MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Hi, I’m your host, Michael Fox. Before we get started, I think it’s important to say that some portions of today’s episode deal with some harsh themes from the US invasion of Venezuela, including bombings and trauma. If you’re sensitive to these things or you’re in the room with small children, you might want to consider another time to listen. 

OK, here’s the show.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:  If you would have seen what I saw last night, you would have been very impressed. I’m not sure that you’ll ever get to see it, but it was an incredible thing to see.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  That is US President Donald Trump’s description of the US invasion of Venezuela in a press conference the morning after.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:  Not a single American service member was killed and not a single piece of American equipment was lost. We had many helicopters, many planes, many, many people involved in that fight. But think of that. Not one piece of military equipment was lost. Not one service member was, more importantly, killed.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  This is also how the US invasion was portrayed in the media. A surgical operation. Exact. Without flaw. The US went in, they kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and they got out in just a few hours. Most stories in the US press focused on the superior capability of the US military. How the United States neutralized the Venezuelan armed forces.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:  No nation in the world could achieve what America achieved yesterday or, frankly, in just a short period of time. All Venezuelan military capacities were rendered powerless as the men and women of our military, working with US law enforcement, successfully captured Maduro in the dead of night.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  What is left out of this narrative is the very real impact the US invasion had on Venezuelans living in Caracas and in the surrounding states where US bombs fell. 

What is left out are the voices of Venezuelans on the ground. The true victims of the US intervention. 

LUCIA:  [Spanish] We could hear the tuk-tuk-tuk, the woo-poo, which I now know were the missiles, and drones.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Despite what the United States government or the mainstream media might be telling us, this was not a surgical operation.

The United States killed more than a hundred people in the invasion. They fired missiles and bombs that blew out windows and hit residential apartment blocks. Helicopters. Explosions. Firebombs. They cut electricity across Caracas. They destroyed a medical supplies warehouse. And they left terror and destruction in their wake. 

COROMOTO JARABA PINEDA:  At this minute, I feared for my life. That’s why I wrote those messages in WhatsApp. Because it’s like, somebody has to know why I died here.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  The US invaded Caracas like it invaded countries in the 20th century, but now with decades of new advances in weaponry and technology. And then the US troops flew away with the country’s president and first lady.

But the aftermath for everyday Venezuelans has been completely ignored. The voices of those on the ground… the voices of the victims… have been largely silenced in the international press and then forgotten as the news cycle hurtles on and our attention shifts elsewhere — To Greenland, Minneapolis, Iran, Gaza, or whatever Trump happens to be blustering about on social media.

So today we’re heading to Caracas to speak to people who experienced the invasion firsthand, whether sheltered in place in their homes or running for their lives in the streets of their city. We’ll hear their stories of Trump’s, quote, “impressive” attack, their messages for the United States,  and how they’ve promised to resist the ongoing attack on their sovereignty.

That… in a minute.

[THEME MUSIC]

This is Under the Shadow — An investigative narrative podcast series that looks at the role of the United States abroad, in the past and the very, very present.

This podcast is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA.

I’m your host, Michael Fox — Longtime radio reporter, editor, journalist. The producer and host of the podcasts Brazil on Fire and Stories of Resistance. I’ve spent the better part of the last 20 years in Latin America.

I’ve seen firsthand the role of the US government abroad. And most often, sadly, it is not for the better: invasions, coups, sanctions. Support for authoritarian regimes. Politically and economically, the United States has cast a long shadow over Latin America for the past 200 years. It still does.

This is Season 2 of Under the Shadow: Trump’s Attack.

Episode 5 — “When the Bombs Fell on Caracas.”  

So… I have been speaking with people in Caracas a lot over the last few weeks. I used to live there back in the mid-2000s. And so, for me, this US attack wasn’t about some far-away place, but a city and a country I know really well. Streets I’ve walked. Smells and sounds that are familiar.

And it’s been really shocking to me to see such a total lack of coverage about the actual impact of the US invasion on Venezuelans. I mean, I’ve seen a couple of stories about people whose apartments were hit by the US strike near the coast. A few stories about the US strike on the dialysis supply distribution center. But beyond that… there’s like this universal silence. 

