,” he adds.
A graduate of the Central University of Venezuela, Rodríguez later studied Labor and Trade Union Law in France.
She has explained that part of her motivation to study law is linked to her father’s death. “I made a decision to do justice in my father’s case and I entered law school. There I immediately applied to be a research assistant at the Institute of Penal Studies.”
That event would also have influenced his approach to politics. “The Bolivarian revolution, the arrival of Commander Hugo Chavez, was our personal revenge”she said in an interview in 2018, although she maintained that she was not acting out of hate.
On the international scene, Rodríguez has been involved in several incidents, such as when in 2016, as foreign minister, he tried to enter a Mercosur meeting in Buenos Aires, after Venezuela had been excluded from the bloc.
Years later, what the Spanish press calls “Delcygate” would occur, a controversy that broke out after Rodríguez landed in a private plane at Barajas airport in the early hours of January 20, 2020, where she met for a few hours with the then Minister of Transport of Spain José Luis Ábalos, despite the fact that she was subject to an entry ban into the Schengen area issued by Austria.
Rodríguez is one of around 50 senior Venezuelan officials on whom the EU has imposed sanctions due to human rights violations and the deterioration of democracy in Venezuela.
She was also sanctioned by the US in 2018, when the Treasury of this country also imposed this type of measures against her brother Jorge Rodríguez, as well as against Vladimir Padrino and Cilia Flores.
Delcy Rodríguez has denounced these measures as a “form of extortion.”
Click here to read more stories from BBC News Mundo.
You can also follow us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, X, Facebook and in our new WhatsApp channelwhere you’ll find breaking news and our best content.
And remember that you can receive notifications in our app. Download the latest version and activate them.
- Who is Cilia Flores, the “first combatant” of Chavismo and Maduro’s wife, whom the US has just sanctioned?
- Who is Vladimir Padrino, the military man Maduro named “super minister” and how much power does he have?