Kulturaustausch: [Translate to English:] „Ich hörte die Explosionen und dachte, es sei

María (pseudonym), 40 years old, La Guaira, 20 kilometres north from Caracas:

“On January 3, 2026, at around 1:30 a.m., I felt the first jolt and thought it was an earthquake. Then one explosion followed another. My house was shaking. I was sitting together with a few friends at the time. We had been drinking a bit and planned to go to the beach together the next morning. Suddenly one of us joked, ‘The Marines are here.’ When we went outside to see what was going on, there was a kind of haze in the air that reduced visibility to less than ten meters. It smelled of gunpowder. I thought the power plant on our street had exploded, but when the haze cleared a little, you could see a tall, dense column of smoke rising in the distance over the city. A man said to us, ‘Be careful, they bombed the harbor, across from the Casa Guipuzcoana’ (a historic museum, editor’s note).”

“Outside, the smoke was still blocking the view of the sun, and there was a strong smell of burning”

At 1:57 a.m. we said to each other, ‘This is serious—what the hell are we supposed to do?’ The streets were jammed; people everywhere were trying to get home. Panicked screams could be heard. We became afraid and received WhatsApp messages saying that something similar was happening at that very moment in nearby Caracas. Amid the smoke in the street, a man approached us with a walkie-talkie; he was pale with fear, crying, and limping. ‘These are bombs, these are bombs,’ he said.

He was a security guard with Bolipuertos (a state-owned company that manages the ports, editor’s note). The man said that one of the missiles had struck about 200 meters away from him. He had seen one of his colleagues die in the blast. The explosion had left him half deaf. We took him into my house and gave him water, but he could barely swallow from sheer nervousness. Then he slept until dawn and eventually set off back to his home in nearby Catia La Mar. The friends who had stayed over at my place also left then. Outside, the smoke was still blocking the view of the sun, and there was a strong smell of burning. Since then I have shut myself inside my house with my fifteen-year-old son, without electricity or anything else.

Fuerte Tiuna military complex, Caracas. This is the site of a well-known bunker belonging to Nicolás Maduro

Foto: privat

My feelings these days are ambivalent, and the same is true for most Venezuelans. I see the images of Maduro in prison and think, ‘My God, finally!’ and I have to cry.

‘Finally,’ because he has made himself complicit in countless crimes against humanity, because hundreds of young people and minors have been arrested, tortured and pushed to their physical and psychological limits. Hopefully he will be given a fair trial.

Twenty‑seven years of Chavismo have nearly brought us to our knees. And now the civilian population is at the mercy of two opposing forces: publicly, Trump has said that he will govern Venezuela. Internally, however, so far everything remains the same, with no hope of change. The military, the police and the paramilitaries are still armed and fully operational and are carrying out arbitrary arrests.

“I am very afraid and want to protect my family.”

Call it paranoia or trauma, but I am very afraid and want to protect my family — especially from the pro‑government gangs, the colectivos. They have called on people to take to the streets to defend the government and are demanding the return of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.

Also, for some time now here we have what are called street bosses and the local food committees, pseudo‑civil structures that are really just a poorly disguised spying system. If I were to go out into the street today, I would be in danger, because not only I but my whole family have been involved in the pro-democracy movement for a long time.

My father and his wife went into hiding after the presidential elections on July 28, 2024 — elections the opposition actually won, but Maduro claimed for himself — and “Wanted” posters were put up by a unit of the Bolivarian National Police searching for them. In the current situation I don’t even dare to go shopping anymore. But well, tomorrow I have to get up very early to buy food, because my pantry is empty and the lines in front of the few stores that are open are sometimes kilometers long.

María works for an NGO and is a feminist activist who advocates for the visibility of neurodiversity as a human right. We are publishing this interview anonymously so as not to endanger the person reporting here. Her name is known to the editors.

"I heard explosions and thought it was an earthquake"

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