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Nicolás Maduro Guerra, the only biological son of the Venezuelan ex-dictator imprisoned in the United States, revealed this Sunday in an interview with El País intimate details of the early morning of January 3, 2026, when his father was captured by U.S. special forces in Caracas and taken to a federal prison in New York.
It is the first time that someone close to the former president has provided details to a media outlet about that night, in which 83 people, including soldiers and civilians, lost their lives during Operation Absolute Resolution. The detailed chronology of the U.S. attack on Venezuela documented that the capture occurred at 2:01 AM local time at Fort Tiuna, with more than 150 aircraft involved. In the operation, 32 Cuban soldiers protecting the dictator were killed, and whose existence the Island’s government had systematically denied.
Before the first bombing, Maduro managed to record an audio message for his son: "Nico, they are bombing. May the homeland continue to fight, we are moving forward." It was a farewell. "He thought he would die that day. We all thought he would die that day," recounted the congressman to the journalist María Martín from the Spanish newspaper.
Maduro Guerra indicated that he has not yet made that audio public—“it will come out at some point,” he promised—but he acknowledged the significance of those words.
A month and two days later, while the deputy was debating the amnesty law in the National Assembly, he received the first call from his father since the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. He got up from his seat, went up the stairs of the chamber, and, away from the cameras, cried "a little bit," as he recounts. Since then, he records all the calls. The prison where Maduro is detained has been described as a hell due to its extreme conditions: cells of about six square meters and up to 23 hours a day of isolation.
The former president has 510 minutes per month to communicate with the outside world. During Holy Week, he started living with other inmates and briefly encountered the rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine, to whom he signed a handcrafted SpongeBob toy. "He must have met him for just one day. My father told me he signed something for him, but I didn’t even know he was famous," his son recounted. The details of the meeting between Maduro and Tekashi 6ix9ine had circulated when the rapper showed the signed toy upon his release from prison.
From his cell, Maduro has also developed a biblical devotion that surprises his own son. "He memorized it. He tells us some crazy verses," he said with laughter. "My dad had never been like this, but now he starts off with: 'You have to listen to Matthew 6:33. And Corinthians 3. And Psalm 108.'" The writings that Maduro has sent from prison are almost entirely based on verses, which his son described as "more like a mass." Furthermore, the former president has read approximately 60 books: from Bolívar's Discourse of Angostura to García Márquez, Lenin, and the New York penal code— the latter sent for his wife Cilia Flores, who is a lawyer, to study from the women's wing of the same prison.
Not everything in calls is reflection. Maduro also got angry with his son over FC Barcelona's elimination from the Champions League on April 14: "Damn, that was a screw-up," he told him.
Regarding the political background, Maduro Guerra posed the question that, according to him, his father must be asking in prison: "What did I do or not do that could have prevented January 3?" And he answered himself: "January 3 was a sum. Of aggression, of sanctions, of mistakes. Of interests. Of everything." When confronted about why political openness was not implemented earlier, he slightly admitted: "Yes. Mistakes were made from all sides." In his responses, he omitted the crimes spanning years of the dictatorship, which forced millions of Venezuelans to leave their country.
The deputy, who chairs the Interior Policy Commission of the National Assembly, acknowledged that from that position "we have seen excesses, to put it nicely," and distanced himself personally from his father's legacy: "I am a member of the party, my dad was the president, but I am young, I did not make decisions."
Since the day of the capture, when Maduro's son broke his silence on social media warning that "history will tell who the traitors were," the deputy has become one of the few voices of Chavismo that continues to speak in the present tense about the former president. His faith in his father's return, he said, relies not on the courts but on a political agreement.
With the capture of Maduro, and the subsequent pressures from Washington on the government of acting president Delcy Rodríguez, the Cuban regime abruptly lost its main economic support— the crucial source of oil supply— and its most unwavering ideological ally in the region.
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