After Maduro
On the most evil Latin American dictator of our day—and the future of Venezuela
In Lima, you have to open your taxi door carefully because a motorbike could be ripping by. The bikes cut through traffic, tearing past dented, unmarked taxis, overcrowded combis, and Mitsubishi Coaster buses painted with images of saints and skulls. A bus lurches to a sudden stop mid-lane to scoop up passengers and a man steps out of his Toyota Corolla behind it to scream that the bus driver is a cholo. “La puta que te parió,” he says, and gets back in his car. Another bike rips past—a Rappi deliveryman in his dusty orange company jacket, riding a 110cc with the big orange insulated delivery box on the back. But sometimes, one of them pulls up on you as you’re stuck in traffic, right alongside your window, and lingers. If they stick a gun in your window, you’ve got maybe two seconds to realize what’s happening and hand over everything you’ve got—and if you flinch, they’ll shoot you in the face.
The motero crime wave began in early 2018, with locals in Lima noting well over a thousand of these assault robberies in just the first months of that year. It wasn’t a mystery where it came from either. Most of the moteros were Venezuelans. The year before, a large wave of Venezuelans had entered Peru. In 2016, there were about 8,000 of them in the country. By the end of 2017, there were around 110,000. Estimates suggest from 2017 to 2019, 800,000 more flooded into the country. And they weren’t just motero muggers. A friend of mine told me a story about an old woman who owned a simple bodega, selling mostly soft drinks and crackers and fruit. She’d been there for decades. But some Venezuelans decided they were going to open a rival bodega nearby, and they didn’t want competition, so they told the old woman to shut her business down. The old woman refused, because she had no other way to survive. So they shot her son in front of her.
Long before the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua began making national headlines in the United States, I had come to know the name during my years in Lima. I suppose there was some early mention of the group around 2021, when U.S. federal law enforcement and Latin America specialists began noticing the group’s expansion through South America, and so if you were looking for it, the gang’s name did occasionally appear in specialist reports and court documents. But it was not yet a household name. The gang broke into mainstream U.S. media in 2023, when police and prosecutors in New York City, Chicago, and parts of Texas publicly linked specific violent crimes—robberies, sex trafficking, organized theft rings—to Tren de Aragua–affiliated suspects. This coincided with a broader national debate over immigration, crime, and border enforcement. Then in 2024, a series of high-profile arrests, law-enforcement briefings, and congressional rhetoric turned the gang, along with MS-13, into a shorthand for transnational crime.
The spread of Venezuelan criminal groups abroad—especially Tren de Aragua—is often mistakenly blamed on Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro allegedly emptying the prisons. I had heard this story during my time in Lima, and I’ve heard it repeated since. But the reality is more complex, and more structural. Venezuela’s utter collapse over the past decade led to a prison system that effectively disintegrated, with several major facilities becoming inmate-run spaces where gangs organized freely, accumulated weapons, controlled territory, and developed transnational ambitions. It was like Haiti, but behind bars. There is no documented nationwide decree ordering the mass release of ordinary criminals, but that’s not to say Maduro is innocent. His ruinous, and frankly evil, regime has resulted in porous borders, corruption, and administrative chaos that made it easy for people—including gang members—to move in and out of the country. When millions of Venezuelans fled between roughly 2017 and 2019, overwhelmingly for economic and humanitarian reasons, organized gang members traveled along the same migration routes, blending in with refugees and later rebuilding cells, even entire criminal networks, in destination countries such as Peru and the United States. Maduro didn’t open the prisons, per se, but he created the hell that gave birth to these groups, and tore his own country apart to the point that the prisons no longer functioned and the borders were no longer secure.
Cañas
There’s a bar in Miraflores, downtown Lima, down a side street off Avenida José Pardo. The name of the bar is Cañas, meaning sugarcane. Or sometimes, cane liquor. It was directly next to my apartment building, close enough that I could get there in a torrential downpour, walking hugged against the building, without getting wet. I came to think of it as an extension of my living room.
I went there for the pisco sours. I had made a study of the pisco sour by then. I’d gone to the Morris Bar on the old Jirón de la Unión in central Lima, where the drink was invented. I’d been to Hotel Maury, where they refined the recipe by adding egg white and bitters, and to Hotel B, my favorite bar in the city. Eventually, I’d gotten so good at making them myself, I couldn’t find a place that satisfied me. It’s not an easy drink, and some part of the recipe is always in flux, uncontrollable, but given enough experience, mostly predictable. The limes, for example, vary in sweetness from one to the next. And the egg always adds a variable to the mix. But I had become obsessed, and had nearly touched perfection once or twice along the way. I knew my work was good when Peruvians at parties began asking me, the gringo, to make their Pisco sours.
