In the civil registry of the La Candelaria parish in the heart of Caracas, there should be a supposed birth certificate for Nicolás Maduro Moros. This document is known as act 2823 of folio 435, indicating that the current president of Venezuela was presented there on November 27, 1964, two years and four days after his birth in the capital. However, confirming the existence of this document does not solve the mystery surrounding his true nationality.
Since January 2013, when he was forcefully imposed as acting president of the Republic during the hidden agony of commander Hugo Chávez in Cuba, and later, after the revolutionary leader’s passing in a military hospital in Caracas, Nicolás Maduro’s birthplace has become a matter of state rather than just public controversy. The current Constitution requires the president to be Venezuelan by birth. If it were proven beyond doubt that Maduro was born in another country and holds another nationality, opposition figures calculated that they could bypass even the obstacle of a Supreme Court tightly controlled by Chavismo, paving a swift path to the president’s removal and the calling of new elections.
The calculations were not unfounded. There are numerous testimonies asserting that the former chancellor and current president had a close connection with neighboring Colombia during his childhood and adolescence. A report published on this website in 2015 detailed a family home in Cúcuta, a city in the Norte de Santander department where the president’s mother, Teresa de Jesús Moros, is said to be from. Documents circulated by various media show that his father, Nicolás Maduro García, who has ancestry from the former Netherlands Antilles, studied in the town of Ocaña, within the same Colombian province. The Chavismo leaders offering explanations about the president’s birthplace and identity only fueled the discussion with frequently conflicting versions. For instance, in 2013, Táchira state governor José Vielma Mora claimed that Maduro was born in the El Palotal sector of San Antonio del Táchira, which borders Colombia. Hermann Escarrá, Chavismo’s favored legal expert, has referred to the president on several occasions, including some sessions of the current Constituent Assembly, as “Nicolás Alejandro Maduro Moros,” adding a middle name not associated with the leader in Supreme Court documents or in his National Electoral Council file.
Amidst all these twists, Maduro’s birth certificate became a key piece to unravel the enigma. The team from Armando.info managed to trace the document after a year and a half of intensive searches in the civil registries of the Libertador municipality, in the central-western part of the Venezuelan capital.
Subjected to the Kafkaesque whims of its officials, the deliberate disarray that completing personal documentation in Venezuela entails, and the differing statements from Chavista spokespersons—like Vielma Mora—who in 2013 provided three different names of parishes as the Venezuelan leader’s place of birth in various interviews, the team members began a shift-by-shift search in all the registries of Caracas until mid-October 2016. Then a ruling from the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court revealed that the president was registered in La Candelaria.
This established perhaps an unusual circumstance: a president whose birthplace was declared by decree. But the decision allowed for focused efforts on tracing that specific registry, located on Urdaneta Avenue in the Venezuelan capital.
Every other Friday, as dictated by the arbitrary consultation rules of the registry, a team member reviewed the volumes where newborn registrations are recorded. They opted to examine the books from 1962 to 1967, under the assumption that Maduro must have been registered in preschool with an official document during his first five years of life. There was no need to go that far. In a volume from late 1964 containing only digitized acts, the birth certificate of Venezuela’s president was found.
To request that document at the La Candelaria registry, interested parties must arrive from Monday to Thursday before 7:00 AM, the time when numbers are distributed for handling requests. Only 80 numbers are handed out, and people often show up at 4:00 AM to ensure they can complete their paperwork in one day. During the peak of the protests against the regime from April to August 2017, some even spent the night to be among the first. The rise in requests for birth certificates corresponded with the recent exodus of Venezuelans.
Many of the books consulted by the Armando.info team had their indexes torn out. When, as a test, a previous act from the same book, corresponding to citizen José Eliseo Arias, was requested from the registry, it was confirmed that the original volume was unavailable for public consultation. However, a photocopy of the scanned act could be obtained. This procedure highlights the secrecy and mystery surrounding the volume recording the birth of the president of Venezuela.
State Matter
The registrar of the La Candelaria parish, Camilo Ángel, does not disclose the whereabouts of Maduro’s birth certificate. “It is under custody,” he summarizes. “I cannot tell you where it is. The Sebin (National Bolivarian Intelligence Service) has taken custody of that information, but right now, I don’t know if it’s in their hands, or with the Presidency, the Libertador Mayor’s office or the National Electoral Council.”
This qualifies as “confidential information” because it concerns “a state matter.”
Ángel claims to have seen it. He attests to its existence because, he says, he signed copies many times when Maduro was a deputy—Maduro would later become president of the National Assembly for just over a year, from January 2005 to August 2006—but now warns that it is “confidential information” due to involving “a state matter.” “He is the president of the Republic,” he justifies.
