Her influence on global diplomacy and presidential policy continued long after she left office. She advised President Obama, President Biden, and a long list of diplomats in the State Department.
She was active in shaping foreign policy until shortly before her death in 2022. Worth noting is the development of her view of Nicolas Maduro between 2018 and 2021.
In 2018, Albright had a dim view of Maduro, but still considered him someone to be treated by means of diplomacy. She wrote:
Chavez intended to be president for life, and he was, but disease cut the dream short. The Venezuela he left behind is poorer than in 1999, when he took office. His successor, Nicolas Maduro, is rigidly ideological former bus driver and union boss who possesses every flaw but none of the virtues of the leader he replaced.
Albright recorded the disastrous economic policies of Maduro. While short-sighted and uninformed, and probably corrupt, his incompetence did not yet merit going beyond diplomacy.
The new president took the helm of an economy in rough waters and steered it toward Armageddon. To repay debts, he tapped the country’s financial reserves. Without reserves, Venezuela is hard-pressed to afford imports. Without imports, basic commodities are unavailable. The value of the national currency — the Bolivar fuerte — has declined to near zero, while the inflation rate is the world’s highest. The result is misery. Paychecks and pensions can no longer cover the cost of necessities; the price of a single tube of toothpaste is equal to half the average weekly income. Malnutrition is widespread. No matter how many pharmacies they visit, families are unable to obtain essential medicines. The minimum wage has been raised repeatedly but has failed to keep pace, stalling at about one-eighth the level in neighboring Colombia. Domestic production of coffee, rice, and corn has declined 60 percent. The country’s cattle herd is smaller by a third, and a decade and a half of squeezing the private sector has left the business community unable to supply basic needs.
If Maduro was to be arrested and taken into custody, then in 2018 it was to be done by the Venezuelan people. Aware of the diplomatic proprieties, Albright apparently thought that Maduro had not yet crossed the line which would precipitate his apprehension by U.S. authorities. It was still a domestic matter, to be dealt with by the Venezuelan system.
For months in early 2017, angry citizens took their grievances to the streets, shouting anti-Maduro slogans while trying to protect their bodies with bike helmets, cardboard shin guards, and homemade shields painted with the country’s colors of yellow, blue, and red.
There was no doubt that Maduro was liable for criminal charges and should face those charges in a Venezuelan court.
The president could have eased the crisis by admitting past mistakes and adopting policies to bring the country together. That would have caused foreign investors to take a fresh look at the situation and sparked regional and global initiatives to help. Instead, he doubled down on repression. To Maduro, one either tries to fulfill the Chavista revolution or betrays it — and he is a stubborn and unrepentant revolutionary. In July 2017, he engineered a referendum to replace the elected parliament with an all-powerful assembly of partisan puppets. Their job is to write a constitution to supplant the one Chavez wrote, which he predicted would last for centuries. At Maduro’s direction, major opposition parties have been banned, while political rivals and even some former allies have been locked up or forced into exile. When responding to street protests, security forces killed more than 120 civilians and roughed up and jailed thousands more. To ensure loyalty, the military and ex-military have taken over many government and private sector functions including the production of oil and the distribution of food.
In 2018, Albright expressed clearly that Maduro had lost all credibility. She dismisses his statements:
Maduro has refused to accept a shred of responsibility for the setbacks his country has endured. He blames every woe on domestic reactionaries and on “coup-mongering, power-grabbing … tendencies directed and governed by the United States.” This last charge was easy to dismiss.
According to Madeleine Albright, Maduro “has tried to nudge followers away from the consensus of support for democratic norms that required decades of struggle and sacrifice to build.”
Albright writes that Nicolas Maduro sees “access to high office not as a temporary privilege but as a means of imposing” his “own desires for as long as” he can. “In public statements,” Maduro displays “no interest in cooperation outside the specific groups” he purports “to speak for and represent.” He claims for himself “the mantle of ‘strong leader,’” and says that he speaks “for ‘the people.’”
By 2020, Albright had gone a step further. She is willing to question not only Maduro’s credibility, but even his legitimacy. In this, she joined the wider global diplomatic community. The EU and several dozen individual countries around the world declared Maduro’s government to be illegitimate.
According to Albright, Maduro is one “of a more contemporary breed of autocratic leaders.”
Maduro was elected in April 2014 and reelected in July 2024. International observers agreed that the elections were rigged. Madeleine Albright writes:
Those in charge of the process manipulated it to the favor of the incumbent. These were not fair elections.”
