Interviews in Spanish were conducted and transcribed by Annika Hom.
The first blast rattled Christian Pich Ortiz’s bedroom before sunrise, sending his mother and siblings into tears as detonations boomed over their community in Miranda, a state along Venezuela’s central coast.
To protect themselves, they dragged their mattresses off the beds and hid beneath them. Quickly, he told them to move downstairs because “we were going to stand up.” He was convinced this was not an accident. He had been expecting this blow after weeks of escalating threats from President Donald Trump and other U.S. officials.
“We understood immediately what was going on,” he said from a protest in Caracas, the day after the U.S. launched a military attack on Venezuela, leading to the arrest of the nation’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, and the killing of over 100 people in the nation’s capital city.
Ortiz is a proud Afro-Venezuelan, part of a once‑erased majority in the country of around 30 million people. Over half the population identifies as moreno (brown), Black, or Afro‑descendant — categories that researchers understand as largely reflecting African ancestry. This is the highest rate among the world’s Spanish-speaking countries.
The viral images of Venezuelan immigrants celebrating U.S. intervention highlight a sharp contrast to the experiences of some Afro-Venezuelans like Ortiz.
Capital B interviewed Afro-Venezuelans here in the U.S. and in the coastal country bordering the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean who said the reality is more complex. It is shaped by the country’s long history of denying racism and by who has actually borne the brunt of sanctions, poverty, and police violence.
“The people of the United States should know that they are not our enemies,” said Diógenes Díaz, an Afro-Venezuelan historian who lives in Caracas.
That complicated history has also produced a clear racial and class divide in how Venezuelans reacted to Maduro’s arrest. While many whiter, wealthier exiles publicly welcomed the U.S. strike, poorer, darker communities — especially along the coast — grappled with the immediate loss of life and uncertainty about what may follow.
“In coastal regions and rural towns where most Afro‑descendants live, pensions and social programs did arrive, even with all the limitations … the [U.S.] bombs landed in those regions too,” Díaz said.
In interviews, some Afro‑Venezuelans offered their support for Maduro’s government, while others cautioned against romanticizing his rule as truly serving the poor. At the same time, they all firmly rejected U.S. military intervention.
Before the country fell into an economic crisis in the mid-2010s, experts said it was very rare for a person of African descent to be anti-government and anti-Maduro, but these days it is much more nuanced.
The American invasion that split Venezuela and its diaspora
“Nowadays, when people think of the U.S. invading Venezuela, you have two different takes, and that is dependent on race and class,” said Evelyne Laurent-Perrault, a Black Venezuelan of Haitian descent.
Racial history helps explain not only the fury many Afro‑Venezuelans felt after the recent U.S. strike, but also the starkly racialized split in how Venezuelans abroad reacted, according to Laurent-Perrault and Nadia Mosquera Muriel, an Afro‑Venezuelan anthropologist who grew up in Venezuela and now studies Black life from the U.S.
They both pointed to viral images from protests in Miami.
“Those populations that you might have seen in Miami, lighter‑skinned — those are part of the Venezuelan diaspora that left before the crisis hit,” Mosquera Muriel explained. “They tended to be whiter, more middle‑class and professional populations that probably migrated with proper documentation and are now American citizens. Those populations have traditionally rejected the [Venezuelan] government.”
A key piece of the current situation in Venezuela stems from the nation’s 2018 election, in which Maduro claimed victory alongside opposition leader Juan Guaidó. Roughly 50 countries across the Americas and Europe refused to recognize Maduro’s 2018 reelection and instead backed Guaidó, while a smaller block of 16 countries, including Brazil, China, and Russia, backed Maduro’s claim to power.
Trump had been floating the idea of using U.S. military force in Venezuela long before that disputed vote, repeatedly asking advisers in 2017 about invading the country and later musing in public about keeping its oil.
Inside Venezuela, Mosquera Muriel said, the picture is more cautious and complex because of this recent history.
“I have not seen anyone going to the streets to celebrate,” but that also does not mean some Venezuelans in the country are not in support of U.S. intervention, she said, because many people have been living in deep fear of the government.
Still, in Latin America, “none of the U.S. interventions have actually brought anything positive to any country where that has happened,” she added.
Díaz is particularly enraged by the justification of the invasion. Officials framed the strike as an operation against the Cartel of the Suns, but Díaz noted that the U.S. Department of Justice later walked back claims that the cartel exists as a structured organization.
“There is an imposed narrative,” he said, calling it “outrageous” that governments and media would use a discredited story to legitimize “innocent deaths in Venezuela,” especially in communities of African descent.
Ortiz, who experienced the strikes with his family, connected what happened in Miranda to a broader pattern of war in Black and brown countries globally, from “Haiti to the Congo to Palestine.”
“We believe in communes, we believe in popular power,” Ortiz said. “We are asking for your solidarity. That’s what we need” against a war that, from his bedroom in Miranda, feels far less abstract than the debates in Washington.
A few days later, Trump met publicly with U.S. oil and gas executives at the White House. He said the U.S. would assume control of Venezuela’s oil indefinitely, under threat of a military blockade that could even further cripple the country’s economy and set off a massive humanitarian crisis, sending more migrants toward the U.S. He told reporters that he intended to control the country for years.