Maduro’s certificate is in one of the few digitized books from 1964.
At the head of the Civil Registration Directorate for the Libertador Municipality, Manuel Gil, also provided no news concerning the birth certificate. He warned that it is outside his jurisdiction. But minutes later, he called the registrar in Candelaria to inform him about this inquiry just when a team member from Armando.info was asking his subordinate why only a scanned copy is shown.
Unlike others, Maduro’s act is in one of the few digitized books from 1964. According to the registrar, this is part of a pilot digitization plan that has, by coincidence, included the volume containing the information on the president’s birth. “As we are in a transition, there’s a lack of order,” he summarizes. “In Antímano and El Valle, everything has been digitized, but we don’t handle that information as such.”
Armando.info has not been able to verify the authenticity of the document through technical expertise. It was established, however, that the original book is kept outside the La Candelaria registry building and rests within a safe, under the responsibility of Irving González, director of the National Civil Registry Office. This office falls under the National Electoral Council (CNE) and operates on the second floor of the CNE’s headquarters in the old Caracas Teleport building at Plaza Venezuela, within the Libertador municipality. González has been a CNE employee since December 2014 and was appointed temporarily to his role on May 10, 2017.
Aside from Camilo Ángel, Manuel Gil, and Irving González, only a small group of people from the National Civil Registry Office knows why only a scanned image of the president’s birth certificate is accessible. This is a mystery the team has not been able to confirm. But to reach any of them, one must first get past Gutiérrez, the figure who serves as a guide amidst the bureaucracy in every Venezuelan public office.
In fact, Gutiérrez is much more than just a guide. Neighbors of the alley that borders the back of the registry building, where there is a secret entrance to these offices, say he is the guardian of the place. Taxi drivers who operate in the alley call him when they see any suspicious individuals loitering to check if he knows them. On several occasions, Gutiérrez has chased off thieves who steal spare parts or disturb the entrances of businesses neighboring the registry. He reportedly does so at night and when needed, and also warns the workers of nearby shops when he has seen any attempts of robbery after waking up to noises.
At one point, Gutiérrez mentioned that he was there watching over Maduro’s birth certificate.
Some say he was a police officer in the past, while many others avoid explaining why he lives in the La Candelaria civil registry office. But once, he mentioned he was there guarding Maduro’s birth certificate. That night, according to witnesses who recounted this story on the condition of anonymity, he had a few too many drinks.
During the day, Gutiérrez—thin, dark-skinned, and with a deep voice—opens the registry offices, organizes the queues, delivers copies of the requested birth certificates, and even parks Camilo Ángel’s vehicle. He is a man of Ángel’s trust. Both enter and exit the registry through the back door. Gutiérrez declined a requested interview, delegating the authorization to Ángel.
From Afar
This birth certificate has only been seen from a distance when it was shown by the president of the Electoral Power, Tibisay Lucena, during an interview with journalist Vladimir Villegas of Globovisión on October 10, 2013. Lucena aimed to settle the intense controversy surrounding Maduro’s nationality at that time, who had assumed the role of head of state six months earlier after narrowly winning the snap elections called to select Hugo Chávez’s successor.
Others speculated he had at least dual nationality, as his mother, Teresa, was born in that border city with Venezuela.
His critics and much of the opposition press contended that he was Colombian. The former representative of Panama to the OAS, Guillermo Cochez, even displayed a supposed document claiming that the president was born in Cúcuta exactly a year before the date of birth declared in Venezuelan documents. Others speculated he had at least dual nationality, as his mother Teresa was born in that border city with Venezuela. These suspicions took on a more credible tone since Nicolás Maduro and his elder sisters, María Adelaida and Josefina, have consecutive identification numbers. They are registered to vote in the San Pedro parish, a lower-middle-class area in the southwest of Caracas, where the leader lived part of his childhood.
Lucena, a trusted figure of Chavismo in the electoral body, did not provide many details about the supposed official document: she only stated that Nicolás Maduro was born in a polyclinic in Caracas and that he was registered in La Candelaria parish. The official confirmation of the place where his alleged act resides arrived in October 2016 when the Constitutional Chamber, in response to a request for an “unnamed action of constitutional control” filed by Maduro’s then legal consultant, Elvis Amoroso, confirmed that Maduro is a Venezuelan citizen by birth, that he was registered in the La Candelaria parish, that he has no other nationality, and that “he meets the requirements set out in articles 41 and 227 of the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to hold the position of Constitutional President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.”
Yet, a thick veil still obscures the document from investigators and the curious. Treated as one of the best-guarded secrets in the Caribbean, the birth certificate is handled with the secrecy of the great mysteries housed in Vatican archives. The confidentiality has only fueled suspicions.