An absolute whitewashing of the attack… as if it were so clean. As if the only people harmed were president Nicolás Maduro and his wife. And it’s just not true. 

But… that’s the story they want you to hear and believe. And we’ve seen this before.

This is exactly what happened in the days and weeks after the 1989 US invasion of Panama…  

[CLIP PLAYS]

That’s a clip from the 1992 documentary The Panama Deception. 

In Panama, the United States government and the US media painted the situation on the ground as triumphant. They covered up the killings and whitewashed the violence and human rights abuses. 

SPEAKER [CLIP]:  They focused on Noriega to the exclusion of what was happening to the Panamanian people, to the exclusion of the [inaudible] industry, to the exclusion of the number dead, to the exclusion of what happened to the women and children in that country during this midnight invasion.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  It would take weeks and months for the truth to come out… for the voices of the victims to be heard. 

And in many ways, it’s the same story today in Venezuela. Not to the same extent, because in Panama, US troops hit the ground and occupied the country for weeks. But in Venezuela, once again, the true story of the very real impact of the US invasion is not being told. 

Today, I hope to begin to set the record straight. 

Also… I know that the news cycle has moved fast. With so many other tragic events happening, the US invasion of Venezuela seems like yesterday’s news. But it’s not. The first unilateral US invasion of a Latin American country in more than 35 years needs to be dissected and exposed. And the people whose voices we most need to be hearing right now are not the pundits, the influencers, or the TV news personalities, but the people who experienced this invasion firsthand. People whose family members were killed by the violence. Or who are living with the trauma and the aftermath. People who are trying to rebuild amid the unknown… under the very dark shadow of the United States. 

The people whose voices have been sidelined and silenced. 

People like Lucia.

LUCIA:  [Spanish] Hello. Hello, how are you? All good? All good. Stronger than ever.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Lucia is not her real name. She asked that her real name not be used. 

She lives in a Caracas neighborhood called Tiuna City, which surrounds Fuerte Tiuna. That’s Venezuela’s largest military base. The neighborhood took the brunt of the US attack on Jan. 3.

Tiuna City is working and middle class — mostly made up of these huge red brick high-rise buildings. Thousands of people live here, both supporters of the government and those in the opposition. It was built through the government housing program Misión Vivienda over a decade ago.

I spoke with Lucia over WhatsApp in mid-January. I asked her to take me back to that night and recount what she and her 10-year-old daughter experienced.

We asked a voice actor to play Lucia in today’s episode.

LUCIA:  Look, I figure that it was about 1:50 in the morning. I started to hear that the sky was breaking apart… like it was going to thunder.

And I thought, even though we weren’t expecting something to happen, we were in a situation that was a little stressful, but without reaching collective hysteria. But everyone was aware that something could happen.

There were some previous reports of people who heard fireworks and got scared that it was some sort of an attack. So, the general population was waiting, in a tense calm. But the moment I heard that it sounded like the sky is breaking apart, my thought was, damn, I have clothes on the line. It’s thundering, and it’s gonna pour. In my sleepiness, that’s what came to mind.

But then the house lit up like it was on fire. It lit up from a big explosion. My daughter, she’s 10 years old and she was sleeping with me. 

I start hearing neighbors screaming from their balconies, “Damn gringos, damn gringos!” And in all the confusion, I just said, I can’t believe this shit is happening. This is it.

I got my daughter up. She was asleep. Remember that these were in the days after New Year, it was still vacation and the weekend.

So I get her up and I tell her, “Get under the bed. Get under the bed.” She asks, “Mom what’s happening?” and I just say, “Get under the bed.”

All this is in a matter of seconds. I realize that the bed isn’t the best place to be because everything is happening in the buildings right in front of my house. 

You can hear the tuk-tuk-tuk-tuk-tuk-tuk, and the the woo-poo, which now I know are missiles from drones. And I think the safest place in my house is the bathroom. I say, “Quickly, let’s go to the bathroom.” And my daughter asks, “Mom, what’s going on? Are we going to die?”

