Venezuela’s deposed president, Nicolás Maduro, never enjoyed the charisma or genuine popularity of his predecessor, “El Comandante” Hugo Chávez. So all the murals, billboards and installations dotted around Caracas urging the release of the 63-year-old statesman – along with his wife Cilia Flores – from American captivity, don’t exactly feel like a grassroots effort.

“Bring them home!” reads one mural, evoking the Israeli hostages kidnapped by Hamas. Meanwhile, a stopwatch installed in Caracas’s Bolivar Square counts how long it has been since the presidential couple were abducted by the US army in early January. Maduro currently resides in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn – a notorious New York jail that has also held Luigi Mangione, Ghislaine Maxwell and the disgraced rapper Diddy – awaiting trial on charges of narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine.

When a team of American commandos snatched the leader – a carefully planned operation rehearsed using a replica of Maduro’s safehouse – many in the Venezuelan diaspora were overjoyed: finally a tyrant getting his comeuppance, they thought. For 13 years, Maduro clung to power by fabricating elections and terrorizing his opponents, all while the economy spiraled out of control under his terrible mismanagement. A quarter of Venezuelans are believed to have fled abroad.

Trump is still determined to reassert America’s might over the Western hemisphere

Trump is still determined to reassert America’s might over the Western hemisphere

“People are much happier now,” the Venezuelan repairing my laptop in Quito, Ecuador, told me before my trip:

Most of my friends left the country, went to Europe, to Spain, to England, to whatever place you can imagine in the world. Ninety percent of my friends are now outside [Venezuela] because it was very difficult to survive in a country that was practically in a civil war. But now I’m thinking of going home for the first time in ten years.

Most of my friends left the country, went to Europe, to Spain, to England, to whatever place you can imagine in the world. Ninety percent of my friends are now outside [Venezuela] because it was very difficult to survive in a country that was practically in a civil war. But now I’m thinking of going home for the first time in ten........

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