Where Roses Bloom

If the oligarchs return to Venezuela, the social housing will go, the public schools will go, the healthcare clinics will go, the food parcels will go, and the forests will be cut down

- Vijay Prashad

IN January, which is the dry season in Venezuela, a gorgeous tree, the Rosa de Venezuela (or Scarlet Flame Bean), blooms with red and orange-red ball-shaped clusters of flowers. The last time I visited the Fuerte Tiuna area in Caracas, one of the five sites struck by the United States military at 2 am on January 3, 2026, I saw a large Rosa de Venezuela tree in full bloom. Sitting at the southern edge of the Caribbean Sea, Venezuela benefits from the warm tropical weather that allows a range of beautiful flowering trees to flourish across the country, including in Caracas-a city overcrowded by the petroleum boom and bust that has been in place for a century. By February, when the rain begins slowly, trees that are familiar at all similar latitudes (Caracas is on the same line as Chennai, for comparison)-Jacaranda with its lavender-blue flowers, Araguaney (sometimes called the Vasantha Rani) with its yellow flowers.

Nicolás Maduro, the President of Venezuela, who—with his wife Cilia Flores—is in US custody in New York City, loves flowers. Just before the pandemic, Maduro was keen to enhance Venezuela's flower industry and to begin to export these Caribbean jewels across South America. But then the sanctions tightened and the pandemic threw everything out of focus. He grew up in a home in central Caracas, with loving parents who had strong ideas of dignity and justice. Nicolás Maduro García, his father, was a trade union man and brought socialist ideas into the home, while Teresa de Jesús Moros, was a devout Catholic who taught Maduro, as he told me years later, to “never shy away from pain”. These trees surrounded his childhood, which was filled with sports and hard work. Maduro became a public bus driver, and then a trade union leader. All the time I have known him, he has liked to refer to himself as a bus driver or a worker, an ordinary man who was propelled by the immense charisma of Hugo Chávez into the presidency of Venezuela.