Months before Christmas, Caracas was adorned with a surreal amount of festive decorations. Millions of lights were strung around the trunks of palm trees; public squares were ornamented with L.E.D. stars and satin ribbons. Back in September, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro had announced that Christmas would come early: an attempt to raise spirits amid threats from the world’s greatest military superpower, and to boost the economy in a country with the highest rate of annual inflation globally. Ironically, this meant that by the time the holidays actually came around, the Christmas trees and fixtures looked depressingly weathered, exposed to the elements for far too long.
On the morning of Christmas Eve, my maternal grandparents and I put up our own decorations, bedecking our apartment, in the north of the capital, with vintage baubles, tinsel, and seasonal cushions. The holiday aesthetics had long lost their allure. Still, we each grabbed a corner of a festive red tablecloth and draped it over the table where we eat breakfast together every morning, cutting fruit and drinking coffee as the sun begins to rise through the wrought-iron windows, birdsong emanating from the tropical forest that separates Caracas from the Caribbean Sea.
In late November, when U.S. President Donald Trump had announced that he was closing Venezuela’s airspace—tantamount to an act of war, given that Venezuela is a sovereign nation—many of us had worried about Christmas. The country has a diaspora of nearly eight million; more than a quarter of the population has left in the past ten years alone, primarily owing to economic hardship. Inflation is so severe that, in the past two decades, the nation’s currency has been declared void and substituted with a new tender three times. The streets of Caracas glitter with discarded, obsolete money, not worth the time it would take to bend over and pick it up.
There is a long-standing custom of Venezuelans who live abroad coming home for the holidays, and, in many cases, bringing much-needed cash to their loved ones in a country where the minimum wage is less than a dollar per month, but everyday life remains expensive. (Because of the unreliability of Venezuelan currency, U.S. dollars and cryptocurrency are used for most meaningful transactions, which has raised the cost of living significantly.) With almost no international flights entering or leaving Venezuela, many families had to make alternate arrangements for Christmas this year, living rooms and bellies much emptier than anticipated. On top of this, the country’s dwindling but nevertheless extensive tourism and hospitality industries were sent into deeper financial distress, as December is typically the busiest period of the year.
This Christmas, it was just my grandparents and me. They have both lived through more than ninety Decembers, but this was the first one we’d shared in a long time. In 2002, after an attempted coup against then President Hugo Chávez, leading to a period of unrest, my parents had decided that we couldn’t live in Caracas, and we settled in London. We visited Venezuela occasionally, but the situation in the country became so extreme that, eventually, we couldn’t do even that. In my early twenties, I moved back to Caracas, though I would leave again to complete my postgraduate studies in the U.K. I returned to the city roughly six months ago and moved in with my grandparents.
We spent Christmas Eve driving around Caracas, revisiting familiar places, such as San Agustín del Norte, the neighborhood where my grandfather grew up, and Bellas Artes, the picturesque museum district. My grandfather, despite nearing his centenary year, insisted on driving—his way of retaining a sense of control among the local and geopolitical chaos. During the crisis years, in the second half of the twenty-tens, when poverty, violent crime, and civil unrest reached a fever pitch, my grandparents had purchased an armored Toyota Camry, the only bulletproof vehicle they could afford. But the car—small, low to the ground, and exceedingly heavy, owing to the ballistic steel and glass—is not suited to a city like Caracas, which is rife with steep inclines and deep potholes, and is best travelled in a four-by-four. The car was surely designed for a foreign diplomat to drive down one straight road between an embassy and a hotel; instead, it suffers greatly at the twists and turns of this city, and at the hands of my grandfather, who drives boldly.
When my grandparents felt that Caracas was at its most dangerous, around 2019, they rarely left their neighborhood at all. In recent years, as violent crime has declined, they’ve become more willing to venture out, eager to reconnect with a place that, for years, they felt they could not explore. On Christmas Eve, we looked through the car windows with awe at a city that my grandparents had almost forgotten, and that I had never got to know in the first place—a mosaic of colorfully painted houses and narrow favela streets, loud with the sound of motorbikes and music, interspersed with walkways wrapped in Christmas lights.
There was something slightly comical about the aesthetics of Christmas, shaped as they are by the colder global North, being superimposed on this tropical landscape. But the humor quickly turns dark when you cross the Río Guaire into San Agustín del Sur, the hillside favela near my grandfather’s old quarter, and arrive at a pyramidal building called El Helicoide. A wildly ambitious brutalist project, the structure was intended as a luxury shopping mall, complete with a four-kilometre ramp that loops around it, allowing vehicles to drive right in and park inside. It is now one of the most notorious political prisons in South America. For the past three months, it has also been a Christmas tree. An L.E.D. star sits atop the pyramid, and strands of colorful lights encircle the structure, like tinsel.