In that moment, the only thing I could do was I grabbed her by the shoulders and I told her, “I don’t know what’s going on, but don’t cry and calm down. Calm down, because calm is what will keep our mind clear to see what we’re going to do.” I kept her in the bathroom and we could hear the machine guns.

Of course, we had no idea what was happening. I realized that the lights didn’t work. It was dark not because it was nighttime but because there was no electricity. I start trying to communicate with others. I made my first phone call trying to figure out what was going on. But the question, what’s happening? was always answered with more confusion. What was clear is that what we thought was happening, an invasion, was happening, but no one had any details.

My mind kept coming back to one thing: The US Marines are down there. They’re outside. We have to be quiet. I don’t know if they’re down there and they’re going to come and get us. They’re gonna come and grab us from our homes. But that was all in my head because I couldn’t spread my confusion and fear to my daughter. 

At that moment, all I wanted was for my daughter to stay calm and to be exposed as little as possible, which is difficult because at that moment, windows in our apartment exploded because they blew up a security post that’s 50 meters from my house.

An hour passed and we still didn’t know what was happening or what state we were in. But for my daughter, it was a moment in which she stopped asking me questions… She said, “I hear them speaking American, Mom, I hear them speaking in English.” I told her, “Calm down, calm down.”

And then my daughter went from fear to anger. She asked if she could have permission to say say a swear word. And I told her, yeah, of course, say what you need to. And she shouted, “Fucking gringos!”

And she painted a dove on the roof of the bathroom. 

Amid all of this, we could still hear explosions. People wrote to me who were watching the attack from another area, far from the city, but with a panoramic view.

They told me, there are drones everywhere. They’re everywhere. And there are still explosions. 

That was the longest night, the longest night of my life. And my daughter was pinching herself. She said, “I’m pinching myself because I want to know if this is real. I want to know if what is happening is real.”

And later, there were moments of calm when there were no explosions and no machine guns. But, after a while, the planes started to pass again. And amid all of this, there was just a ton of confusion. Messages arrived from people, messages from godparents, but above all, everyone was confused. To a certain point we just couldn’t know what was happening.

The reality is that we went from fear to anger. Anger that I couldn’t understand how these helicopters were on the balcony of my house or were they going to park in the parking lot of my house? I didn’t understand how this is possible.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  I asked her if they broke the windows in her home. 

LUCIA:  Yes. I still don’t know if it was from a shock wave from an explosion or shrapnel from a missile that broke through the glass.

But it wasn’t just my windows. It was the windows of more than 400 homes where I live. I have neighbors who have missile shrapnel in their living room. 

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  I asked her, “How is your daughter?”

LUCIA:  My daughter is a fighter.  It’s not that she wasn’t affected, but my daughter didn’t cry until 8:00 in the morning. That’s when she started to kind of digest what had happened. And I noticed that she was sort of shrinking. I told her, “Do you want to cry?” And I told her, “Now is the time to cry.”

But at no time before that did my daughter cry. My daughter stayed strong. And in the conversations later, she said, “Mom, I’m afraid.”

I told her, “Yeah, it’s logical that you’re afraid, but how do you feel now? Do you feel weaker or stronger?” She told me, “No, I’m much stronger than I was before.”

Now, I kept my daughter safe, but not because I made a better or worse decision in the moment. There was just so much confusion.

But my daughter wasn’t exposed to what other children were exposed to. Where I live, there are children who are traumatized. There are children who haven’t wanted to go home. There are children who have drawn helicopters with dead people, even though they didn’t see the dead people. So, it’s really hard. But it was a breaking point for my daughter.

You know, like I’ve told other people, I didn’t make the movie Life is Beautiful. I’m not Guido, and I’m not going to hide what’s happening from my daughter. She’s living it. I try not to expose her to a lot of things, but she talks about it naturally.

But yeah, sometimes, I’m afraid of what happened. I’ve dreamt that we’re being bombed again.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Lucia’s words really hit me hard. They brought me to tears. I’ve done a lot of reporting about violence, intervention, and injustice in the past.
But this is different. She’s recounting something that happened right now, and which was carried out by the government and military of the United States — The country where I was born and raised. The country that is indiscriminately killing innocent people in real time… be it in Caracas, Venezuela, or Minneapolis, Minnesota. 

