By Sara Flounders
February 10, 2026

Cilia Flores, kidnapped with President Nicolás Maduro and held prisoner in New York City, is, in the corporate media, often relegated to the dismissive, nondescriptive title of “First Lady.” This suggests she is a mere appendage to the Venezuelan head of state.

Flores has been a political leader of the Bolivarian Revolution for more than 25 years who has held top elected offices. She was elected to the National Assembly in 2000, 2005 and 2021 and was the first female president of the National Assembly (2006 – 2011), served as Attorney General (2012–2013) and was elected to the Constituent Assembly in 2017.

Flores is one of the most powerful political figures in Venezuela.

Flores did not come from a wealthy or connected family — she was not a child of privilege. Flores was born in 1956 in the small town of Tinaguillo in the very poor rural state of Cojedes in north-western Venezuela and lived with her five siblings in a mud-brick shack with a dirt floor.

Maduro talked about his partner’s early life in his 2013 election campaign, saying she moved with her family from the rural state of Cojedes to Catia. Catia is a large, densely populated, low-income, working-class neighborhood in western Caracas. With a population of 1 million people, it is one of Caracas’s major barrios. Catia was one of the impoverished neighborhoods, without basic infrastructure, where informal housing clung to steep hills. Catia, like all the barrios, lacked sanitation, sewage, lighting, health care and education. This barrio, with its intense urban congestion, became an important center of the emerging Bolivarian movement.

Flores was an exceptional student who managed to attend law school while working to support herself. She then focused on labor law, married and had three children.

El Caracazo Uprising 

In 1989, life changed for Flores and for millions of Venezuelans, based on a national uprising against International Monetary Fund-imposed “structural adjustment” measures. This uprising, called “El Caracazo,” was a rebellion against the massive austerity, privatizations and currency devaluation. Overnight, food, fuel and transportation costs had skyrocketed as state subsidies of basic necessities abruptly ended.

This uprising across Venezuela and especially in the urban barrios of Caracas was a profound revolutionary break in the whole political structure. The brutal repression by the military resulted in thousands of deaths and disappearances.

Flores says this uprising and the following repression ignited a “revolutionary calling” in her.

From the beginning Flores, union leader and now President Nicolás Maduro and Acting President Delcy Rodríguez were part of the leadership in the revolutionary movement that emerged from the El Caracazo uprising.

This was the development that also radicalized Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, a young army major, and a whole layer of low-ranking officers and enlisted military members. Influenced by the revolutionary leader of Venezuela’s struggle for independence from Spanish colonialism in 1821, Simón Bolívar, Chavez formed a clandestine group within the military who believed that the country’s vast natural wealth should be used to benefit ordinary Venezuelans.

“El Caracazo” was the rupture that led Nicolás Maduro, a bus driver and the son of a union activist, to start organizing the bus drivers of Caracas, who at that time provided an essential service for all workers who lived miles from the city center in hillside barrios. These bus drivers were unorganized, irregular, “informal” workers without any rights or union benefits. This was true for most of the workforce in Venezuela at that time.

Several years before the uprising, in 1986, young Maduro spent a year in Cuba at a school run by the Union of Young Communists.

Delcy Rodríguez was 10 years old when her father — the rebel fighter Jorge Antonio Rodríguez, who founded the Socialist League Party — was killed under torture in police custody in 1976.

The Socialist League was a small Marxist-Leninist political party that promoted armed struggle in the 1970s and 1980s. It merged into the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) along with several other left political parties in 2006 when Hugo Chávez founded the PSUV. Maduro had been a member of the Socialist League.

A failed coup ignites a movement

On February 4, 1992, Chávez, with a small group of revolutionary soldiers, launched a coup against the notoriously corrupt President Carlos Andrés Pérez, the politician who had imposed the austerity measures. The coup did not succeed but it electrified a national movement.

Flores, as a young lawyer, volunteered to represent Chávez and was instrumental in winning his release two years later. She was also the lawyer for several other imprisoned patriotic military officers. After his release Chávez traveled the country building a new political Bolivarian movement based on the promise to dissolve the old political party system, rewrite the constitution and redistribute the nation’s oil wealth to the poor.

Flores formed part of Chávez’s campaign committee, and by 1998, when he was sworn in as president, Flores was a central figure in the Bolivarian Revolution. She was a key figure in developing the Bolivarian Circles as popular, grassroots committees and helped transform these committees into the armed Peoples Militia to defend the government after the failed U.S. coup against President Hugo Chávez in 2002.

After being elected to the National Assembly in 2000, Flores quickly rose to become the leading voice for radical measures in health care and education and for the popular mobilizations of the Communes. Workers in the millions won the right to organize in movements that swept every industry and plant and guaranteed rights, including pensions and disability benefits for workers and rural peasantry, and transformed Venezuela. A process of radical political and social changes emerged that included an electoral system at every level, from small neighborhood councils to districts, states and the National Assembly.

Venezuela Transformed

Millions of new housing units were being built based on oil revenue. New schools, including a whole free university system, arose. Hospitals and thousands of small health clinics, staffed by Cuban doctors, were created.

As a lawyer with revolutionary consciousness, Flores left the National Assembly when Chávez named her Attorney General in 2011. This was a key role in the enforcement of the radical new legislation and a transformed judiciary.

Chávez died of cancer in 2013. This was a blow to the popular revolutionary process. Chávez named his Vice President and union leader Nicolás Maduro as his successor.

Maduro was Flores’ long time companion, since the stormy days of the 1990s. She resigned as Attorney General in 2013 and officially married Maduro in July of that year. Flores stayed actively involved in political life in Venezuela and was warmly named “Primera Combatiente” (First Combatant).

The Constituent Assembly, which Flores served in, was the temporary body charged with drafting a new constitution to deal with the economic and political crisis created by U.S. sanctions and economic destabilization. But it was also set up to guarantee that the rights won through mobilization and legislation were firmly written into the constitution.

Flores was again elected as a deputy to the National Assembly for the five-year term of 2021 – 2026. This is still her official, legal position. She is not just “First Lady”!

After the U.S brutally kidnapped President Maduro and Deputy of the National Assembly Flores on Jan. 3, on the same day the Constitutional Chamber of Venezuela’s Supreme Court ordered Vice President Rodríguez to serve as acting president.

The court ruled that Rodríguez will assume “the office of President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, in order to guarantee administrative continuity and the comprehensive defence of the Nation.” This declaration had the immediate support of the Venezuelan military command and the Peoples Militia.

Rodríguez has been part of the revolutionary process in Venezuela since her childhood. She is trained as a lawyer and an economist and helped design the complex economic policies that helped Venezuela survive the ever tightening rounds of U.S. sanctions.

Both Flores and Rodríguez are exemplary revolutionaries!

Free Maduro and Flores now!

In the millions in massive demonstrations, Venezuelans took to the streets to support and defend their government and their revolution, including demanding the release and return of President Maduro and Cilia Flores. In New York City on Sunday, March 8, International Women’s Day, women will lead a demonstration to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn to demand freedom for Cilia Flores. This is a day globally to call for the release of our sister, Cilia Flores.