Inmates have reported cruel and inhumane treatment: electrocution, beatings, and simulated executions, among other horrors. Many were arrested for protesting Maduro’s regime, after he stole the Presidential election, in 2024. Some were detained for simply sending texts questioning the government’s legitimacy—messages that were uncovered during the phone searches that have become a routine part of law enforcement in Caracas.
Trump’s aggressive actions toward Venezuela only worsened the Maduro regime’s paranoia, and, in turn, its authoritarian grip on power. A common slogan, written on the armored personnel carriers that could be seen coming and going from El Helicoide at all hours of the day, translates to the declaration “To Doubt Is Treason.” The city’s most ubiquitous image, painted all over Caracas by government-commissioned muralists, is of the eyes of Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s predecessor, watching us.
In September, after the Trump Administration had begun striking boats off the coast of Venezuela, I was out photographing the local flora, a few streets down from where my grandparents and I live. After taking a picture of an unusually overgrown kapok tree—which, my neighbors later told me, was near a property owned by a high-ranking government official’s daughter—plainclothes officers approached me. They asked fairly banal questions about my employment and my reasons for taking photographs, and they looked through my phone, where they discovered that I had some text messages in English, further arousing their suspicion.
After roughly half an hour of sitting with the officers in the shadow of the kapok, being interrogated about my thoughts on the government, a four-by-four pulled up. Officers from SEBIN, the country’s intelligence service, dressed in black balaclavas and combat gear, with semi-automatic rifles slung over their shoulders, emerged from the vehicle and said that they were going to take me somewhere for questioning. They explained that, for my own safety, they were going to have to restrain me, and, in a gesture painfully symptomatic of the fact that I have spent far too much of my life in England, I made sure to shake the officers’ hands before they zip-tied my wrists.
I was guided into the middle back seat of the car, the SEBIN agents sitting on either side of me, and a plainclothes officer up front. My eyes were covered with a blindfold. I could feel a cold pressure just below my ribs, and, looking down out of a small gap in the eye covering, I saw that both of the agents beside me had drawn handguns and were pointing them at my waist. They took me to El Helicoide for interrogation, on suspicion of being a spy who was using the pretext of photography to document what they called “a street where important people live”—all of this for a photo of a beautiful tree, and a language shared with a potential oppressor. After grilling me for hours, the officers decided that my intentions were more artistic than political. But they insisted on driving me back to my apartment so they could check the validity of my story about living with family near the site of my arrest. When we arrived on my block, an uncle who could vouch for me was thankfully present and smoking on the porch, and I narrowly avoided introducing my grandparents to the masked men with rifles. It wasn’t too long after this encounter that El Helicoide became a Christmas tree.
All throughout December, fireworks punctuated the tropical nights, set off by families and delinquents alike, who took advantage of the pyrotechnics sold by street venders around town. Many times during the holiday season, I flinched at the sound of a celebratory rocket or a confetti cannon, mistakenly thinking that the U.S. had begun its ballistic campaign. The most extensive American-military buildup in the region in decades, featuring missile destroyers and the world’s largest warship, along with a reported fifteen thousand troops, was less than twelve kilometres off our coast—and yet the fireworks persisted. It is a testament to the Venezuelan people’s resilience that, even in the face of a possible war, they were celebrating loudly with pyrotechnics; it is also horribly annoying if, like me, you have an anxious disposition and spend too much time reading the news. It wouldn’t be until the day after Christmas that Trump announced the first air strike on Venezuelan soil, targeting a port facility that he claimed was used for drug-trafficking. Though the strike itself was a dramatic escalation, few people here were surprised. If anything, the most unexpected aspect of the attack was that it had come so late in the year: the naval fleet had already been present, in the Caribbean and in the public imagination, for more than four months.
On the evening of January 2nd, my grandparents and I drove out to El Paseo Los Próceres, the site of Caracas’s most elaborate holiday display, to see the Christmas lights before they were taken down. It’s a long boulevard flanked with statues, which connects monuments to the country’s independence heroes with a sprawling military complex, Fuerte Tiuna. The Paseo was commissioned by the mid-century dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, whose modernizing campaign saw the construction of El Helicoide. We spent a quiet evening watching the twinkle, and my grandparents told me stories about dances and parties they’d attended in venues nearby. My grandfather said that, at the invitation of a friend who was in the military and had access to the private venues reserved for the armed forces, he had once attended a party there with Pérez Jiménez himself.
I went to bed early that night. At roughly 2 A.M., I woke to a loud humming noise, which I realized was coming from fighter jets overhead. This was followed by the sound of bombs dropping, rattling the padlocks on our windows, which my grandmother had bought, during the crisis years, to prevent break-ins. After the first rush of terror subsided, I realized how foolish I’d been to think that the fireworks that went off in December were a possible bombardment. This current noise was unlike anything I’d ever heard, so utterly and unequivocally an instrument of death. The best way I can describe it is as vividly three-dimensional: in the same way that hearing an echo can sometimes allow you to visualize the shape of the room it is coming from, each blast seemed to occupy space solidly, leading me to imagine a thick sphere of fire. I felt the sound in my chest, like the negative impression of a heartbeat.