And Lucia’s is just one testimony of so many. Stories from the epicenter of the US invasion. Innocent families. Parents. Kids. Grandparents. Frantically trying to stay safe under the whining propellers of the US choppers and the explosions rocking their cities, their homes, and their lives. Lucia and her daughter stayed hidden in their bathroom as the US planes attacked. Many others fled for their lives.

Professor Oleno Leon lives in the same area as Lucia, near Fuerte Tiuna. He says when the US aircraft arrived, a friend who was staying at his house began to shout, “We gotta get outta here, because they’re invading,” he said.

PROFESSOR OLENO LEON:  At that moment, we could hear a big explosion, combined with the shock wave. It felt like a shock wave that entered the apartment. Then, in the middle of the darkness, because there was no electricity anymore, I threw on my clothes. All I could think of was that we had to get outta there.

We managed to dress and grabbed what we could. We were able to leave the apartment, and all the neighbors were evacuating too in the midst of the cries and despair. You couldn’t see much. You couldn’t distinguish who they were, but everyone was leaving.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Oleno Leon and his family made it out of their apartment building carrying their 60-pound dying dog. They followed the crowd of people fleeing the area. 

But, he says, once they were out they were afraid that if this was an invasion, there could be ground troops — An invading army shooting people in the streets.

PROFESSOR OLENO LEON:  There were so many indescribable noises that I’ve never heard in my life. They were obviously from artillery, people firing guns and weapons. Thunderous, terrifying sounds. So terrifying you don’t even know where they came from, or where they were going. People just knew they had to get out of here, because at any moment a bomb could fall on their residential buildings.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Bombs did fall on residential buildings and countless locations across Caracas and the surrounding states. 

There are also some testimonies of people who witnessed US helicopters turning to fire on innocent people in the streets.

COROMOTO JARABA PINEDA:  They bombed the coast in two, three places, actually. They bombed the Mamo base, they bombed the civilian neighborhood, and they bombed the docks, where the medicines were.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Coromoto Jaraba Pineda is a translator, a freelance journalist, and a former colleague of mine in Caracas. 

COROMOTO JARABA PINEDA:  Then they bombed in the east neighborhood, the wealthy neighborhood of La Boyera. They bombed those towers in [inaudible]. They also bombed El IVIC, which is the center for scientific investigations and research. They bombed some antennas there. 

Then, of course, they bombed Fuerte Tiuna very heavily, destroying several buildings and the school. And obviously, they bombed military personnel who were actually asleep. This was sick. They bombed leaving, on their way out I think. In Higuerote. There was an air base. They bombed that as well.

They keep saying this was a surgical operation. Like this was like something in a laboratory, so trying to save someone’s life. This was nothing like that. And this neighborhood, this is an old civilian neighborhood, and they attacked it.

And they also attacked the port where we had a bunch of medicines for the people with kidney disease and all the medicines, and we had to wait for the Brazilians to send us some humanitarian aid to replace all this medicine that was bombed out.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Since the US knocked out Venezuela’s main dialysis warehouse, the Brazilian government has sent more than 90 tons of supplies for kidney patients. And it promises more help is on the way. Roughly 9,000 kidney patients have been impacted across Venezuela. These supplies are a matter of life and death for many of them. 

Coromoto says if you just look at the widespread bombing campaign in Venezuela, it’s clear that the United States did not only want to hit military targets and kidnap president Maduro and his wife. But they also wanted to sow fear in the civilian population. 

COROMOTO JARABA PINEDA:  This was not to help the Venezuelan people. This was not made with, “Yes, let’s only attack the military.” They attacked all places at random. And let’s see if this bomb does what it says on the package. Oh, it does. It’s good.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Later in this episode, Coromoto will take us to one of these locations that was hit by a US missile. But first…

I’m going to bring in one more person to tell us his story about what happened the night of Jan. 3. 

This is Ángel Palacios. He’s a Venezuelan filmmaker. He made the documentary Llaguno Bridge: Keys to a Massacre, about the 2002 failed coup in Venezuela. He’s also an old friend. I worked with him in the mid-2000s translating and narrating that movie into English, and then producing and reporting for a 10-part film series he was working on about the history of US intervention in Latin America. It was called Injerencia — ”Intervention” in Spanish.

