Nicolás Maduro

Nicolás Maduro Moros (born 23 November 1962 in Caracas) is a Venezuelan politician who has served as President of Venezuela since April 2013, following the death of Hugo Chávez. A former bus driver and trade union organizer, Maduro rose through the Bolivarian movement as a National Assembly deputy, then Foreign Minister (2006–2013) under Chávez, and briefly as Vice President before assuming the presidency.

Maduro narrowly won the April 2013 special election against Henrique Capriles. His tenure has been defined by a severe economic crisis featuring hyperinflation, collapsing oil output, and one of the largest refugee outflows in modern Latin American history, with the UNHCR reporting more than 7 million Venezuelans displaced abroad by the mid-2020s.

His 2018 re-election was rejected as illegitimate by the United States, the European Union, the Lima Group, and most members of the Organization of American States. In January 2019, National Assembly president Juan Guaidó declared himself interim president, triggering a parallel-government dispute that lasted until the opposition dissolved the interim arrangement in 2022. The US Treasury, under both the Trump and Biden administrations, has maintained extensive sanctions on PDVSA and Venezuelan officials, and the US Department of Justice indicted Maduro on narco-terrorism charges in March 2020.

The July 2024 presidential election, in which the National Electoral Council declared Maduro the winner over opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia, was disputed domestically and internationally; the opposition published precinct-level tallies claiming a González victory, and several governments — including the US, Argentina, and Peru — refused to recognize the official result. Maduro was inaugurated for a third term on 10 January 2025.

He remains aligned diplomatically with Cuba, Russia, Iran, China, and Nicaragua, and is a frequent reference point in MUN debates on sanctions regimes, electoral legitimacy, and migration in the Western Hemisphere.