Hours after the United States launched an overnight military operation in Venezuela and captured the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, some Central Floridians took to the streets in protest of the extraordinary action.
"Venezuela in our hearts! Stop this war before it starts!" chanted a crowd of some 40 people who marched in protest through Orlando’s Mills 50 neighborhood Saturday afternoon.
Orlando resident Caleb Pierre is a local member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. He said he was marching Saturday in support of people in the Caribbean and Latin America, who he described as Central Florida’s “neighbors.”
As a Haitian American himself, Pierre said, he’s especially aware that U.S. interventions in other countries often come with dire consequences. In the case of Venezuela, he said, President Donald Trump himself has stated he wants to take over the Latin American country’s oil refineries.
“If you want to understand anything about foreign policy, just understand that our own U.S. foreign policy is not built on spreading democracy, but on extracting precious resources that those people do need,” Pierre said.
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Since Maduro’s leadership began in 2013, Venezuelans have struggled increasingly with poverty, electricity disruptions and food and medicine insecurity. As of early 2024, more than half of the country couldn’t afford basic food, according to one United Nations report.
Nearly 8 million Venezuelans have fled the country since Maduro took power. Still, Pierre said, the U.S. invading the country and kidnapping its leader won’t solve Venezuela’s problems.
“Regardless of what one may think about Maduro or Venezuelan leadership, we are not Venezuelans,” Pierre said. “And regardless of what one may think, kidnapping a president and then bombing the capital — it's illegal. It's a violation under international law.”
For those with direct ties to Venezuela, like Orlando resident Ramón Pereira Bonilla, the tensions are deeply personal.
Pereira Bonilla was born in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas and moved with his family to the U.S. in 2006, while former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez was still in power. “(We were) fleeing what we could tell was going to be a very difficult economic and political situation in Venezuela.”
Since then, Pereira Bonilla said, more of his family members have managed to escape Venezuela. But his grandmother is still there. The family regularly sends her food, medicine and clothes. As of Saturday, his grandmother had enough food to get through the next couple of days, Pereira Bonilla said.
“She's doing okay …. She's lived through the multiple (attempted) coups that have already happened when Chávez came into power, and then the ones that occurred while he was in power,” Pereira Bonilla said. “So she's relatively experienced; she knows how to stay safe. But it's terrifying.”
For Pereira Bonilla, that sense of terror only escalated after hearing what President Donald Trump said at a press conference earlier Saturday: that, at least for the time being, Trump plans to have the U.S. “run” Venezuela.
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“Obviously, I do not support the Maduro regime, and I think it's been disastrous for Venezuela,” Pereira Bonilla said. “However, I'm also a student of history, and I also understand basic pattern recognition.”
If this intervention follows the path of others before it, Pereira Bonilla said, it will trigger additional “massive immigration and massive political refugees” from Venezuela: a situation that would only create more challenges for countries receiving those immigrants, including the United States.
“I guess if I could say anything, my message would be to my Venezuelan compatriots, who I'm sure are feeling the same sort of both relief and worry that I'm feeling,” Pereira Bonilla said. He described that feeling as a sort of “tentative hope.”
“We struggled for decades under this regime, and our people have suffered. There's no question about that. People have been murdered, they've been maimed, they've been starved, and our people don't deserve that,” Pereira Bonilla said.
But at the same time, he said, “we cannot let our voices be used as a way of manufacturing consent for an invasion that is only going to worsen our country.”
Later on Saturday, outside of a Venezuelan food truck in West Orlando, owner Javier Castillo expressed a similar sense of uncertainty while reflecting on the situation in his home country.
Castillo moved to the U.S. four years ago, he said. Although he now has two American sons, the rest of Castillo’s family is still in Venezuela. In the early hours of Saturday, as the U.S. military operation was underway, Castillo started receiving messages from those family members.
“Obviously, they all started to write to me on WhatsApp,” Castillo said, speaking in Spanish. “I was excited at first. I was awake when everything happened …. But after a little while, it was like: boom!”
In Caracas, where the U.S. launched military strikes, Castillo said people were scared.
“There are explosions, people armed in the streets,” Castillo said, describing the scene in Venezuela early Saturday. “So you don’t sleep, you don’t rest. You don’t know what’s going to happen.”
That sense of uncertainty is why back in Venezuela, people are frantically trying to buy up all the supplies they possibly can, Castillo said. “Because they don’t know what’s going to happen. The electricity could go out, the water could go out … These things happen normally, always. So now, with the intervention, they’re going to happen more.”
There’s also lots of uncertainty ahead for people like himself, who have left Venezuela and started new lives elsewhere, Castillo said. At least for now, he’s not jumping at the chance to try and return to his home country.
“Right now, it’s going to be more difficult (there) than it was before,” Castillo said.