Yes… both he and I have been focused on this issue for a long time. We asked a voice actor to play Ángel in this episode.

ÁNGEL PALACIOS:  As the people woke up on that night, columns of smoke were rising over Caracas from the explosion of the missiles. And we were not at war, this has to be said. I’ve worked as a correspondent in war zones in the Middle East and in other places. And when a country is at war, you are prepared for something like this to happen, but not here. We thought it was fireworks or that an electric transformer had exploded. When missiles landed over Caracas and drones flew across the city, the reaction of the people was chaos, because no one was expecting an attack when the city was sleeping — Because we were not at war. 

We saw helicopters with double propellers and some that were Chinook style. We heard planes flying over our houses and our city, helicopters flying over our homes. The lights from the drones blinked on and off, and some of them crashed. We later learned that they were suicide drones; drones that crash, not shoot. They’re projectiles that detonate like bombs when they impact. They call them Lucas drones. 

And the noise, because I can describe the invasion visually, but you can feel it audibly, too. The noise was creepy, because you heard a very loud sound like a high-displacement motorcycle passing beside you and a second later you heard the detonation. 

There were other drones I suppose were for surveillance. And they positioned themselves where the people were. A friend, who is a soldier, he was in one location, and when he went to grab his weapon, a drone appeared just in front of him. In another place, he went to reach for his cell phone, and when he picked it up a drone appeared again just before him.

Communications were cut off in parts of the city. Part of the city was dark. And we saw bombs exploding in the mountains and we didn’t understand why. Later we learned that it was because they were attacking transmission antennas and communication towers and electrical generation centers. It was a hellhole of shrapnel. It was betrayal by the United States, because we were not at war.

If a country is at war, it’s prepared. It’s active. They threatened us for four months. They took actions, they killed people on our coast, on the boats that they bombed with their warplanes. But we were not at war.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  The US invasion killed more than a hundred people. The exact number is still unknown. Some Venezuelan officials have said it could be as high as 150.

Two days after the invasion, the Venezuelan government held an official funeral and then a memorial for the soldiers killed in the US attack.

In Cuba in mid-January, thousands marched to the US Embassy to denounce the attack on Venezuela and the killing of 32 Cubans during it. 

The independent outlet Belly of the Beast was on the street.

SPEAKER (BELLY OF THE BEAST):  Right now the demonstration is passing by in front of the US Embassy in Havana. La Marcha del Pueblo Combatiente is a symbol of the support of the Cuban people to the revolution.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  “We are here to march for our fallen loved ones and to bring the youth,” said one woman in the march. “We are here to demand that Cuba remain free. That US imperialism stays out of our affairs,” said another. 

They chant, “Down with imperialism. Down with Donald Trump.”

[MUSIC]

Back in Venezuela, a couple of days after the invasion, I asked freelance journalist Coromoto Jaraba Pineda to visit some locations that were hit. To see first hand the impacts and the recovery. 

COROMOTO JARABA PINEDA:  Today is Saturday the 10th. This is Avenida Lecuna. There’s people around. It’s sunny, but there’s a lot of clouds, so there might be rain later…

She took the bus down to Catia La Mar the week after the invasion. 

MICHAEL FOX:  Walk me through that day that you went down. What did you see? Where did you go? And what was the situation?

COROMOTO JARABA PINEDA:  Well, Catia La Mar, as you know, is a seaside town, and there’s also the Naval university and the Naval military base of Mamo. So, it’s a place also like El Valle, which is really in… I wouldn’t say cooperation, but like they have some soldiers who rent rooms. It’s part of the local economy, and it is in El Valle as well. 

We arrived there, it seemed like a normal day. All shops were open, fishermen were selling their fish. I could see a new hospital opened by the governor of La Guaira. We were walking up the hill asking around where this La Soublette, where the missile fell was. And well, I managed to speak to a couple of people. Actually, I talked to a lady who’s from the Comité de Salud, the health committee. And she explained that she lives in a different area of Catia La Mar. 

