‘Feels like an illusion’: inside post-Maduro Venezuela’s bewildering new era | Venezuela

When Ángel Linares heard a strange buzzing followed by an explosion, his first thought was that the neighbors were setting off fireworks to celebrate the new year.

Then its windows were shattered, the building’s walls shook and its façade was ripped off; which threw him onto the floor of an apartment that suddenly turned into a pile of rubble. Her 85-year-old mother, Jesucita, feared Venezuela’s northern coast would be devastated by an earthquake like the one she remembered from 1967.

Next door, Elizabeth Herrera jumped out of bed in her pajamas and realized something worse was coming as the post-blast silence was filled with gunshots: “Tah-tah-tah-tah-tah-po-po-tah-tah-tah.”

Herrera recalls her husband thinking, “Is this a coup? … ‘I don’t believe Daddy Trump would have the courage to invade,'” as panicked residents of the housing complexes tried to make sense of the chaos just before 2 a.m. on Jan. 3.

All four residents of the Urbanización Rómulo Gallegos project in Catia La Mar, a seaside town 20 miles north of Caracas, were wrong. Donald Trump had indeed ordered the invasion of Venezuela, albeit at lightning speed, to kidnap the country’s then-president, Nicolás Maduro.

Their communities found themselves in the eye of the storm As air-to-ground missiles rain down Defense and radar systems, as well as radars on the country’s Caribbean coast, and helicopter-borne Delta Force fighters moved south toward the capital. “It was 10 minutes that felt like an interminable hour,” said Herrera, who lost two elderly neighbors during the attack, which appeared to target military facilities on a nearby hill.

She remembered the pain her autistic son experienced as he ran into the darkness and took refuge in a nearby school. “Mom, are we the bad guys? Are the Venezuelans the bad guys? Are they going to kill us?” he asked.

“I told him, ‘No, this is probably just an issue between the White House and Miraflores,'” he replied, referring to Venezuela’s presidential palace.

“So why are they shooting at us?” his son insisted. “In his autistic mind… if this was a government-to-government thing, it made no sense why the missiles were landing here?”

More than four months after Operation Absolute Resolve, Herrera and his neighbors are not alone in trying to understand Trump’s intervention and its impact on the future of a country already racked by years of poverty, hunger and oppression.

Across Venezuela, ordinary citizens, opposition activists, diplomats, businessmen and members of the Maduro movement are trying to make sense of the bewildering new era ushered in by the autocrat’s capture and Trump’s unexpected decision to recognize vice president Delcy Rodríguez, who has held power ever since.

“It’s all so confusing… It sometimes feels like an illusion,” said Jesús Armas, a former political prisoner and ally of Nobel laureate María Corina Machado, an exiled opposition leader who hopes to seize power but has been excluded from Venezuela’s post-Maduro transformation.

Changes have undoubtedly occurred since Maduro’s 13-year rule ended during a two-and-a-half-hour attack that left scores of Cuban and Venezuelan soldiers and at least three civilians dead.

An incipient political unraveling follows years of increasingly despotic rule, which deepened after Maduro was accused of stealing the 2024 presidential election.

Maduro’s murals have been painted over, his portraits have been quietly removed from some government offices, and foreign journalists are being allowed into the country for the first time since the 2024 elections.

Hundreds of political prisoners were released and dissidents came out of hiding or returned from exile to continue efforts to return to democracy.

Last evening, hundreds of people gathered outside Venezuela’s most notorious political prison – a shopping mall-turned-torture center called El Helicoide – in a previously unthinkable protest to demand new elections and the release of an estimated 500 remaining detainees.

“People have lost their fear,” human rights defender Jeisi Blanco said as his colleagues wrote the names of those still detained on the pavement, under the gaze of police who filmed the participants but did not intervene.

“They are not just statistics, they are people with stories and families who have spent over three years behind bars,” he said.

Armas, who was released from El Helicoide in February as a gesture from Maduro’s heirs, said: “I feel great… I’m hopeful right now. I know we will change this country.”

“We will bring back freedom… and I know that Venezuela will become a democracy in the next few months,” he said, insisting that Machado would return in the coming weeks to tour Venezuela, rally supporters and complete its political transformation.

U.S. officials are also celebrating what is being called a “new political moment” made possible by Trump’s daring but, many say, illegal raid. “The President loves action. He also loves deals, he loves progress, and we see all of that in a very short period of time,” said Jarrod Agen, director of Trump’s national energy dominance council, after arriving in Caracas for his first U.S. commercial flight to the oil-rich country in more than seven years.

“We’re moving at Trump’s pace… I’m so excited,” he said, flanked by smiling Venezuelan officials who have been at odds with their U.S. counterparts for years.

But along with the excitement and optimism, there is also consternation and concern over the fact that Maduro’s surrender has led not to full-blown regime change or democratization but to an odd rapprochement between the fallen dictator’s authoritarian allies and his longtime enemies in Washington.

Trump repeatedly praised Rodríguez as a “terrific” partner; Venezuela’s new leader gave no indication that new elections would come. “I don’t know, sometime” he deviated when asked recently when the vote might be held.

Caracas diplomats express surprise at the political handbrake turn of Maduro’s so-called anti-imperialist successors, who have rolled out the red carpet for Trump officials and given the go-ahead. Venezuela will become what some call a US protectorate – with almost no explanation.

“This is the theater of the absurd, Beckett,” a foreign envoy said, recalling that after Japan’s surrender to allied forces in 1945, Emperor Hirohito called on his citizens to “endure the unbearable and endure the unbearable” to save their nation’s future.

The diplomat said Rodríguez’s team offered no such justification for embracing Trump: “They just went from A to B without explaining why.”

Experts say the once-improbable relationship of interest between Washington and Caracas stems from Trump’s desire to secure access to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves and “win” a foreign policy amid the debacle in Iran, and Rodríguez’s determination to retain power and save the political movement Hugo Chavez founded more than 25 years ago.

US diplomat Tom Shannon, who has been working with Venezuela since the 90s, said, “The goal is to be the cat’s paw of the USA, not to be a partner of the USA.”

“The aim is to continue and preserve the Bolivarian revolution as much as possible, to do what needs to be done to protect that revolution and to ensure the survival of the political leadership that defines it.”

“I’m sure he thought it was insulting,” he said of Rodríguez, whom he had met many times. “He finds himself in a position that I am sure he sees as politically complex and difficult, but which is historic in terms of the course of the Bolivarian revolution.”

The détente and incomplete transition left a bitter taste for the movement’s opponents, who blamed it for the economic and humanitarian disaster that forced nearly a quarter of the country’s population to flee abroad.

Sitting outside his home next to the government monument honoring the victims of Trump’s attack, Herrera recalled his initial joy at the change that seemed imminent, even though some of his residences were devastated.

“I thought it was all over… I thought, thank God, we will get out of this situation that is suffocating us,” he said, while a freshly painted government mural behind him bore the message “We will win.”

However, as the days passed, excitement gave way to horror. “In the news they talk about how much oil, how much gold they bought… but we are stuck in the same place… [If Trump came here] “I would like him to think not only about the natural resources that Venezuela has, but also about Venezuelans,” he said.

“I feel hope, but I also feel fear… Our fear contains hope that the situation will change and then it won’t happen.”

Sitting on a sofa next to a shrapnel-riddled portrait of Venezuela’s liberation hero Simón Bolívar, Jesucita Linares said her main concern was a repeat of the attack.

In preparation, she transformed the shopping cart into an emergency bag filled with clothes and medications. “I was asking God that this would never happen again,” Linares said. “But you really never know.”