'Like an illusion' The Venezuelans bewildered by the post-Maduro era

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.

- Tom Phillips, María de los Ángeles Graterol

A mural of Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in Catia La Mar. The president and first lady were seized by US forces in January

Then his windows shattered, the building’s walls shook and its facade was ripped off, sending him flying to the ground and reducing his apartment to rubble.

Linares’s 85-year-old mother, Jesucita, feared Venezuela’s northern coast had been devastated by an earthquake, like the one she remembers from 1967.

Next door, Elizabeth Herrera jumped out of bed in her pyjamas and realised something else was afoot when the post-explosion silence was filled with gunfire.

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: “Is it a coup? ... I don’t believe ‘Papa Trump’ would have dared to invade,” he had said.

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.

Air-to-surface missiles rained down on defence and radar systems and radars along the country’s Caribbean coast and helicopter-borne Delta Force fighters swept south towards the capital. “They were 10 minutes that felt like an interminable hour,” said Herrera, who lost two elderly neighbours during the attack.

She recalled her autistic son’s anguish as they rushed out into the darkness and sheltered in a nearby school. “Mummy, are we the baddies? Are Venezuelans the baddies? Are they going to kill us?”

“I told him: ‘No, it’s probably just an issue between the White House and Miraflores,’” she replied, referring to Venezuela’s presidential palace.