Nicolás Maduro is described in these episodes as the president of Venezuela and the successor to Hugo Chávez, under whom the country’s economic and political crisis deepened. The two episodes that treat him — a 2017 interview with Fergus Hodgson and a 2019 conversation between guest host Charlie Deist and Clif Ross — present him less as an independent actor than as the inheritor and administrator of a project already failing when he took it over.
The ideological reading: Hodgson
Fergus Hodgson, asked by Bob Zadek how a country with Venezuela’s advantages reached such a state, answers that ideology or philosophy is driving it, and that the people involved are motivated both by a quest for power and by Marxist ideology. He notes that this is not exclusive to Venezuela and describes a long infiltration of Marxist ideologues, particularly from Cuba, with thousands of Cuban agents in the country advising and supporting the regime. Maduro himself, Hodgson says, has a chief advisor who worked with Che Guevara in Cuba during the Cuban Revolution Venezuela on the Brink with Fergus Hodgson (2017).
Hodgson describes the economic condition in concrete terms: hyperinflation, and an average salary of about $30 per month. He says the Supreme Court of Justice has annulled the parliament, making the country a dictatorship, though in his account it was already one before that. He traces the background: oil discovered and utilized in the early part of the 20th century, which made Venezuela one of the wealthiest countries in the region and produced a transition to democracy in the late 1950s; the resource curse of dependence on a single economic element, bringing corruption and political instability; a growth in a redistributionist or socialist state since 1958; and two coup attempts in the 1990s led by Hugo Chávez, who went to prison, was later pardoned, and ran for president as an anti-establishment candidate. Chávez, a student of Fidel Castro, imported that ideology, and over the last 17 or 18 years he and Maduro converted Venezuela into what Hodgson calls a socialist basket case. On the Fraser Institute’s ranking of economic freedom, Venezuela is 159th and the lowest in the world among those that can be ranked Venezuela on the Brink with Fergus Hodgson (2017).
The convert’s reading: Ross
Clif Ross, introduced by Deist as a writer, poet and filmmaker who was once a supporter of the Bolivarian Revolution, frames the question through the mechanics of economic organization. Drawing on Karl Polanyi, he says there are about three ways to organize production and distribution: a market, as Adam Smith conceived it; redistribution by the headman of a village, which he calls socialism; and reciprocity, which works in a small band or tribe but not in cities, states, or a world of seven billion people. Only the market, in his account, works effectively and empowers everyone Hugo Chavez: Failed Messiah (2019).
Ross says he arrived in Venezuela in April 2013, the day after Maduro was elected, and realized it was not working at all: the country was falling into chaos even then, when the price of oil was still over $100 a barrel, and oil is 96% of the country’s national income. Corruption was immense under Chávez and then Maduro, and Ross’s argument is that a corrupt leader in charge of organizing all economic activity is a recipe for trouble. He identifies the centralization of power as the problem common to socialist projects, and says the “new socialism of the 21st century” was not working either. He returned in November 2013, the last time he was in Venezuela, and realized he was in danger there; he cites Venezuela as the world’s second-worst prison system, after the Philippines, according to what he believes was Amnesty International Hugo Chavez: Failed Messiah (2019).
Corruption and the narco-economy
Deist raises an article in which Ross wrote that “El Pollo” — a nickname meaning “the Chicken” — was beginning to squawk, and asks how information about Maduro’s ties to the FARC could damage him if it is already an open secret. Ross answers with the connections: Cilia Flores, the First Lady, raised her nephews in her own home, and they trafficked cocaine into the United States, or tried to, before being arrested by the DEA and tried in New York. On tape, one of them said they were doing it to raise money for Flores’s run for the parliament or the National Assembly. The plane flew out of the presidential hangar, flown by an active-duty Venezuelan military pilot, carrying a planeload of cocaine into Haiti, where the DEA arrested them Hugo Chavez: Failed Messiah (2019).
Ross describes cocaine trafficking and money laundering at the very top level of government, involving Maduro’s family, along with corruption in the CLAP, the local committees for food production — which, he says, produce nothing but money laundering, skimming and embezzlement of state funds. He names Diosdado Cabello, the number two in power, a former military man, as also involved in the money. Currency control, in his account, is the seedbed of corruption: because foreign exchange can only be obtained through the government, people take money obtained officially and trade it on the black market, multiplying their wealth hundredfold and more, such that there is a currency shortage at the same time as hyperinflation. El Pollo, Ross says, knows where everybody has their money, who they deal with, and the drug trafficking routes; he defected to Guaidó’s side in February after escaping custody in Aruba, where he was in danger of extradition to the United States, and is now awaiting extradition on drug trafficking charges and collaboration with the FARC Hugo Chavez: Failed Messiah (2019).
The symbolic succession
Ross explains the messianic frame around Chavismo through the events of April 2002: Chávez was overthrown in a coup on the 11th and taken out of the country, and the coup failed on the 13th, when he returned by helicopter in the evening. Ross likens this to the Christ narrative — killed on Good Friday, buried, rising on the third day — and says Chávez worked on that narrative and thought of himself as a reincarnation of Bolívar. Maduro was handpicked by Chávez to succeed him and to inherit that charisma, but in Ross’s account the project has failed and that inheritance has come to an end. The only people left supporting Maduro, he says, are hard dead-enders caught up in the millenarian myth and those bought and paid for with drug money and corruption Hugo Chavez: Failed Messiah (2019).
Across episodes: the question of causation
Both episodes ask how Venezuela reached its present state, and the difference between them is one of emphasis rather than of conclusion. Hodgson, in 2017, locates the cause in ideology and philosophy — Marxist ideologues, Cuban infiltration, the resource curse, the growth of a redistributionist state — and treats Maduro chiefly as the second man in a line that begins with Chávez. Ross, in 2019, having been a supporter of the revolution, locates the cause in the mechanics of centralized power and in the corruption of the individuals who hold it, describing Maduro as the headman to whom the whole village turned over its power. Hodgson supplies the ranking and the macro data; Ross supplies the family, the plane, the currency window and the defecting intelligence chief. Neither excerpt contradicts the other, and neither shows the other’s argument being revised.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe Maduro’s own biography before 2013, his earlier offices, or the details of his election. They do not cover the 2018 or later elections, the Guaidó interim government beyond Ross’s mention of defections to it, or any negotiations between the regime and the opposition. Nor do they state what became of El Pollo’s extradition, or give any account of Venezuelan politics after the period each episode describes.