‘Feels like an illusion’: how Trump seizing Maduro has changed little in Venezuela

When Ángel Linares heard a strange buzz followed by an explosion, his first thought was that neighbours were setting off fireworks to celebrate the new year. Then his windows shattered, the building’s walls shook and its facade was ripped off, sending him flying on to the ground of an apartment suddenly reduced to rubble. His 85-year-old mother, Jesucita, feared Venezuela’s northern coast had been devastated by an earthquake, like the one she remembers from 1967. Ángel Linares, 48, in his rebuilt apartment in Catia La Mar. Photograph: Andrea Hernández Briceño/The Guardian Next door, Elizabeth Herrera jumped out of bed in her pyjamas and realised something more sinister was afoot when the post-explosion silence was filled with the sound of gunfire: “Tah-tah-tah-tah-tah-po-po-tah-tah-tah.” “Is it a coup? … I don’t believe ‘Papá Trump’ would have dared to invade,” Herrera remembers her husband speculating as their housing estate’s panicked residents struggled to make sense of the mayhem just before 2am on 3 January. All four residents of the Urbanización Rómulo Gallegos project in Catia La Mar, a seaside town 20 miles north of Caracas, were wrong. Donald Trump had indeed ordered an invasion of Venezuela, albeit a lightning-fast one to abduct the country’s then president, Nicolás Maduro. Damaged buildings in the Urbanización Rómulo Gallegos housing project in Catia La Mar. …