And well, the very same thing, like people living high in the hill, the earth moved, and many houses were affected by it. Close to 50, 60 houses, like they have their ground, the walls, they’re cracked walls. And in many areas were reported also the power wave, I don’t know how to call it. It made the windows explode.

MICHAEL FOX:  The shock wave from the missiles.

COROMOTO JARABA PINEDA:  The shock wave. This must have been freaking scary. She came out of her home and she tried to put to safety the elderly and the children while all this thing was going on, because all the information so like… 

I think the people in Catia La Mar are very brave. Their house, the building that was affected, a lady died there. And the family, although they’re not government supporters, they had the full support of the governor and different institutions in rebuilding not only that home and helping them with funerary service and things like that, but also to another lady who was critically ill, and she had a stroke during this attack.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Coromoto spoke with the nephew of the woman who died in the attack. Everyone was really impacted by what happened. People get alarmed at any noise. Everyone was just shocked, he said.

Some of the pictures of this apartment block in Catia La Mar just after the airstrike during the invasion are just shocking. There’s a gaping hole in the side of the building. People commented that it looked like a scene from Gaza. The blast reportedly affected 12 apartments. At least one 80-year-old woman died. 

But here’s the interesting thing: When Coromoto visited just a week later, the building was already well under construction and there were numerous government missions providing services and support to residents in need. There were community doctors and psychologists offering free services for community members and even their pets. There were blood pressure checks, care for the elderly, and professionals to talk to for mental health support, Coromoto says. 

COROMOTO JARABA PINEDA:  It made me proud to see people working there.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Lucia says the US invasion was just the beginning. Now it’s about reconstruction, helping those who suffered through the attack, and cleaning up.

LUCIA:  This is the second battle, in the domestic and the day-to-day comes the struggle. And at least my family is going through it in my daughter’s school. It’s a struggle that comes little by little. I mean, right now we have to the work through what each child lived, or what each person lived. I see it with my daughter and I see it with me.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Lucia says they are still finding glass shards from the broken windows in her daughter’s room, weeks after she cleaned everything up.

But she also says her daughter has surprised her. She has this little succulent plant on the balcony of their apartment. It was damaged in the attack. But her daughter found it and is nursing it back to health.

LUCIA:  For me, it’s really symbolic. She said, “Look, Mom, I put it back together, I planted it again, and there it is. It’s really powerful.”

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Lucia says she has also been trying to help her daughter understand the context of what’s happened and who is responsible.

LUCIA:  My daughter told me, “This is the the gringo people who are doing this to us.” And I say, “No, no, no, this is the state. The government of the United States that has done this to us.”

The United States is so giant that perhaps what is happening looks tiny next to what they are living there: ICE, repression, discontent, and maybe they just don’t notice what’s happening elsewhere. But damn, it seems like they are having to live, little by little, what other countries have lived.

I don’t even need to tell them to wake up, because I think they are waking up. And it’s a really tough fight that they are going to have there.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  There are few people I know who have been more focused on uncovering and telling the story of US intervention in Latin America than filmmaker Ángel Palacios. I asked him what this invasion meant for him personally as someone who has done so much research and produced so many documentary films about the history of the US impact in the region.

ANGEL PALACIOS:  Well, this is one of the greatest acts of aggression against the people of Latin America, but at a higher level. It’s not new that they bombed Latin America. It’s not new that they invaded. It’s not new that they kidnapped presidents. They kidnapped Chávez in 2002. The history of the coups d’états, the invasion of Granada, Panama, the assassination of Sandino.

History has forgotten the number of times that the words of Simón Bolívar are reaffirmed. He warned about 200 years ago that “The United States appears to be destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.” That’s how it’s been ever since. And it’s not only in Latin America. Bolívar needed to say all of America, because I always tell my colleagues that on May 1 we celebrate Workers’ Day around the world for the Chicago martyrs, who were American workers who were murdered by capitalism and by the North American elites.

Now, what does this mean? It means they’ve taken it to another level. They attacked a people who slept in peace.

After the bombings there’s always the mental bombings. The bombing of lies to justify what happened.

First, this was not a surgical attack, and from the videos this is clear. There’s evidence. This was a shithole of lead and destruction. 

