The good luck of Nicolás Maduro

Why dictators need better retirement plans

Nicolás Maduro and his wife in custody

As the fates of despots go, “abducted in the middle of the night and whisked off to stand trial in New York” is really not such a bad end. The luckiest despots, like Franco or Mao or the older al-Assad, are those who die in their bed as old men, exhausted by decades of increasingly lethargic tyranny; following them in fortune are men like Idi Amin or Mengistu or the younger al-Assad, who flee the collapse of their regimes and find themselves exiles on strange shores (Mengistu, one of the great butchers of the last century, is still today comfortably retired in Harare, and of course Bashar appears to spend his days puttering around Moscow); and then those, like Pinochet or Fujimori or Videla, who relinquish power under circumstances not quite of their choosing and live undisturbed for a time, only to face trial in one unfavorable jurisdiction or another in the decades that follow.

The least lucky of all, of course, are those like Gaddafi or Ceausescu or Mussolini: made suddenly desolate and abject and shorn of all the accoutrements of power, they meet their doom at the hands of their former subjects.

So compared to what befell his peers, Nicolás Maduro’s involuntary retirement is a quite happy outcome. Manuel Noriega of Panama, ousted from power by American soldiers on January 3, 1990—36 years to the day before Maduro’s own exfiltration—was, like Maduro, arrested, extradited to the U.S., and charged as a drug trafficker. Noriega was convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison, but was lucky enough to serve his sentence in a minimum security prison outside Miami, where he was granted his own bungalow; and, as he was a model prisoner, his sentence was ultimately reduced to 17 years. In the end Noriega died in Panama City at the ripe old age of 83, still a prisoner but at least a prisoner of his own country. There is, as of yet, no pension plan for dictators, no franchise of retirement communities for those who wish to relinquish their power in peace; but life as a ward of the U.S. state, not so dissimilar from the life enjoyed by countless American retirees across the Sun Belt, is close enough.

It is precisely the difficulty of retirement that seems to me one of the great downsides of being an autocrat. In a stable republican system a leader takes few risks by retiring: the achievement of executive power is the pinnacle of a successful public life, and one can leave it just as one can leave any private career. Thus in Rome’s republican period a former consul might happily live out his remaining days as an august elder statesman, called upon for grave pronouncements on matters of state; or he could, like Cincinnatus, simply disappear to live out his senescence on his rural estate.

And indeed that was the example followed in later epochs by men like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, who modeled both their lives and the republic they founded on the Roman ideal. In our less noble times former executives tend to occupy themselves with lucrative sinecures, tiresome public commentary, and the production of Netflix content (there is much to be said for those who commit themselves to humble good works or simply disappear to a Texan ranch); but it is still the case that, with a few glaring exceptions, a leader who accedes to power by democratic means does not incur much danger by leaving his post.

But that is not the case for a dictator. The autocrat knows too much and has made too many enemies to live out his twilight years in peace and quiet; and transitions of power are always the most perilous moment for a regime.

Manuel Noriega in custody

Before the Delta Force surprised him in his bedroom a few nights ago, Maduro had spent several months in talks with the U.S. government about the possibility of his exiling himself from Venezuela. Turkey looked like a distinct possibility; there was also talk of Russia and Qatar. But Maduro must have known that this was not feasible. There is no case in modern history of a despot surrendering his power, disappearing to a comfortable exile abroad, and seeing his regime survive. Centuries ago a pious ruler like Charles V might, toward the end of his life, decide to relinquish the throne and embrace the life of a monk in rustic northern Spain; but Maduro, it is reported, wanted to keep $200 million of the money he’d pilfered and enjoy an opulent life abroad. Clearly that would not do. The rumors went, in fact, that he knew he could not leave power, because his bodyguards had been furnished by the Cuban government and would kill him if he made a deal with the Americans.

Why did Maduro surround himself with Cuban guards? Here we arrive at another great downside of being an autocrat. It would be unthinkable for an American president to surround himself with Canadian bodyguards, or for a British prime minister to hire only Germans for his security detail. But the autocrat—and particularly the autocrat who feels his hold on power to be less than completely secure—must always be paranoid. A democratic ruler can say he holds power because of the will of the people; a monarch can say he holds power because in him flows sacred blood; a theocrat can say he holds power because it is the will of God. Even a conqueror can say his power was won on the battlefield. But what of someone who seized power through dishonorable means—a fraudulent election, open bribery, the murder of his predecessor? What is to stop that thug from being deposed by another thug, and in fact treated much as his own predecessors were treated?

It is impossible to be a dictator, then, and not arrive at the outermost extremes of paranoia: a rational paranoia, it should be said, because in the game of praetorian politics only the paranoid survive. This paranoia, it should be said, does not touch much on the institutions of the state, which in many despotic regimes are allowed to fall into disrepair; rather they center inevitably on the person of the dictator.

Dr. Francia of Paraguay, dubbed in his day El Supremo, was perhaps the most paranoid of all historical despots, though Stalin and Saddam Hussein come close; and fittingly he was the one whose passion for self-preservation most completely contoured the activities of his regime. In his early life the man who would become El Supremo had enjoyed gambling and those social affairs that were available to a Paraguayan gentleman of the early nineteenth century; but when he acceded to power, after a great deal of scheming and cunning manipulation, the fear of intrigue began its complete subjugation of his soul.

