When Oakland resident Elaine Agrizone first heard that U.S. authorities had taken custody of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, she stayed up most of the night trying to confirm that the man she blames for years of repression in her home country had truly been removed from power.
“I got goosebumps and the tears started to flow,” Agrizone said in Spanish.
Maduro made his first appearance in a New York courtroom Monday, pleading not guilty to narco-terrorism charges brought by the Trump administration after U.S. forces captured him and his wife at their home Saturday in a stunning overnight military operation. Trump told reporters Saturday that his administration will “run” the Venezuela government during an undefined transition period.
The move triggered Bay Area protests from anti-war groups over the weekend opposing Trump. But Venezuela natives living in the Bay Area expressed their joy that Maduro on Monday was facing federal charges in New York, but also concern over Maduro’s underlings that appear to remain in place.
“We know it has been a terrible government for our country, but I felt for those innocent people who died — because truly so many innocent people have died over the years,” Agrizone said.
In her view, Maduro “was only a puppet.”
“I don’t think we will be free while that government is still in power,” Agrizone said. “It is still corrupt.”
Nearly 8 million Venezuelans fled the country during the socialist regimes of Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez. Roughly a million came to the U.S., including nearly 30,000 to California, many of whom received temporary protected status to live and work here legally, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
Several Bay Area Venezuelans with temporary U.S. residency status contacted by this news organization were reluctant to identify themselves. They fear reprisals from both the remains of a Venezuelan government that has a history of violence against political opponents. And they worry about their ability to remain in the U.S. after the Trump Administration sought to remove protected legal status from hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans living here, an action being challenged in court.
Nonetheless, many were thrilled that Maduro was captured.
Nardy Brasil, 42, left Venezuela 24 years ago when Chavez was in power and she watched her native land descend into political violence and economic scarcity. She is now a U.S. citizen. But she is concerned about her family and friends who only have temporary status in the U.S. — and whether the Trump administration will take steps to deport them whether they want to return to Venezuela or not.
As the news broke last weekend, she spent several fearful days with mixed emotions, unable to contact her father.
“No one wants them to bomb your country,” Brasil said. At the same time, however, “we said, ‘thank God, it’s finally happening.'”
She is grateful to the Trump administration for its bold move, she said, but “that doesn’t mean that Venezuela is free. The people of Venezuela are still in fear about what is going to happen to the country. It’s like watching a movie and not knowing what the ending will be.”
Celestino De Caires, 65, is a US Citizen who lives in Oakland, and first came to the United States from Venezuela 45 years ago to study Engineering at Berkeley and then SF State for Latin American Studies, said he has lived the repression of the Maduro government and its predecessor.
In San Francisco, he helped organize Venezuelans in opposition to then-President Chavez in San Francisco in the early 2000s. After his action, he says he was accused of being a CIA agent by the Venezuelan government, and eventually was tracked down by government agents while visiting his home in Venezuela, fleeing them by getting onto his roof and running from rooftop to rooftop to escape with his passport.
“We’re happy, but with a bad taste in our mouths, because they are still there in power,” said De Caires in Spanish, highlighting the corruption and repression that marred the Maduro government. “But Donald Trump has shown his teeth and his war power.”
De Caires believes that Trump’s threats will force Acting President Delcy Rodriguez, who worked under Maduro in his regime, to make a transition government.
He says he and other Venezuelans are not for American interventionism, but because the government was so corrupt and led to so much pain for the country, he sees the value of the action. But while he believes the action is legal, since Maduro was designated as a terrorist, he calls the action and its legal basis “a double edged sword.”
“It’s not that we’re pro-Trump it’s that we’re anti-Chavismo,” Caires concluded, referring to the movement that encompassed the Chavez and Maduro governments.
Aida Crosby of San Jose, a school teacher who fled Venezuela in 1988 and settled in San Jose after meeting her husband at Brigham Young University, has been protesting the Chavez and Maduro regimes for years. In 2011, she held hands with fellow protesters across the Golden Gate Bridge, “but no one was listening.”
She is “thrilled” that Maduro was captured and facing justice in the U.S, she said. Her father, an American who married a Venezuelan, worked in the oil industry there and was killed while dining in a restaurant in 1983. No one ever was arrested, but the family is confident he was targeted by pro-socialist sympathizers who wanted Americans out.
“Maduro is the little, tiny scale of the big Anaconda that is wrapping around, not Venezuela, not the Americas, but the entire world,” Crosby said. “So we Venezuelans, we’re having a hard time understanding why it is that Trump has allowed (Vice President) Delcy Rodriguez to control the other part of the snake.”
Trump is a “godsend,” she said, and she is hopeful that since Secretary of State Marco Rubio from Florida understands the geopolitics of Latin America and speaks Spanish, the future there will be bright.
“We are very, very hopeful,” Crosby said.
She longs to return to her native country and help rebuild it, she said, “to eat our food, to put our feet in the clear waters of the Caribbean, to celebrate, to dance, to sing,” Crosby said. “No one has the capacity to have a party anymore, because there is nothing.”
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