{{The president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, was young once too. He played guitar and worked as a roadie for a rock band, Enigma, leaving his hair long in the back, mullet-style.}}
The skinny, rebellious young man looked not too different from the student protesters and angry teens now challenging his government in the streets.
For these youths, who grew up during the 14-year rule of his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, it is Maduro who has become the face of a rotten establishment.
“Maduro, resign now!” they roar.
After more than two weeks of daily protests that have left at least 14 dead and 150 injured, Maduro is stumbling toward Wednesday’s anniversary of Chávez’s death, saddled by doubts about his ability to keep his mentor’s “Bolivarian” revolution running.
The problems Chávez passed along when he died last year, including rampant crime and a cratering economy, have gotten worse.
But the man who calls himself “a son of Chávez” has also inherited a silver spoon of immense, centralized state power. Maduro and the United Socialist Party founded by Chávez control 20 of Venezuela’s 23 state governments, as well as the Supreme Court, parliament and, the most important, the military and the national oil company.
In the poor and working-class barrios where Chávez provided new schools, medical clinics and subsidized housing, loyalty to the government remains strong.
Venezuela is not Ukraine, analysts say, where a weak president wobbled, then fled.
“There is no reason to believe Maduro is in an unstable situation,” said Gregory Weeks, a Latin America scholar at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
“The military has declared itself behind him and has not wavered in that regard.
Unless they were called in for intense repressive measures, it is hard to imagine any scenario where military leaders would revolt.”
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