The Bolivarian Revolution and the collapse that followed
Afro‑Venezuelans have long been concentrated in the country’s rural coastal zones and urban barrios. In these areas, discrimination and police abuse has been rampant. Their dominance in the poorest regions, even as the country grew among the globe’s richest off its vast oil reserves, means they are disproportionately represented among the Venezuelans living in poverty.
As scholars have documented, the erasure of Blackness in Venezuela has colonial roots: enslaved Africans were brought to work cocoa plantations, and even after abolition in 1854, dark‑skinned Venezuelans faced systemic barriers. The ideology of “mestizaje” — racial mixture — was used by elites to deny that racism existed at all.
“The assumption is that there is no racism in Venezuela, that everything is blended,” said Laurent-Perrault, a history professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. After graduating from Universidad Central de Venezuela and then moving to the U.S., her work has focused on uplifting contributions of Afro-Venezuelan women.
In the U.S., she noted, the legal “one‑drop rule” defined Blackness; in Venezuela, “mixing with white then turns the person into no longer being Black,” even though they are still of African descent. That ideology, she said, helps explain why many Venezuelans insist they “have no racial issues because we all mix,” even as Black enclaves remain some of the country’s poorest.
Still, dark‑skinned people were told to mejorar la raza —”improve the race”— by marrying lighter and modifying their features to look less Black, explained Mosquera Muriel.
However, following the introduction of new census categories in 2011 and a strategic push by former President Hugo Chávez, who identified as a descendant of the African slave trade, things changed. Chávez was “overtly the first non‑white president” to make explicit racial claims, Mosquera Muriel said, and he faced “quite a lot of racist attacks from the elites” who saw a leader who looked like the working‑class majority.
Afro‑Venezuelan organizers said they had to cultivate that racial consciousness in Chávez, but once he embraced his African ancestry publicly, it became “an awakening” for many Black Venezuelans who had been taught to hide or downplay their Blackness, according to Díaz.
When Chávez launched what became known as the Bolivarian revolution in 1999, his project promised to rework reality: using state control of oil to fund schools, clinics, food programs, and new jobs in poor Afro-descendent communities, while publicly affirming Venezuela’s African ancestry in a way no previous government had done.
Díaz said 2005 was a turning point, when then–National Assembly President Maduro signed the decree creating Afro‑Descendants’ Day. It was the first time the state openly recognized African contributions to the nation. Later, as foreign minister, Maduro helped create a Vice‑Ministry for Africa and expand Venezuela’s embassies on the continent from eight to more than 20.
Those symbolic shifts were backed by material policy. Programs like Barrio Adentro brought free health clinics directly into poor neighborhoods, while literacy missions helped Venezuela declare itself free of illiteracy. The government also created new universities, distributed subsidized food through boxes known as CLAPs, and offered pensions and cash bonuses to families, funded by redirecting oil revenue that had long enriched a lighter‑skinned elite, Díaz said.
But as Díaz told it, the intent to serve Afro‑Venezuelans ran into economic sanctions that restricted trade in food and medicine and choked off state revenue. At the same time, the decaying economy shrank the money available for social programs, leaving fewer resources to reach Black rural and coastal areas.
Mosquera Muriel, a professor of African and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, described how that dependency worked on the ground. In African descendant communities, the state became the main employer and the gatekeeper for roads, clinics, and CLAP boxes. That presence “was really built into the fabric of community life,” making the government a lifeline when wages were unlivable — but also hard to escape when services declined and police pressure increased.
As oil revenues fell, Mosquera Muriel said, the relationship between Black communities and the state darkened. “You see a lot more militarization and authoritarianism, and also policing those communities,” she said.
Human Rights Watch and the United Nations have documented how Maduro’s government carried out extrajudicial killings in poor, predominantly Afro‑descendant neighborhoods, manipulating crime scenes and planting weapons to justify the deaths.
“Blunt, lethal violence was enforced against the poorest areas,” Mosquera Muriel said, “which are mostly inhabited by people of African descent.”
She also saw many people migrate when state wages and benefits no longer covered basic needs, further weakening the social fabric that had briefly been built up.
Since the free fall began, nearly 8 million Venezuelans have migrated, including roughly 800,000 to the U.S. (Reliable numbers on Afro‑Venezuelans in the United States are scarce.)
For many Venezuelans in the country and in the diaspora, this history is the only way to understand the bombing and its aftermath.
Laurent-Perrault said it is fair to say that the government under Maduro is not benefiting the masses.
“Quality health care for everybody, quality education, affordable housing — those are basic tenets of socialism, and they were never fully implemented,” she said, pointing to crumbling public universities and how often she has to “send $20 here and $30 there” for loved ones and sometimes strangers to access health care.
“There was a lot of hope. There was a lot of pride, and at some point, there were a lot of possibilities,” Laurent-Perrault said. “And I — we — actually liked that. But it became politicized.”
Read More:
Venezuelan Oil Brought to the U.S. Would Be Refined in Black Gulf Communities