The Free Press

The capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro opened a rare moment of hope for a people long trapped under a regime that turned what was once South America’s richest country into a failed state. But while the despot is gone, the criminal enterprise that ruled through him remains firmly embedded in the country’s military, intelligence services, and …

MINNEAPOLIS — James said Renee Good, his neighbor, went out the way she lived: taking care of others.

“She was always checking up on everybody, making sure everybody was okay. That’s literally what she was doing that day,” said James, 38. “She was telling her family, ‘Hey, heads up—ICE is down the road.’ ”

Last Wednesday morning, he heard gunshots outside his bedroom window on Portland Avenue in South Minneapolis. Scared, he waited five minutes before running out to find Good’s wife, Rebecca Good, sitting in the snow, screaming.

Rebecca, 40, had “brain matter and blood dripping all over her,” said James. “I went upstairs to get her a towel, and by the time I came back, she was gone.”

Videos show Good blocking traffic in a maroon SUV. Three ICE agents swarm her car. Through her open window, Good looks at one of the agents, Jonathan Ross, 43. “I’m not mad at you dude,” she tells him. Rebecca, who is wearing a whistle around her neck then asks Ross: “You want to come at us?” As Good maneuvers the car—either to flee or to run the agent over, depending on which narrative you believe—Ross fires three times. Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was later pronounced dead at a local hospital.

The fatal shooting of Renee Good by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer Jonathan Ross has rekindled a debate about the use of force in law enforcement. Or perhaps debate is too strong a word—rather, the incident has again polarized the nation, confirming us in our existing beliefs.

The Babylon Bee put it best: “Video of the incident has definitively proven whatever you already wanted to believe about the incident.”

Even though we see what we want to see in that video, it is worth pushing back on one notion that has emerged: that Ross was justified in his decision to use lethal force against Good because of an incident last year where he was dragged by a vehicle.

That incident occurred in Bloomington, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. According to court records, Ross and other ICE agents had pulled over a man named Roberto Carlos Muñoz, who had been convicted of sexual abuse in Minnesota. Muñoz refused to lower the driver’s side window when Ross asked him to, and Ross then unholstered his Taser and broke the window in an attempt to unlock the door. Muñoz accelerated, dragging Ross for nearly 100 yards. Ross later needed 33 stitches between his forearm and hand, and Muñoz was eventually arrested and convicted in December of assaulting a federal officer with a dangerous or deadly weapon, resulting in injury.

Welcome to the center of the universe. Of course, I mean Minneapolis—or more expansively, Minnesota.

It has felt like that, once again, ever since Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross fatally shot Renee Nicole Good last Wednesday morning. The news and reactions to it immediately went global. None of the videos have changed many minds. Protests that broke out often invoked George Floyd, also killed in Minneapolis, just blocks away.

Just two days before Good was shot, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, beset by a burgeoning fraud scandal, announced that he would no longer seek a third term. Not so long ago, Walz was seen as vice presidential, at least to the Democratic Party.

After the shooting, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey said ICE should “get the fuck out” of Minneapolis. Walz had mobilized the National Guard but did not put them into operation. It was a head-scratcher. Would the National Guard be used to stem public unrest, fueled by the governor’s most passionate supporters? It seemed even less likely that he would point the National Guard at ICE.

In a building in downtown Kyiv hit by yet another Russian barrage on Friday, a group of teen volunteers ferried supplies from the courtyard to board up windows and patch walls destroyed by a drone attack. A dental clinic on the first floor was hastily trying to clear debris and patch holes before it became too cold to reopen. Like half of Kyiv, the building had no heat even as temperatures dropped below 14 degrees Fahrenheit. In the parking lot, a Mini Cooper stood scorched and windowless.

Russian air strikes tend to intensify after productive summits between Ukraine and its foreign partners. As its missiles fell on Ukraine, Moscow sent signals both to Ukrainian and international audiences. For Ukrainians, the Friday attack on Kyiv, with 242 drones and 36 missiles that killed four and injured 25 others, was just the latest effort at intimidation that Ukrainians have come to expect from Moscow. For the rest of the world, the attack, which included a strike by a nuclear-capable missile right by Ukraine’s border with Poland, was a reminder of the Kremlin’s ability to threaten NATO’s borders with weapons that Western air defenses struggle to intercept.

From the viewpoint of Ukraine’s allies, the biggest shadow that hangs over the Ukraine war is the threat of escalation to nuclear weapons. The Oreshnik hypersonic missile that Russia launched into Western Ukraine’s Lviv region—only its second use in the war—was not armed with a nuclear warhead, but the message that it could be in the future was unmistakable. President Joe Biden consistently slow-walked weapons to Kyiv for fear of nuclear escalation, according to former administration officials. Now, with Ukraine-Russia negotiations deadlocked and U.S. sanctions on Russia tightening, Moscow is resorting to blunt warnings. Years of successful nuclear saber-rattling now seem to invite more of it.

Ever since the mass demonstrations began in Iran two weeks ago, President Donald Trump has offered more than just moral support. He has promised to attack the regime if it started killing protesters. It’s now time for Trump to make good on his promise.

