Nicolas Maduro, a former bus driver and union activist, rose from humble origins to rule Venezuela for 13 years and eight months before being unceremoniously ousted on Saturday by US special forces who seized the 63-year-old leader and flew him out of the country.

Axar.az informs, citing Guardian, for years Maduro had accused the US government of seeking to undermine the supposed socialist revolution that his late mentor and predecessor, Hugo Chavez, ushered in in 1999. Now in the custody of US authorities, he will face indictment on narcotics charges and a potentially long prison sentence.

Venezuelans will judge him too. Maduro’s rule shattered Venezuela’s economy, leading millions of his countrymen and women to flee overseas to escape an incompetent, corrupt, repressive and often brutal government.

Born on 23 November 1962, Maduro began his political career as president of the student union at Jose Avalos high school in El Valle, a working-class neighbourhood on the outskirts of the capital, Caracas.

Records show he never graduated, but he was remembered as an imposing and conciliatory figure. In 1986 he travelled to Cuba where he received his only formal education after high school. He worked as a bus driver for the Caracas subway system on his return and quickly became a union leader, like his father before him, and an enthusiastic follower of Chávez.

In the mid-1990s, he joined the political movement that Chávez organised after receiving a presidential pardon for leading a failed and bloody military coup. When Chávez eventually took office in 1998, the younger man’s loyalty, political skill and ideological commitment led to a rapid rise through the ranks of Venezuela’s ruling party. After six years in the national assembly, Maduro was made foreign minister, before being appointed vice-president six years later.

When Chávez died of cancer in 2013, he named the burly, moustachioed Maduro as his successor. Many mocked Maduro’s working-class roots and portrayed him as a loud-mouthed clown who did little more than slavishly repeat Chávez’s bombastic rhetoric. It was true that Maduro had little of his mentor’s charisma, but he won a narrow victory that year and his first six-year term.

Almost immediately, Maduro’s presidency was plunged into crisis. The political opposition, including the now-Nobel peace prize winner Maria Corina Machado, called for street protests in Caracas and other cities.

In 2018, Maduro survived an assassination attempt when drones rigged with explosives detonated near him as he delivered a speech during a nationally televised military parade in Caracas.

By now, the economy was in freefall, racked by hyperinflation and shortages of basic essentials. Oil production dropped to less than 400,000 barrels a day, a figure once unthinkable.

Maduro has been married twice. His first marriage was to Adriana Guerra Angulo, with whom he had his only son, Nicolás Maduro Guerra, also known as "Nicolasito", who was appointed to several senior government posts, Chief of the Presidency's Special Inspectors Body, head of the National Film School, and is a deputy to the National Assembly of Venezuela.

In July 2013, he married Cilia Flores, a lawyer and politician who replaced Maduro as president of the National Assembly in August 2006, when he resigned to become Minister of Foreign Affairs, becoming the first woman to serve as president of the National Assembly. The two had been in a romantic relationship since the 1990s when Flores was Hugo Chávez's lawyer following the 1992 Venezuelan coup d'état attempts and were married months after Maduro became president. She is also thought to have been seized by the US.

While they have no children together, Maduro has three step-children from his wife's first marriage to Walter Ramón Gavidia: Walter Jacob, Yoswel, and Yosser.

Maduro’s tenacity and tactical skill often surprised opponents who wrote him off too early. This time it looks like there will be no comeback.