DORAL, Fla. (AP) — Revelers chanted “liberty” and draped Venezuelan flags over their shoulders in South Florida on Saturday to celebrate the American military attack that toppled Nicolás Maduro’s government — a stunning outcome they had longed for but left them wondering what comes next in their troubled homeland.
People gathered for a rally in Doral, Florida — the Miami suburb where President Donald Trump has a golf resort and where roughly half the population is of Venezuelan descent — as word spread that Venezuela’s president had been captured and flown out of the country.
Outside the El Arepazo restaurant, a hub of the Venezuelan culture of Doral, one man held a piece of cardboard with “Libertad” scrawled with a black marker. It was a sentiment expressed by other native Venezuelans hoping for a new beginning for their home country as they chanted “Liberty! Liberty! Liberty!”
“We’re like everybody — it’s a combination of feelings, of course,” said Alejandra Arrieta, who came to the U.S. in 1997. “There’s fears. There’s excitement. There’s so many years that we’ve been waiting for this. Something had to happen in Venezuela. We all need the freedom.”
Trump insisted Saturday that the U.S. government would run the country at least temporarily and was already doing so. The action marked the culmination of an escalating Trump administration pressure campaign on the oil-rich South American nation as well as weeks of planning that tracked Maduro’s behavioral habits.
About 8 million people have fled Venezuela since 2014, settling first in neighboring countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. After the COVID-19 pandemic, they increasingly set their sights on the United States.
In Doral, upper-middle-class professionals and entrepreneurs came to invest in property and businesses after socialist Hugo Chávez won the presidency in the late 1990s, and recent years have seen an influx of lower-income Venezuelans seeking work in service industries.
Niurka Meléndez, who fled Venezuela in 2015, expressed hope that Maduro’s ouster will improve life in her homeland. She called for international humanitarian support to help in Venezuela’s recovery. “Removing an authoritarian system responsible for these crimes creates the possibility for recovery,” she said.
