The vanishing of Nicolás Maduro: how the former dictator is being erased from Venezuela

Billboards are being painted over and former allies seem eager to forget the man they once glorified

For years, his bewhiskered face stared down from propaganda billboards glorifying the supposedly revolutionary rule of a dictator who styled himself as “the protector of the people”.

The spin-doctored adoration was such that factories churned out plastic action figures exalting Nicolás Maduro as an “indestructible” and “iron-fisted” caped crusader nicknamed “Super Moustache”.

In a coastal town near Caracas, authorities even branded dustbins, garbage trucks and overpasses with sinister black silhouettes of the autocrat’s stache.

Five months after US special forces toppled Maduro , his heavily curated cult of personality is collapsing, as the deposed president is being airbrushed out of Venezuelan history by former allies who seem desperate to move on.

Giant images of Maduro and his also incarcerated wife, Cilia Flores, still adorn the capital’s main arteries, some stamped with the hashtag #WeWantThemBackNow. A count-up clock has been erected in the historic centre, logging the number of days since the couple’s kidnapping.

In the streets around Miraflores, the presidential palace that the autocrat once occupied, pro-regime graffiti artists have scrawled declarations of support on to newspaper stands. “ Que viva Maduro, carajo! ” [Long live Maduro, damn it!] reads one. Another declares: “We love Maduro.”

But such affection seems in increasingly short supply. Across the country, billboards and paintings of Venezuela’s ousted leader are quietly being dismantled or erased, or simply left quietly to rot or be consumed by the undergrowth.