In 2018 everything started to get worse for Nicolás Maduro. It was another year like this 2024, in which he had to hold presidential elections in Venezuela and the votes escaped him. The Chavista leader decided to call the elections early; He eliminated any competition that threatened to remove him from power by disqualifying candidates and other well-known judicial maneuvers; and he entered quicksand where his legitimacy was fractured. That year the international community crossed its arms as a sign of disapproval of his re-election, considered flawed. Relationships were broken, ambassadors were demoted to chargé d’affaires.
FLORANTONIA SINGER
The president reached that 2018, the end of the first period as a substitute that occurred after the death of the eternal commander of the revolution Hugo Chávez, after resisting months of intense days of protests that his security forces repressed with violence and today the Criminal Court International investigates possible crimes against humanity. He went through the fire of hyperinflation, the brutal shortages of food and medicine and the first peaks of mass migration of Venezuelans. But this week Maduro has rewound the cassette from that year and has found something much more serious that occurred that year without raising suspicions: betrayal was speaking in his ear in every council of ministers.
The president has confessed on television that since January 2018, when everything began to get even more complicated, Tareck El Aissami, the bishop that he himself put at his side as his vice president for a year and a half, was plotting against him. Not only was he the second on board, but he was also the one who was entrusted with the still pending task of rebuilding the economy and waging the crusade against inflation, generated by the controls on the economy imposed since the time of Hugo Chávez—of whom both call themselves sons— , in which they tried from chasing the zeros that the bolivar was accumulating in its unstoppable devaluation to finally admitting the free circulation of the dollar, which they claimed was the enemy to be pulverized, and ended up adopting the pseudonym REF—for reference—, the abbreviation with the that today all prices are indicated in Venezuela, behind which hides the fear of the times when talking about dollars was a crime.
Maduro has begun to move pieces in the puzzle that prosecutor Tarek William Saab has been revealing for several weeks in press conferences that serve as episodes of an increasingly convoluted plot, which he has called PDVSA Cripto and in that 21,000 million dollars of the nation were lost, as a result of the sale of oil on the black market without anyone noticing at the time. The skein of this thread began to be pulled a year ago. El Aissami, as Minister of Petroleum, resigned from his position while other officials were arrested and disappeared from the map without giving further explanations. A few weeks ago he showed signs of life: prosecutor Saab released photos of one of the most powerful men in the Government in handcuffs entering court.
It is not known under what circumstances he was detained or how. After occupying almost all positions in the revolution and being a super minister, he now carries the title of traitor. In the latest revelations that the prosecutor always makes at noon, they ended up together in the same conspiracy, apparently concocted by Zoom video calls, accused of being frontmen of Chavismo, such as businessman Samark López, now identified by Maduro as the right-hand man of who was his right hand in 2018, and staunch opponents of his Government such as Julio Borges and Leopoldo López, united in exile and in the arrest and extradition orders that have been issued to them this week, but politically opposed to each other for more than a decade.
More details in THE COUNTRY OF SPAIN