They destroyed whatever they wanted here. It wasn’t a surgical attack. They killed civilians. They shot directly at homes, as in the case of El Hatillo, where a missile entered the courtyard of a home and was recorded with the surveillance camera of that house. They destroyed 460 homes around Fort Tiuna.

That area they attacked is a civilian area, outside of the military base

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Another lie, Ángel says, is the narrative that Venezuelans weren’t capable of defending themselves.

ANGEL PALACIOS:  Yes, we defended ourselves. They haven’t told the truth about the number of casualties they took. I saw Venezuelans respond to fire and hit a helicopter. One of those big ones, for air transport, with two propellers… And I saw it shake. I saw it recover, and I saw it respond to the fire. 

It was two hours of fighting. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth says it lasted just half an hour. It’s a lie. The fighting in Caracas lasted two hours. And they simply swept aside the people. What they did was a massacre.

They were supported by technology that is 50 years ahead of us. This was not an attack against a country at war. And they used all the technological tools they had to do it. Electronic war, signal blocking, radar blocking, blocking of civilian and military communications, taking out the electrical grid. Utilizing electronic warfare, cyberattacks, kinetic war, and missile impacts.

And I can summarize everything I told you in one sentence: They carried out the invasion because they could, because they have the technological superiority — But they did not stay, because they couldn’t stay. We are still a sovereign country. There is no gringo military base here. And they know that if they try to stay here, they will unfortunately have to buy many black bags to take their boys home.

Because the people here are prepared to defend the whole country. We are not prepared to fight against advanced technology. We’ve known that for a long time. But we’re outraged and ready to fight for our country if they come to put their boots on the ground. And that’s why they entered at night like thieves.

Every day we wake up, we go to work, we go to school, we go to our factories, we go to our universities. Every day that passes is a day of humiliation for those sons of bitches. Because we are demonstrating that we are still a sovereign country. We still have our homeland, despite the most brutal attack the United States has carried out in recent times against a population that is not at war.

[THEME MUSIC]

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  That is all for this episode of Under the Shadow. 

Next time, we look at Trump’s lethal blending of US imperial policy — Foreign and domestic. When US threats and actions abroad are the same as Trump’s threats and actions at home. And the result is always more violence, fear, and suffering unleashed by Trump and his administration with the goal of forcing others to their knees.

But people will not bend. And as we’ve seen in Minneapolis, the resistance is only growing.

That’s next time on Under the Shadow. 

I’m your host, Michael Fox. 

I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s episode. A couple of things to mention.

First, I’ll add some links to Ángel Palacios’ documentaries I mentioned in this episode. The series about US intervention in Latin America is called Injerencia in Spanish, Intervention in English.

Second, many thanks to the incredible help from Coromoto, Jessica dos Santos, Ricardo Vaz, and others for sharing their contacts and pointing me toward people willing to speak out about this moment.

As usual, if you are looking for more information, news, and reporting on Trump’s onslaught, both on communities within the United States and abroad… Please check out The Real News and NACLA. Both of them are publishing daily, indispensable reporting. In fact, NACLA has created a Curated Guide to the US Invasion of Venezuela. That includes this podcast. I’ll add links to it all in the show notes.

If you are new to this podcast series, you might want to consider checking out the first season of Under the Shadow. It looks at US intervention in Central America, in particular throughout the 1980s. I highly recommend you go back and give it a listen. It’s super relevant today. I’ll add links in the show notes, or you can find that by searching for Under the Shadow wherever you get your podcasts. 

The theme music is by my band, Monte Perdido. You can find us on Spotify or wherever you stream music. This closing music playing right now is off our 2024 album, “Ofrenda.” I hope you check it out. I’ll add links to this also in the show notes.

Finally, if you like what you hear, please head over to my Patreon page: patreon.com/mfox. There you can support my work, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of all the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America. This really helps me to continue to do this important work.

Under the Shadow is a co-production of The Real News and NACLA.

This episode script was edited by Heather Gies. Many thanks to Jill Replogle and Jaisal Noor for their voice acting work. I really, really appreciate it. 

Thanks for listening. See you next time.