Pianist Leo Blanco was in his Medford studio early Saturday morning, working on a composition about forced migration in Latin America. That’s when his phone started lighting up — with news of bombs falling in Caracas.
Friends from Venezuela were sending audio messages that the end of Nicolás Maduro’s regime seemed imminent.
“It’s started in Venezuela,” one friend said in an audio message shared with WBUR. “We have to take these sons of bitches out, but I’m sad about any lives that could be lost.”
Later, as the ousted Venezuelan president and his wife were seized by the U.S. military and imprisoned in New York, Blanco’s American friends had a very different message: Apologies for what their country was doing to his country.
“A lot of my friends are outraged at what happened in Venezuela, and I’m saying like, ‘Don’t be too sorry,’ ” he said with a chuckle. For Blanco, it was a moment of jubilation. But now there’s more uncertainty.
The morning Maduro was apprehended, President Trump zeroed in on oil opportunities and said the U.S. would control Venezuela. He did not mention restoring democracy or forcing elections as America’s near-term goals. But for millions of Venezuelans who have fled the country in recent years — and those who settled in places like Boston long ago — those are the changes that would matter most.
Blanco has no illusions about American intentions for his native country, with the largest proven oil reserves in the world. But for Blanco, Trump’s interest converged with the will of the Venezuelan people when it came to arresting Maduro.
“Trump is one of the biggest tragedies that [the United States] has had in a long time,” Blanco said. “However, he was the only one with the guts or with the craziness … to actually come into the country and remove the president.”
Blanco teaches jazz at Berklee College of Music. And unlike most middle-class Venezuelans in Boston, he actually supported the socialist project of Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, back when he was elected president in 1998.
But Blanco’s support faded as he watched the country devolve into autocracy and economic collapse. That led to what’s considered the largest refugee crisis in the history of the Americas: some 8 million Venezuelans scattered around the world, and accusations of stolen election after stolen election.
Without that backdrop, Blanco couldn’t imagine himself cheering on U.S. Delta Force troops as they extracted a president from a foreign country.
“There’s no easy solution,” he said. “The only thing I’m celebrating is that one important piece of the chess game was removed. They took a king away.”
Venezuelans around the world danced in the streets upon learning of Maduro’s arrest. But the jubilation quickly merged with new fears — that nothing will change.
While Maduro awaits trial for drug trafficking in New York, his regime remains intact in Caracas, with Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, now serving as interim president. The White House says it plans to work with Rodríguez rather than back a replacement from the opposition.
On Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he wants democracy for Venezuela, but the first priority is to secure U.S. interests: “No more drug trafficking, no more Iran, Hezbollah presence there, and no more using the oil industry to enrich all our adversaries around the world and not benefiting the people of Venezuela — or frankly benefiting the United States and the region.”
That kind of positioning could reassure supporters of the regime in Caracas. A rare Boston-area Venezuelan who backed Maduro is Jorge Marin, 66, a longtime supporter of the so-called Bolivarian Revolution.
Marin said he’s hoping for Venezuela to negotiate an oil deal with the U.S.; he believes that would allow the revolution to continue with Rodríguez as president, and for U.S. oil companies to get what they want.
“At the end of the day, the important thing is that people in Venezuela live peacefully and have a better life,” he said. “And if by negotiations we achieve that, then that will be good.”
Marin said he’s still in shock the U.S. military was able to snatch Maduro so quickly.
But he says fully toppling the government would mean a full-blown American occupation of Venezuela — and armed resistance by government loyalists.
“They’re not going to support anybody that comes from the outside and tries to take power,” he said. “If they have to take to the mountains, they will. It can create a big chaos in the country.”
On the other side of the political spectrum is Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann, who served as Venezuela’s planning minister in the early 1990s, and who was portrayed as an enemy of the state by Maduro. For Hausmann, it’s unlikely that American oil companies will play ball with “such a fragile regime.”
“Any due diligence analysis by any of the major oil companies — they’re going to say, ‘We’re going to wait this out until this whole political mess gets cleared up,’ ” Hausmann said. “So this cannot be the end of a story.”
“Don’t treat us like children. We know the consequences of an invasion. We were selling our souls. But the problem was too big and couldn’t be solved within Venezuela.”Andreina
Trump’s bitter medicine for Venezuela also appears to have sidelined María Corina Machado, last year’s Nobel Peace Prize recipient who’s viewed as the most popular leader among the Venezuelan people.
And the campaign against Maduro comes as the White House is ending legal status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans in the U.S.
One of them is a musician in Boston who left Venezuela as a teenager. At 26 years old, Andreina has never known Venezuela without authoritarian socialists in power. WBUR agreed to use only her first name, because of her immigration status.
She said the growing critiques of Trump’s arrest of Maduro miss the key point — this is what most Venezuelans wanted.
“Don’t treat us like children,” Andreina said in Spanish. “We know the consequences of an invasion. We were selling our souls. But the problem was too big and couldn’t be solved within Venezuela. No matter what we did from the inside, this was the only way.”
What matters most is what happens next, Andreina said. And if the Maduro regime stays in power, she said, she’ll wonder what this was all for.
With additional reporting by WBUR’s Lynn Jolicoeur.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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