This weekend marks one year since Nicolas Maduro became president of Venezuela in a narrow election victory. Maduro promised to carry on the legacy of his mentor, Hugo Chavez. While Maduro's supporters say he has done a lot for a country struggling with high crimes rates, unemployment and soaring inflation, his rioting opposition label him a failure.

In the dark before dawn one night last February, Colonel Googlis Martín Caballero was driving a white Ford Explorer through the Venezuelan countryside not far from the Colombian border. With him were his wife, his daughter and roughly half a ton of cocaine. 

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and opposition coalition representatives agreed Tuesday to hold talks on ending two months of anti-government protests that have left 39 people dead in their oil-rich nation.

Late President Hugo Chavez used to call it “la revolucion bonita” (the pretty revolution), but the world looked at Venezuela last week and saw only ugliness. Protesters gunned down in the streets, barricades in flames, chaos. One of the dead was a 22-year-old beauty queen shot in the head. With the government censoring and cowing TV reports, many of the images came from smartphones, grainy and jerky snippets filled with smoke and shouts.

Throughout the fall, things looked bad for Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. His popularity was tanking; most Venezuelans blamed his government for the economic crisis that had been plaguing the country since the end of 2012. In just one year, inflation had soared from 20 percent to more than 50 percent, and shortages of electricity, food, and other essentials had become a part of everyday life. Efforts to control pandemic criminal violence hadn’t yielded significant results, either.

Though Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez died in March, his successor Nicolas Maduro says he's still "everywhere." Everywhere, it turns out, means even in the rocks deep below Caracas, where workers are busy carving out a new subway tunnel. Maduro claims that late one night this week, workers briefly saw the late leader's face appear in the rocks.