It’s a lovely drink too. Heavy, bright, refreshing. Apparently, it was created at the Morris by an American bartender who, lacking whiskey, had improvised with the local brandy. Now, that might suggest that this is actually an American drink at heart. But here’s the twist. The whiskey sour he was trying to replicate had itself been invented by a Peruvian in San Francisco decades earlier. The cocktail had crossed the border twice. But it was at Cañas, where a Venezuelan named Luis made the best pisco sour in the city. Other than my own, of course. I think his secret was that he beat the egg white to silk. Luis and I used to talk long, as I’d watch him make my pisco sours, in the slow hours of the evening. He told me about growing up in Venezuela. How beautiful the country was. How much he missed it. And how he would never go back.
The government had destroyed his home, he said. Not his house, but his home, the country itself, and he was lucky to be alive. Once, I came in and found he was drinking himself, which he never did. I ordered a pisco sour, and then another, and we began to talk, and he began to tell me the story of how he walked to Lima. The whole way. He had traveled with his little sister, though he didn’t tell me her name. She liked to pick flowers along the way, he said. Roadside flowers. She’d pick a few, and act like she was going to keep them forever, like they were her new friends. A little later, once they’d wilted, she would place them down on the side of the road. This struck him, because back in Venezuela, flowers on the side of the road were usually placed to remember the dead, often someone who had died in a car accident in that exact spot. People called them flores de muerto. Flowers of death. She liked to sing songs at night, to keep herself from being afraid of the dark. There were a lot of other people on the path, fleeing Venezuela, and not all of them were good people. A beautiful girl like her, and so young too, she could be an easy target. He never told me exactly what happened to her, only that she didn’t make it to Peru.
It was at Cañas that I asked my wife’s father for permission to marry his daughter. My Spanish was still rough, but I made sure to do it in Spanish, and he gave me a talking-to about taking care of her, and I listened to every word. Then Luis brought us pisco sours and we drank until the evening blurred. Not long after that, COVID hit. Peru had the highest per capita death rate in the world at one point, and subsequently, the strictest lockdown in the world. The lockdown was so strict that a man I knew got arrested for stepping outside without a mask to put his trash on the corner. A woman I knew would fill a backpack with groceries and walk around the block, pretending she was coming home from shopping, just to breathe fresh air. For eight months, I didn’t leave my apartment a single time. When the lockdown finally lifted and Cañas reopened, I went back. The bar looked the same. But Luis was gone. I never learned what happened to him, and never heard from him again.
El Burro
The man who might have pointed a rifle at me in traffic and the man who made my drinks came from the same country, and fled the same regime. One was a product of the hell Maduro created, the other a product of the economy he collapsed. Maduro inherited power in 2013 with a thin electoral mandate and a deteriorating economy. When opposition victories and economic contraction threatened his position, he chose survival over reform. What emerged was not simply an inefficient state, but a repurposed one. The security apparatus became an instrument of political control. Venezuela’s Special Action Forces, the FAES, carried out lethal raids in poor neighborhoods under the guise of anti-crime operations. They became death squads. United Nations investigators documented a consistent pattern: victims shot at close range, evidence staged to simulate confrontations, families threatened into silence. The UN concluded that the killings were not aberrations, but policy. It recommended that FAES be dissolved. Earlier reporting by then–UN High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet attributed thousands of deaths to security operations.
Opposition leaders, protesters, journalists, and suspected dissident officers were arrested and held in facilities like El Helicoide, a former shopping center converted into a political prison. Testimony collected by UN investigators describes electric shocks, asphyxiation, prolonged stress positions, beatings, and rape used to extract confessions and intimidate networks. There were, of course, protests. In 2014, 2017, and 2019. There were elections too. And then, after all that, Maduro threw thousands of people, especially anyone he could pinpoint as having taken part in those protests, into a dungeon. Protest itself was criminalized. Demonstrations were met with live ammunition and armored vehicles. Armed pro-government colectivos attacked protesters alongside police, providing plausible deniability while chilling dissent. The press was systematically targeted. Independent outlets were closed or blocked, reporters arrested or forced into exile. The state oil company PDVSA was transformed into a patronage machine as billions were siphoned through inflated contracts, shell companies, and opaque oil-for-cash swaps. Meanwhile, purges of technical staff accelerated the collapse of production long before heavy sanctions took effect—despite what the vile Marxists at the Grayzone or Jacobin, who carry water for this psychopath, would argue. Even The Nation has downplayed his evils. Even programs designed to alleviate suffering became vehicles for theft. The CLAP food program routed contracts through offshore firms tied to insiders, not to mention boxes were overpriced and poor in nutrition, turning mass hunger into a revenue stream.
