President Maduro insists that he is a man of simple tastes, yet the former bus driver referred to on state media as the “working-class president” is rumoured, like the rest of his senior cabinet, to have amassed great wealth at the expense of ordinary Venezuelans.
If that is true, it is well concealed. American sanctions speak of freezing “all assets of Nicolás Maduro subject to US jurisdiction” without specifying what they may be. Mr Maduro is married to Cilia Flores, a politician, who was once the lawyer for Hugo Chávez, the self-proclaimed founder of the “Bolivarian revolution”. She is a member of the new constituent assembly, as is Nicolás Jr, the couple’s son.
Widely rumoured to be the power behind the throne, Ms Flores now says little in public, except agreeing with her husband on his near daily social media posts. These can border on the surreal: showing the often track-suited couple driving through Caracas streets, or planting a tree together.
One had them seated on a playground swing. Since he became president in 2013, Mr Maduro has put on weight, while the rest of the population has become slimmer owing to shortages, a process sardonically referred to as the “Maduro diet”.
Opposition politicians routinely call Mr Maduro a “narco-dictator”, and both his vice-president, Tareck el Aissami, and his interior minister, Néstor Reverol, have been linked by the US government to trafficking allegations they deny. Two of Ms Flores’s nephews were convicted of trying to smuggle cocaine into the US and are in jail in New York. Prosecutors alleged that cash from the operation was intended to keep the family in power.