Dr. Francia of Paraguay

Dr. Francia ruled Paraguay for a quarter of a century and during that period isolated it entirely from the rest of the world; and just as he separated Paraguay from the world, he separated himself from all other men. Distrusting any guards, he would lock the doors of the palace himself each night; the cigars his sister prepared for him were always unrolled to check for poison; he permitted no one to come within six paces of him. When he went riding, all bushes and trees on his path were uprooted so that no assassin could lie in wait for him. Thus as the unchallenged potentate of his small country he lived a life of complete loneliness and desolation. And indeed Dr. Francia was a wise man: for after decades of complete power, he died peacefully in his bed as an old man.

Was Dr. Francia born so extreme a paranoiac, or did he become one? The question cannot be answered. Certainly the numberless betrayals and brutalities small and large demanded of one who rises to autocratic power must select for those who are by nature distrusting, deceitful, and aloof from others. But even if Dr. Francia was always a latent paranoiac, there is something about the practice of autocratic rule that brings that restless distrust into its full flower: just as autocracy inculcates in its lowly subjects a subtle and insidious everyday fearfulness, it instills in its practitioners a more vast and more horrible paranoia.

It is paranoia that debilitates most dictatorial regimes and that robs them of all the unity of purpose that ought to be their great advantage. It is this paranoia that leads dictators to intentionally weaken the institutions that might allow them to govern their countries and defend their lands; that leads them to appoint incompetents of some kin relation or another; and that leads them, in certain circumstances, to do as Maduro did and surround themselves with armed foreigners. He did so for the same reason that Chinese emperors would entrust vast functions of state to eunuchs who could not be tempted by the desires and loyalties of the flesh, or that the emperors of Byzantium chose to surround themselves with the Norsemen of the Varangian Guard, or why Gaddafi chose only women for bodyguards.

Gaddafi and his guards

The paranoid ruler selects those who by the rules of his society are precluded from ever holding power in their own stead; or, failing that, who by dint of religious or ethnic or familial loyalties would not wish to do him harm. In the political science literature this is called “coup-proofing”; and the more insecure the regime the more central it becomes to the affairs of government. In the most degenerate circumstances the individual cause of the dictator colonizes his government from within, like a parasite upon its host: and so the protection of his corporeal person becomes the overriding purpose of the state.

All of which means that in autocratic regimes there are few positions more promising of steady ascent and great reward than the apparently humble post of bodyguard. For in this position of seeming servitude exist extraordinary opportunities for private gain: history furnishes us with countless examples of men whose proximity to the despot won them such opportunities. The gloomy emperor Tiberius placed enough trust in his Praetorian prefects, first Sejanus and then Macro, that these soldiers of humble origin could rule Rome for years as the aging emperor devoted his senescence to debauchery. Likewise Aleksey Dyumin, longtime bodyguard to Vladimir Putin, is now vaunted as his potential successor, having been promoted to a regional governorship. One can imagine that dictators, afflicted with such solitude and fear as is almost inherent in the position, find a great personal solace, even some simulation of friendship, in the company of the bodyguard.

Of course the comfort is often a false one. There are certain stories that relate how King Candaules of the Lydians was betrayed by his bodyguard, Gyges, who usurped the throne and founded a dynasty that ruled for more than a century, until the Lydians were subjugated by the Persians. Macrinus, Praetorian prefect to the Roman emperor Caracalla, attempted the same feat of usurpation: he had the emperor murdered and assumed the throne himself. But Macrinus was less fortunate than Gyges, and was murdered within fourteen months.

The history of bodyguard betrayal continues into the present day. In 1984 Indira Gandhi of India had ordered the Indian military to root out Sikh extremists at the Golden Temple in Amritsar; asked whether she could trust Sikhs to guard her after that decision, she looked at one of her favorite bodyguards, a Sikh, and said, “When I have Sikhs like this around me, then I don’t believe I have anything to fear.” Two months later that Sikh bodyguard would shoot her dead.

Even family is no protection. Ali Bongo, erstwhile dictator of Gabon, put his cousin in charge of the presidential guard; after Ali Bongo had served 14 years in power, that cousin decided to depose him and see how he would fare as head of state instead. Ali was also one of the lucky ones: he was held under house arrest for 20 months and then allowed to leave; he now lives in Angola, while his cousin runs the country.

Ali Bongo after being deposed

So treacherous is the life of the despot that one imagines that it must wear terribly on his spirit. There are many books devoted to the sufferings of the people under dictatorship: few to the sufferings of the dictator. It was Lincoln who said that slavery corrodes the soul of the slaver just as much as that of the slave. One suspects that certain despots, after having reached a particular stage in their lives, desire to be relieved of the burden they assumed as younger and more ambitious men; one remembers the story of the emperor Diocletian, who in his old age resolved to abdicate his power and dedicate his energies to the cultivation of his garden in Salona, in what is now Croatia. Shortly thereafter his successors fell into vicious squabbling and sought to draw him from his retirement. Politely he refused. “I wish you would come to Salona,” he wrote to his old co-emperor Maximian, “and see the cabbages I have planted; you would never again mention to me the name of empire.”

And indeed we find such instances of disillusionment everywhere in the life of kings and dictators. For the man who achieves all his aims and lives the future of which he once dreamed must learn that his power, however great, will not prevail against those forces of accident and nature that constitute the world. In reading about the final years of Mao one notices this disillusionment, the dark jokes about having changed “a few places in the vicinity of Peking.” We need little wonder why Charles V decided to live as a monk. And is life in prison so different from monastic existence? Perhaps it is more comfortable: white-collar prisons in America today offer tennis, volleyball, basketball, even the simple luxury of time to read and think—certainly a luxury afforded to few leaders of states. So Nicolás Maduro has much to look forward to in his state-supervised retirement. Perhaps they will even let him grow his own cabbages.