Four months after Donald Trump’s surprise raid on Venezuela, a political thaw has descended on the country – but mingled with hope is trepidation for what comes next. When Ángel Linares heard a strange buzz followed by an explosion, his first thought was that neighbours were setting off fireworks to celebrate the new year. Then his windows shattered, the building’s walls shook and its facade was ripped off, sending him flying on to the ground of an apartment suddenly reduced to rubble.
Next door, Elizabeth Herrera jumped out of bed in her pyjamas and realised something more sinister was afoot when the post-explosion silence was filled with the sound of gunfire. “Is it a coup? … I don’t believe ‘Papá Trump’ would have dared to invade,” Herrera remembers her husband speculating as their housing estate’s panicked residents struggled to make sense of the mayhem just before 2am on 3 January. All four residents of the Urbanización Rómulo Gallegos project in Catia La Mar were wrong. Donald Trump had indeed ordered an invasion of Venezuela, albeit a lightning-fast one to abduct the country’s then president, Nicolás Maduro.
Their community found itself at the eye of the storm as air-to-surface missiles rained down on defence and radar systems along the country’s Caribbean coast and helicopter-borne Delta Force fighters swept south towards the capital. “They were 10 minutes that felt like an interminable hour,” said Herrera, who lost two elderly neighbours during the attack that was apparently targeting military installations on a nearby hill. She recalled her autistic son’s anguish as they rushed out into the darkness and sheltered in a nearby school. “Mummy, are we the baddies? Are Venezuelans the baddies? Are they going to kill us?” he asked.
More than four months after Operation Absolute Resolve, Herrera and her neighbours are far from the only ones still trying to make sense of Trump’s intervention and its impact on the future of a country already reeling from years of poverty, hunger and repression. Across Venezuela, ordinary citizens, opposition activists, diplomats, businesspeople and members of Maduro’s movement are trying to fathom the bewildering new era ushered in by the autocrat’s capture and Trump’s unexpected decision to recognise his vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, who has held power since.
“Everything is so confusing …. This feels sometimes like an illusion,” said Jesús Armas, a former political prisoner and ally of the exiled opposition leader and Nobel laureate, María Corina Machado, who had hoped to take power but has been sidelined from Venezuela’s post-Maduro transformation. Changes have undoubtedly occurred since Maduro’s 13-year rule was brought to an end during a two-and-a-half hour blitz that left scores of Cuban and Venezuelan troops and at least three civilians dead. After years of increasingly despotic rule, which deepened after Maduro was accused of stealing the 2024 presidential election, an incipient political thaw has descended.
Murals of Maduro have been painted over, his portraits quietly removed from some government offices, and foreign journalists are being allowed into the country for the first time since the 2024 vote. Hundreds of political prisoners have been freed and dissidents have emerged from hiding or returned from exile to continue their push for a transition back to democracy. On a recent evening, hundreds of people gathered outside Venezuela’s most notorious political prison – a shopping mall-turned-torture centre called El Helicoide – for a previously unthinkable protest to demand fresh elections and the release of the estimated 500 detainees remaining. “People have lost their fear,” said Jeisi Blanco, a human rights campaigner, as colleagues chalked the names of those still incarcerated on the pavement under the gaze of police who filmed participants but did not intervene.
