CHAVEZ'S CARICATURE WHO COULDN'T LAUGH

NICOLAS MADURO

- JAYANTH JACOB

NICOLAS Maduro Moros's story has always unfolded at the seam between belief and brute force, between the intimacy of loyalty and the cold mechanics of power.

It ended in the early hours of a January morning, when US soldiers dragged him and his wife, Cilia Flores, from their bedroom and flew them out of Venezuela.

For a man who spent more than a decade insisting that Washington was plotting to kidnap him, the final image was cruelly symmetrical.

Maduro was never meant to be Hugo Chavez. He lacked the thunderous charisma, the improvisational brilliance, above all the soldier's authority. Tall, mustachioed, with a habit of misspeaking in English, he might have seemed an improbable heir to a revolution built on spectacle. Yet that improbability became his defining political skill. Where Chavez dazzled, Maduro endured.

Born in 1962 in the working-class neighbuorhood of Caracas, the son of a trade unionist steeped in old-party politics, Maduro entered public life not through barracks or universities but on a bus route, as a driver for the Caracas Metro.

Union activities carried him upward. Ideology certainly followed through the Socialist League, student politics, a taste for John Lennon lyrics and anti-imperialist rhetoric. Power followed loyalty. Chavez took note of it all very early.