Two factors seem to have nudged Albright into a more prosecutorial stance against Maduro: First, when the EU and individual nations declared his rule to be illegitimate, he lost the claim to diplomatic immunity. Second, mounting evidence made it clear that he was engaged in criminal activity, i.e., being part of a drug cartel and promoting that cartel’s activities.
Maduro was no longer “probably” corrupt. Evidence confirmed that he was a leader in an international cartel, guilty of smuggling, racketeering, and a long list of other crimes. Given that the community of nations had declared his government to be illegitimate, he was no longer the object of diplomacy, but rather the object of law enforcement.
As early as 2015, when Albright was advising Obama, the U.S. government was gathering such evidence, as the Associated Press reports:
Nephews of Maduro’s wife were heard during recorded meetings with confidential U.S. government sources in 2015 agreeing to send “multi-hundred-kilogram cocaine shipments” from Maduro’s “presidential hanger” at a Venezuelan airport. The nephews during the recorded meetings explained “that they were at ‘war’ with the United States.”
As the case against Maduro became stronger, the Biden administration offered increasing rewards — up to $25 million — for information leading to the arrest of Maduro. It was the aim of the Biden administration to apprehend Maduro and take him into custody.
Given that Madeleine Albright’s work for the Biden administration was informal, confidential, and off-the-record, it is difficult to ascertain the exact degree of her involvement in the decision to seek Maduro’s capture. From her writings, it’s clear that her stance against Maduro was becoming more resolute. She was also in a position, given both her experience and her contacts in the global diplomatic community, to discern that other nations were confirmed in their view that Maduro’s government was illegitimate and that he was not entitled to diplomatic immunity.
In March 2021, Albright participated in a forum sponsored by the Aspen Institute. There was no live audience because of the pandemic, but the participants — government leaders and diplomats from several nations, of whom Albright was one — did meet live and in-person. There is no currently available record of the back-channel conversations which Albright might have had with these leaders, and whether Maduro was a topic in those conversations. Given the increasing amount of cocaine being smuggled into EU countries from Venezuela at that time, it is certainly possible that Maduro was a topic.
Amazingly, Albright was alert, lucid, and engaged in foreign policy conversations until shortly before her death in March 2022. At her funeral, in April of that year, President Biden said:
Presidents and leaders around the world continued to solicit her advice, including me. When I asked her last year to chair the Defense Policy Board, she built businesses. She pumped out New York Times bestsellers that were both highly prescient and deeply salient — and constantly bestsellers. I think I’ve read them all.
Albright, in unofficial capacity, would have been able to “send out feelers” to other nations to judge what kind of response the Biden administration would get when it put a bounty on Maduro’s head. Official State Department diplomats would not have been able to be as frank and direct as Albright could be, and they would not have the personal relationships, acquaintances, and friendships that Albright had. She was ideal for doing the kind of off-the-record communicating that the Biden administration would need to lay the groundwork for eventually offering a reward for Maduro’s capture.
KTVZ reported further comments that the president made at Albright’s funeral:
The President said Albright remained a “nexus of the foreign policy community” in the decades after she left office.Albright, Biden said, was “always, and I mean always, on top of the latest developments. Always speaking out for democracy, and always the first to sound the alarm about fascism.”
The Biden administration offered large cash rewards for Maduro’s apprehension. If there is conclusive evidence that Albright was part of the decision-making leading to this offer, it has not been declassified or published yet. Given her status as the go-to foreign policy expert in the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations, and given her close and frequent communication with Biden, with State Department officials, and with the global diplomatic community, it is difficult to imagine that the administration did not ask her opinion on the idea of posting a reward for Maduro’s capture. Perhaps she was promoting the idea before her opinion of it could be asked.
An article in Sky News in August 2025 stated:
Under US President Donald Trump's predecessor Joe Biden, the offer went up to $25M — the same amount the US offered for the capture of Osama bin Laden following the 11 September 2001 attacks. Now it's doubled to $50M.
In January 2025, an A News article explained:
The US increased the reward for information leading to the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to $25 million on Friday as he was sworn in for a third term in office.The Biden administration is also increasing the reward for information leading to the arrest of Venezuelan Interior and Justice Minister Diosdado Cabello to $25 million under the State Department's Narcotics Rewards Program, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby announced. A new $15 million reward is being offered for Defense Minister Vladimir Pedrino.
The Biden administration, during its entire four years, had Maduro in its sights, and gradually increased the dollar amount of the bounty on Maduro’s head. Biden’s clear objective was to arrest and incarcerate Maduro.
In her role as an advisor during both the Obama administration and the Biden administration, Madeleine Albright was not only aware of the effort to capture Maduro, but approved of it, and even espoused it.