On January 8, Iran’s regime shut down the internet and has used the occasion to turn the streets of its cities into abattoirs. According to Iran International, a London-based news outlet, an estimated 2,000 protesters have been slain in the past three days by the regime’s security forces. Precise figures are nearly impossible to obtain because of the digital blackout. But Iran International has obtained videos from hospitals that show mounting corpses from the shooting of citizens in the streets.

The good news is that Trump’s advisers are briefing him on military and cyber options to respond. The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that Trump will meet Tuesday with senior administration officials to discuss possible actions against Iran. The bad news is that the situation in Iran is getting dire and it’s unclear how much longer Iran’s people can be expected to march in the streets now that the Basij militia, Revolutionary Guard Corps, and regular army apparently have orders to use lethal force against them.

A week after the spectacular raid that captured Nicolás Maduro, little else has changed in Caracas and the action is in Washington.

In Caracas, the regime remains fully in charge. While there are concessions—some real, some merely rhetorical—for the Americans, none of them compromise the plenary power of the gang that has ruled under Chávez and Maduro. The ministers of defense and interior, both indicted drug traffickers, remain in place. Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as interim president by her brother Jorge, who heads the National Assembly. Chavista gangs are still used to prevent or punish demonstrations. As of Saturday, just 16 of the country’s 800 political prisoners had been released.

In other words, the regime is functioning internally exactly as it would have had Maduro been removed by a heart attack, and it is making the smallest concessions to Washington that it can.

Happily for the gang running the country, the American demands thus far revolve around oil and foreign interference rather than an opening in the political system. The gringos want control of the oil, but may accept the “Chevron Model” for that sector. Chevron now runs its own operations in Venezuela with limited regime interference and pays the regime in oil to cover taxes and fees. The regime sells that oil on the black market (due to U.S. sanctions) for the money it needs to keep the economy afloat and stay in power.

A few years ago, touring Venezuela’s oil belt, I saw ruins. Outside El Tigre, once Venezuela’s booming oil center, a group of storage tanks stood in a sea of crude because no one had bothered to stop up the leaks. Thieves would break into oil field installations and strip the copper wire from electrical components or the engines that drove the oil pumps, in order to sell it for scrap. Hyperinflation and devaluation had made the currency and once substantial oil worker salaries worthless. Company vehicles were broken down and employees had to hire taxis to get to far-flung worksites.

For Venezuela’s oil fields, 2018 and the years just after were rock-bottom, and not helped by Nicolás Maduro’s putting a know-nothing general in charge of PDVSA, the state oil company. Last week I spoke by phone with oil workers in the area, and they told me that conditions have improved—albeit from a very low level, and they remain far from optimal. PDVSA has resumed investing in the area since the pandemic, as China has provided an outlet for sanctions-evading oil shipments.

Workers told me that they drive into the field in new Toyota Hilux pickup trucks. National Guard patrols make rounds of the oil fields to keep out thieves and offer protection to the workers. Salaries, now tied to the dollar, have recuperated some of their value, although many, if not most, workers do odd jobs or have outside employment to make ends meet. Production in some parts of the zone had increased to double or triple what it was in 2018, according to the workers I spoke with, though the total Venezuela is shipping is still less than a third of its 1990s high.

In the aftermath of the U.S. military operation in Caracas that led to the capture of Nicolás Maduro, Venezuelans abroad openly celebrated the fall of a dictator who had cast a shadow over their country for more than a decade. But inside Venezuela, the response was starkly different. Public celebration was swiftly outlawed, movement restricted, and fear reasserted. The Free Press spoke with one Venezuelan, who requested anonymity due to the risk of reprisal, about what life looks like in the country right now—and what, despite it all, he hopes will come next. —Tanya Lukyanova

Last Saturday, in the early hours, I woke up to the sound of unseen helicopters and large explosions. It was alarming but not surprising. We were expecting something like this to happen eventually. We just didn’t know when it would come.

When Venezuelans got the news about the operation, many of us were excited about the prospect of a Venezuela without Nicolás Maduro. But we are a people who have been through many cycles of political unrest, and the first instinct for many is to prepare for the worst.

On January 3, most supermarkets were already closed. A majority of people were still enjoying the Christmas break, which in a normal year runs until the second week of January. The few stores that were open were packed with people panic-buying essentials, afraid of what might come next.

As it became clear that Maduro was in U.S. custody, some did attempt to celebrate. But as soon as the first few started going out, the authorities cracked down on them using powers given by the state of emergency that was declared on January 3.

Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a poem or paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, Ruth Wisse reflects on “Good Night, World,” a 1938 poem by American Yiddish poet Jacob Glatstein, which stunned readers by urging Jews to turn away from a hostile world.

In 1914, Jewish teenager Jacob Glatstein immigrated from his native Poland to New York. There, he joined a thriving community of Yiddish poets and co-founded a literary magazine, In Zikh, a journal devoted to “introspectivism,” to filtering poetry through the prism of the self. This was the type of expression available only in America, where national and international political problems became temporarily less urgent for the immigrants fleeing them.

But by the 1930s, the dual threats of Adolf Hitler in Germany and Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union were reaching fever pitch. This period, which Winston Churchill described as “The Gathering Storm,” was even more ominous for Jews. When pogroms erupted in his native Poland, Glatstein published a poem, “Good Night, World,” dated April 1938 and here translated by Marie Syrkin. Its opening was startlingly aggressive.