PRR: Another Swan Song for Padrino
PRR 473| 07/04/2025
The View From Above
There was a time when general Vladimir Padrino Lopez, the Defense Minister with the longest term in Venezuelan history, was considered a candidate for leading a transition. More precisely, a man who would use his leadership over the Armed Forces to lead a transition while keeping at bay—through dissuasion or force—the more violent elements of the chavista coalition. But when Nicolas Maduro started an illegitimate period in January 2019 after the shady elections of 2018, Padrino remained loyal to him, and also stood by him during the violent repression that followed the 2025 stolen election. When more than 50 countries refused to recognize Maduro as legitimate, it wasn't enough for Padrino to betray Maduro. Neither did the human rights investigations, the sanctions, the mass migration and the massive electoral fraud of July 28, 2024. The feeble attempt at a coup d'etat in 2019 by Juan Guaidó and Leopoldo López was prompted, according to the latter, by backchannel negotiations with both Padrino and the president of the Supreme Tribunal of Justice, who would join in declaring Maduro illegitimate, but backed off once the plan was put in motion.
Padrino has stood firmly as a pillar of the chavista alliance that has endured many kinds of domestic and foreign threats since the death of Hugo Chavez, killing speculation after another about the general’s secret desire to rule the country by himself—or in tandem with someone who has nothing in common with him like Maria Corina Machado.
As a career officer who has talked a lot about a multipolar world not ruled by the US, and developed a close and profitable relationship with the Russian industrial-military complex, Padrino’s trajectory stands out as a case study about the involvement of the Venezuelan military in the build-up of the chavista autocracy. He absorbed the fantasies of many who dreamt about a general who produced, almost single-handedly, a regime change, like Wolfgang Larrazabal in 1958’s Venezuela or Augusto Pinochet in 1973’s Chile. While he recorded himself in target practice at Fuerte Tiuna, embracing athletes or meeting the Carter Center election observer’s team just before he helped steal an election, he seemed to make fun of the chimerical dreams that some people in the opposition or its allies abroad would hold close to their hearts. In the past two years Padrino has lowered his public profile, which was once as intense as that of a man with presidential ambitions; now, to the periodical questions about who would replace him, our sources in the government add that the Defense Minister is seriously ill, and could be reaching the end of his stellar role in this long story.
If this is true and Padrino leaves the ministry in the following weeks or months, we recommend to resist the temptation of updating the fantasies about him, by thinking that his exit would inflict a mortal wound on the chavista alliance. Today, the individual leadership that Padrino used to enjoy is spread among several military leaders. Diosdado Cabello and his allies in the military are more powerful than in 2019, even if Maduro is trying to correct that mistake. Maduro hasn’t lost the ability to balance the distribution of power, even if Cabello is trying to destabilize that balance to his favor. Other military leaders that were once thought to be next in line after Padrino were betrayed by their own ambitions, and were deprived the command of troops and sent far away from the barracks, as it happened with Admiral Remigio Ceballos, currently the ambassador in Beijing, or former Army General Jesús Suárez Chourio, who had to change his uniform for a business suit when he was sent to the National Assembly as a lawmaker.
Nonetheless, the end of the Padrino era wouldn’t be inconsequential. Maduro will have to find a way of replacing him with one or several generals that provide the regime with the same function where Padrino excelled at: keeping a demoralized, underpaid, poorly equipped and deeply corrupted Armed Forces free from the temptation of turning on a ruling elite where every head has a price, payable in thousands or millions of U.S. dollars.
July means rumors about Vladimir Padrino