No food. No electricity. No more?
The Venezuelan community in Los Angeles is hopeful change is finally on the horizon after the Trump administration captured Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores over the weekend.
“Everything was bad—food, gas and electricity were all in short supply, and services barely functioned,” Carlos, a Venezuelan Uber driver in Los Angeles, told The Post.
Carlos — who still has family back home in Venezuela — asked us not to use his last name out of fear for speaking out. He said he was happy to see the ousted dictator arrested on narco-terrorism charges. “There came a point when I was going three days without eating.”
Another Venezuelan, who asked not to be identified because his family is still in the country, said the disgraced despot “truly deserves to be imprisoned” just as Maduro imprisoned him.
“I was imprisoned for protesting in 2017 against the government, I was tortured,” he told The Post. “All Venezuelans are happy with the United States because Maduro has committed many crimes in our country. He has sent drugs to other countries.”
There are an estimated 30,000 Venezuelans living in Los Angeles, and while many of them celebrate what they see as a new opportunity for prosperity and change in their country, elected officials, like Mayor Karen Bass, called it a “reckless decision.”
“To strike Venezuela to remove Nicolás Maduro risks chaos, violence, and entrenching the United States in a conflict that the American people did not ask for,” Bass said in a social media post.
But perhaps Bass has a different perspective on dictatorships, given her history in Cuba as a member of the Venceremos Brigade — essentially a joint venture between radical leftists activists and the Cuban government.
Bass took multiple trips to Cuba with the Brigade in the 1970s. Bass addressed her relationship with the organization in an article with The Atlantic in 2020, saying she “built houses during the day” and attend “cultural activities.”
“I didn’t have any illusions that the people in Cuba had the same freedoms I did,” she told the outlet.
When Cuban dictator Fidel Castro died in 2016, Bass raised eyebrows when she referred to the Cuban autocrat as the “Comandante en Jefe” and said his death “is a great loss to the people of Cuba.”
Bass later told Fox News that she has since changed her view and realized the Castro government “was a brutal regime.”
The Los Angeles mayor isn’t alone in her criticism of the Trump administration. Protests erupted across the country, including Los Angeles at rallies dubbed “Hands off Venezuela.”
Felix, who lives in LA, but grew up in the oil-rich nation, told The Post that politicians and protesters who are upset over the Trump administration’s decision to remove Maduro don’t understand the reality of the situation.
Here’s the latest on Nicolás Maduro’s capture:
“Regular people, like you or me, search through the trash looking for something to eat. People don’t know that in Venezuela you can get incarcerated just for an Instagram story or a WhatsApp story,” he said.
The Trump administration said it will temporarily run Venezuela and tap into its oil reserves, a resource that Felix argued never benefited the people who lived in Venezuela anyway.
“That oil belongs to Russia, that oil belongs to Cuba, to Iran, to China, and they [Venezuela] used that oil to buy guns, to kill Venezuelan people,” Felix said. “That has never been our oil, so if the U.S. wants our oil, perfect, if that’s the price we have to pay—it couldn’t be worse than how we were, 27 years with that regime.”
The sentiment among everyone The Post spoke to was gratitude and optimism for the future — but there was also concern that more needs to be done.
“The truth is that the United States should return to Venezuela and arrest the remaining bad people so that we can return to our country and make it a better place,” Ronnier, who fled to America alone when he was just 18-years-old, told The Post.
Delcy Rodriguez, Venezuela’s vice president and oil minister, was formally sworn in on Monday as the interim president. Rodriguez is a 56-year-old labor lawyer known for her devotion to the ruling party and her close connections to the private sector.
“If they don’t do something to remove everyone who belongs to Maduro’s government, the dictatorship will continue,” Carlos said.
Rodriguez said she wants to “collaborate” with the Trump administration on “shared development.”
