In the early hours of January 3, when the first bombing raid shook Caracas, Nicolás Maduro managed to record an audio message for his son. He still doesn’t want to make it public—”it will come out at some point,” he promises—but he shares a few lines: “Nico, they’re bombing. Let the homeland keep fighting, let’s move forward.” It was a farewell. “He thought he was going to die that day,” his son tells EL PAÍS four months after the attack that abruptly changed the history of Venezuela. “We all thought he was going to die that day.”
This is the first time that Nicolás Ernesto Maduro Guerra—Nicolasito, as he has been called for years to distinguish him from his father—has spoken publicly about January 3. It is, in fact, the first time that someone close to the president has given details to a media outlet about that traumatic night in which 83 people died, including soldiers and civilians. Just when it seems Venezuela is turning the page, Maduro’s only son, 35, is one of the few in Caracas who still speaks of the autocrat in the present tense.
A month and two days after that early morning, Nicolás Maduro Guerra received a call. Things were calmer; a “new political moment” had dawned, and he was in his seat in the National Assembly during one of the sessions debating the amnesty law. It was one of his stepmother Cilia Flores’s sons.
“Nico. Nico, this is Nico. Hello?”
They were connecting him with his father on the other end of the line. It was the first time he had heard that voice since January 3rd. The congressman was speechless. He got up from his seat, walked back, and went up the stairs behind the chamber. And there, away from the cameras, he cried “a little,” he says now, sitting in a boardroom several times the size of the bedroom where his father was detained. Curiously, his office, located in a financial district of Caracas, is just minutes from the Marriott, the hotel where the Americans have set up their base of operations to dictate Venezuela’s future without his father.
Since that day, Maduro Guerra has been recording the calls he receives from the US prison. They record everything too, and together they are compiling a sound archive that is now history.
“To accept the call, press five,” he hears each time.
Nicolás Maduro, locked up in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, the only federal prison in New York City, has 510 minutes a month for his conversations with the outside world.
“Hello, good night, how are you?”
Maduro teases his son, just as he teased all the guards who watched him when he landed in New York after his capture. “Happy New Year,” he told them, his hands cuffed on his stomach, wearing his gray Nike tracksuit and a wool hat.
Maduro’s first months in prison were spent in solitary confinement, on a narrow bed. Coffee, overly spicy food, a desk. The government of Delcy Rodríguez negotiated improved conditions with the United States, and, according to his son, during Holy Week he began interacting with other prisoners, watching television with them. It was then that he met the rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine, whose first act upon release was to show off a handmade SpongeBob SquarePants doll signed by Maduro. “He must have only met him once. My father told me he signed something for him, but I didn’t even know he was famous,” he recalls. “I’m a salsa dancer,” he jokes.
Maduro has been reading the Bible obsessively. Every day. “He memorized it. He recites some crazy verses to us,” he says, laughing. “My father was never like this, but now, on the phone, he sometimes starts there: ‘You have to listen to Matthew 6:33. And 3 Corinthians. And Psalm 108,’” he says. Maduro used to profess devotion to the Indian spiritual leader Sathya Sai Baba, but now he seems to do so for the Pope. The congressman writes down the psalms Maduro recites to him in a notebook. It’s no coincidence that the two writings his father has published from prison—one after the first hearing on March 26, and the other on Palm Sunday—are based almost entirely on verses. “More like a Mass,” his son told him when he read them.