I woke up my grandparents who, being slightly deaf, had not yet realized that anything was happening. Throughout the night, more than a hundred and fifty aircraft would fly over Caracas and nearby cities. At the time, none of us knew how discerning the troops would be in their campaign, or how long it would go on for. Ultimately, the bombardment would last a little more than two hours, with the noise from the aircraft continuing almost until dawn. Fuerte Tiuna, the military complex near the beautifully illuminated boulevard where my grandfather had partied with Pérez Jiménez, had been partially reduced to rubble. It is where Maduro and his wife had been staying when they were captured by U.S. forces.
Later that morning, after news of Maduro’s capture had circulated, the mass panic-buying began. People across the city scraped together the little money they had, sometimes draining their bank accounts entirely, to buy food and other necessities. Queues for gas stations and grocery stores, where shelves were increasingly empty, grew to be several blocks long. Prices, meanwhile, began to skyrocket: a single plantain now costs three dollars—six times what it used to.
Outside the overpopulated supermarkets, Caracas, which is normally a mad bustle of people and motorbikes, was eerily deserted. The city’s colorful outdoor food markets lay abandoned—the usual smell of ripe papaya replaced by the stench of yesterday’s scraps, rotting in the heat. Even the police and military presence was strangely understated. Caracas feels like a war zone at the best of times, with uniformed men on so many streets, but now that we were actually at war, they were nowhere to be seen. The only body that has come out in force in the wake of the bombardment are the colectivos—paramilitary groups that monitor the roads on motorcycles. These ad-hoc patrols, who defend the regime, make up for their lack of official authority with sheer intensity. Though superficially less intimidating than the National Guard and intelligence agents, who wear expensive gear and are evidently trained, it is the colectivos who inspire true fear, partly owing to one crucial detail: they, unlike official law-enforcement officers, tend to keep their fingers on their triggers.
Maduro’s ouster initially led to a sense of relief in Venezuela, for people across the political spectrum: those who supported U.S. intervention celebrated Maduro’s capture as a sign that regime change was imminent, whereas those who feared American military force hoped that the capture would at least mark an end to the imminent threat of violence. That relief quickly faded, however, as we realized how much uncertainty lies ahead. We in Venezuela are well aware of the Trump Administration’s mistreatment of Latin American immigrants in the United States, including the two hundred and fifty-two Venezuelan men who were sent to CECOT, the maximum-security prison in El Salvador, where their heads were shaved upon entry and some were severely beaten. Hundreds more Venezuelan immigrants have been sent to Alligator Alcatraz, where the Miami Herald reported that two-thirds of the more than eighteen hundred migrants detained last July had essentially disappeared from public records. Many Venezuelans fear that Trump’s brutal treatment of the Latino population on U.S. soil is indicative of how he will proceed in terms of his foreign policy, even with Maduro, one of the main targets of his ire, gone. Trump’s rhetoric has decidedly shifted away from the prevention of drug trafficking toward obtaining control and resources, underscoring that this operation was never about democracy or the Venezuelan people’s right to self-determination. After Trump stated in a recent Times interview that the U.S. is going to be running Venezuela, apparently for years, and shared an image on Truth Social of a doctored Wikipedia page calling him the “Acting President of Venezuela,” some of us fear that we have swapped one unelected despot for another, and that we might even join the ranks of Hawaii and Puerto Rico. Or, based on the recent chaos, that we might return to something like the crisis years.
The morning after Maduro was captured, as the sun rose over the mountains at the edge of the city, people had stepped out of their homes in a daze. This city, with its long history of civil disobedience and violence, where so many people distrust their neighbors, was suddenly buzzing with conversations between strangers, as everyone tried to figure out what had happened the night before, together. But that brief moment of connection was something of an isolated incident. The country is becoming more and more polarized, as the many Venezuelans who are simultaneously angry at Maduro’s dictatorial regime and distrusting of the U.S. feel that they must pick a side, despite there being no good options. The extremists on either end of the spectrum—ardent supporters of the Bolivarian regime, and the disenfranchised ruling class who hated the revolution from its more democratic beginnings, long before it spiralled into a dictatorship—are both disproportionately loud and paint a picture of the country and its people that is far more ideological than the reality. The diaspora, too, with their safety from the mechanisms of state repression and their distance from the bombardment and the mortal fear it spurred, cast a skewed image. “Don’t try and explain Venezuela to Venezuelans” has rapidly become a popular slogan of the diaspora, especially in right-wing cities like Miami, where it is often used to shut down criticisms of Trump’s actions. I would retort with, Don’t try to speak on behalf of Venezuela if you are not here. If you heard the bombs on the news instead of feeling them in your chest, you’re bound to have a different reaction to the situation. There is neither celebration nor lamentation in the capital right now, only immense uncertainty as we try to make sense of what comes next. With the city in such a state of suspension, no one has bothered to take down all the Christmas lights. ♦
