Nicolás Maduro’s son, Nicolás Maduro Guerra, claimed during a weekend livestream that history will reveal who the alleged “traitors” were who helped the United States arrest his father.
Local outlets reported that Maduro Guerra, commonly known as Nicolasito (“Lil’ Nicolas”) and “The Prince,” issued the message on Saturday hours after President Donald Trump ordered a U.S. law enforcement action in Caracas that resulted in the capture of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Maduro Guerra is Maduro’s only son, born in 1990 at a time his father was married to Adriana Guerra Angulo.
“History will tell who the traitors were, history will reveal it, we will see. We must focus on moving our country forward, raising Chávez’s flags, and bringing Nicolás Maduro Moro and Cilia Flores back safe and sound,” Maduro Guerra said in his message.
Maduro Guerra did not provide further details on who were the purported “traitors” allegedly involved in his father’s capture.
“I am steadfast. My family is steadfast. Steadfast. Strong, and we are moving forward, so I apologize if I got a little emotional. I wanted to speak to you from the heart,” he continued, before saluting individuals who sent messages to him.
“Well, I’m keeping an eye on things. She’s talked to half the world today, and I still have to talk to the other half, but we’re fine, in God’s name. Hugs, we’ll get through this,” he concluded.
According to the outlet El Estimulo, Maduro Guerra called for protests in Venezuela against his father’s capture for Sunday, January 4 — the protests, the outlet reported, did not took place.
“Today [January 3] was a shocking day, of course it was, we got dealt a huge blow. We have had great victories, but today we underestimated. But tomorrow, January 4 and January 5, we are going out into the streets to call on our people to unite and rally around our political-military leadership with maximum unity,” he reportedly said during the stream.
Maduro Guerra, 35, has occupied several different positions in the Venezuelan socialist regime since Nicolás Maduro succeeded Hugo Chávez in 2013. Presently, he serves as a lawmaker in the socialist-controlled National Assembly and boasts the title of “Vice President of Religious Affairs” for the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), a position that saw him serve as a liaison between his father and pro-regime local religious groups.
Maduro Guerra publicly appeared on Monday at the National Assembly for the start of the 2026 legislative year, where he delivered a teary-eyed message to Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores amid the applause of his fellow socialist lawmakers.
“The homeland is in good hands, dad, and soon we will embrace each other here in Venezuela. And you will see the boys, Cilia. You will see them, Cilia. We will see each other,” he said. “Long live Venezuela, long live the homeland, and here we stand firm for whatever we must do for our homeland. We love you very much.”
A recently unsealed indictment revealed that Maduro Guerra stands as one of the co-conspirators who benefited from Nicolás Maduro’s drug trafficking schemes. According to the indictment document, Maduro Guerra visited Venezuela’s Margarita Island “twice monthly” between 2014 and 2015. Maduro Guerra would arrive on a plane owned by Venezuela’s state-owned oil company PDVSA and, before leaving the island, the plane would be loaded, “sometimes with the assistance of armed sergeants, with large packages wrapped in tape” understood to have been drugs, according to testimonies cited by the court.
“Maduro Guerra was present while the PDVSA plane was loaded and, on one occasion, stated that the plane could go wherever it wanted, including the United States,” the document read.
The indictment further explained that, around 2017, Maduro Guerra worked to ship hundreds of kilograms of cocaine from Venezuela to Miami and spoke to drug trafficking partners about “shipping low-quality cocaine to New York because it could not be sold in Miami, arranging a 500-kilogram shipment of cocaine to be unloaded from a cargo container near Miami, and using scrap metal containers to smuggle cocaine into the ports of New York.”
The United States, during President Donald Trump’s first term, imposed sanctions on Maduro Guerra in 2019 for his participation in the illegitimate National Constituent Assembly, a supra-parliamentary body imposed by the Maduro regime in 2017 that hijacked the functions and powers of the National Assembly, at the time controlled by the Venezuelan opposition and the last democratically-elected institution in the country up until the regime replaced it with socialist lawmakers in a sham 2020 election.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.