Andrew Sage

That is currently, what, something like $50 million?

I mean, there are people around Maduro that have made upwards of a billion dollars in oil rents.

So it's not like you can pay off people to betray him either.

Yeah, and it's not, nor is it like a cult of personality situation, like certainly not now.

Chavez had something of a sort of charismatic leadership role, but Maduro is not that.

So let's talk about the opposition in Venezuela in so much as like, I guess if we go back to the election last year, right, let's start with the election and explain to people what happened there and the subsequent sort of avenues that are now open or the avenues that that opposition is now exploring, if that's okay.

There was an election, quote-unquote, that took place last year.

It was brokered largely by the U.S.

The U.S., under the Biden administration, was pushing for some kind of negotiations between the opposition, the Venezuelan government.

They convinced enough people in the opposition to stand for elections under what was called the Barbados Agreement in 2023.

And this was meant to be an exchange of...

partial lifting of the sectoral sanctions that have been in place on Venezuela for a long time, in which the Trump administration, the first Trump administration, really tightened in exchange for the Maduro government agreeing to stand for elections.

And those elections happened last year.

It was pretty clear from pre-electoral surveys and from exit polls and from the vote returns that were coming in at the time that the opposition candidate was going to win by an enormous margin, about a 35-point margin.

The candidate was officially Edmundo Gonzalez, but he was candidate mostly because Maria Corina Machado, the now Nobel Prize laureate, was barred from running.

So she gave her blessing to Gonzalez to be basically her proxy, and people were more or less voting for both of them, so to speak.

But both he and her are much more popular than Maduro, who, by all accounts, is an extremely unpopular leader, especially in contrast to, as you said, Hugo Chavez, who is

for all his faults, was a genuinely charismatic leader, and he did stand for elections and win them pretty convincingly.

Incidentally, the price of oil was about $100 a barrel when he was president, and he was able to spend a lot on social programs, but that aside, Maduro is...

Pretty unpopular at this point.