Of course, as the economic pressure mounted, Maduro’s regime built sanctions-evasion networks, selling oil at steep discounts through intermediaries and moving payments via front companies, gold shipments, and cryptocurrencies to secure elite liquidity rather than national recovery. U.S. prosecutors charged Maduro and senior officials with narco-terrorism, alleging coordination with Colombia’s FARC to traffic cocaine and corrupt state institutions. The consequences spilled across borders. Venezuela’s collapse produced nearly 8 million refugees—the largest displacement crisis in the Western Hemisphere—placing heavy strain on Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Chile, and beyond. The violence and oppression created by Maduro—known as El Burro, “The Donkey”—have torn Venezuela apart and rippled across all of Latin America, and into the United States. Those millions of refugees are forever changed, most of them for the worse. They walked the same roads Luis and his sister walked. Some of them, like Luis, found work and rebuilt. Some of them died along the way, left behind along the road like so many flores de muerto. Others ended up in strange new lands, impoverished, too old to start again, broken by the family lost along the way. And some ended up on motorbikes in Lima traffic with rifles in their hands.
La Patria
This morning, I woke up to the news that President Trump claims to have captured El Burro. He plans to have a news conference at 11am today at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, where he’s spending New Year’s week. Naturally, there will be conversations, and debates, about U.S. foreign policy. There will be outrage from the Marxists at Jacobin. I am sure we will be treated to young leftists in the streets protesting U.S. power and defending Maduro. But among so many homeless and broken Venezuelans, there will be cheers. The faces of so many abuelas from La Patria will be covered in tears. So many brothers and sons will be utterly overwhelmed, thinking of a possible reunion on the horizon. And what of Venezuela? Will it descend into chaos? Will Maduro’s bootprint remain fixed on the face of the nation? Will gangs take over and turn the country into something like Haiti? Maduro is the most economically destructive dictator in world history, not including destruction by war. He inherited oil wealth, functioning institutions, and regional power—and managed to destroy all three. Will Venezuela rise again once he’s out of the way? Imagine what that could do for its 30 million inhabitants, its 8 million people overseas, or the 126 million in Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Chile, whose countries have been made poorer, and markedly less safe, all because of one Marxist dictator.
I’m not especially interested in providing a sweeping, big-picture analysis of how the Maduro regime emerged, how Venezuela’s economy unraveled, what role the United States or sanctions may have played, or in parsing the statistics of collapse that have already been endlessly litigated elsewhere. I just wanted to share with you my very small window on a country that was once great, now that some glimmer of light possibly promises to return. Before El Burro, the cities worked. Caracas had congestion and crime, yes, but also reliable electricity, stocked supermarkets, universities that still drew regional talent, and a middle class that planned vacations as opposed to exits. Cafés were full, bookstores open, and bars loud late into the night. The oil economy distorted things, but it also propped the nation up. Salaries meant something. Savings existed. You could imagine a future for yourself and your kids.
The country itself felt open and generous. Beaches were clean and accessible, not overrun or rationed. Clear water, white sand, families relaxing all day long with coolers and radios playing salsa. The Andes were green, the plains expansive, the coast like something from a postcard. It was heaven. Domestic tourism was normal, people traveled within their own country because they could afford to, because roads functioned, because hotels operated without generators. Venezuelans were proud, and rightfully so. Most of all, there was social ease. Business disputes didn’t require political loyalty. Police were not universally feared. The state was inefficient, sometimes corrupt, but it was not a weapon turned against its own people. Venezuela before Maduro was no utopia. But it was something greater. It was a home, a home to many who have long hoped to return, and some who never can. Venezuelans have a lot of street smarts. Viveza criolla, they call it. Let the people have their country back, and I am sure they will do wonderful things. And to all my Venezolano friends, pa’lante.
What a beautiful essay. Thank you so much.