The Free Press

On New Year’s Eve Vanessa Sanchez ate 12 grapes, as is customary in Latin America, making a wish for each one. Her first wish was for God to save Venezuela from Nicolás Maduro, the socialist president whose brutal rule drove her to flee the country nine years ago.

When her phone began to buzz on Saturday with news that the U.S. had captured Maduro, she could hardly believe it.

“This is what all Venezuelans wished for,” said Sanchez, who lives in Port Washington, Long Island. “We were waiting 25 years for this.”

Despite her brush with socialism, Sanchez, 32, told me she wasn’t opposed to Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who was sworn in just last week. “He’s young—I feel like he knows what the people need,” she said. Then she saw Mamdani’s post on X criticizing Trump’s capture of the Venezuelan dictator.

It was always a matter of when, not if, the Iranian people would take to the streets again.

Since the regime’s defeat in the 12-day war against Israel and America in June, Iran has been a powder keg, subsumed with unresolved political crises, rising domestic dissent, deepening economic turmoil, and environmental crises ranging from drought to air pollution. The country has also witnessed mass arrests and an execution spree, while authorities have tried to feign a social opening that Iranian women have been using to push back on discriminatory public dress codes.

When unrest finally broke out in late December among Tehran’s traditional merchant, or “bazaar” class, its proximate cause was the sinking rial. Iran’s currency had just hit a record low of 1.43 million against a single U.S. dollar. Inflation was between about 40 and 50 percent—and a staggering 64 to 73 percent for foodstuffs, hitting families and small-business owners particularly hard. Against this backdrop, you might have expected protesters to make explicit economic demands. But rather than seek to change the exchange rate, Iranians poured into the streets to change their regime.

There are many reasons why Venezuelans across the globe celebrated the arrest of authoritarian ruler Nicolás Maduro by U.S. forces early Saturday morning. There’s the disaster that is the Venezuelan economy. There’s last year’s stolen election. And there’s the cruelty with which the Maduro regime crushed dissent.

In the hours after Maduro’s dramatic departure from the country, I spoke with a Venezuelan pro-democracy activist who has firsthand experience with the regime’s viciousness. Nelson Merino was detained, tortured, and forced to flee under Maduro’s regime. He is now living in exile in Spain. Merino described the conditions inside Venezuela’s torture centers, where he was held under flimsy pretexts for months on end, and he shared his thoughts on this sudden, extraordinary turn of events in his homeland.

The testimony that follows has been lightly edited for clarity and length. —Tanya Lukyanova

As told to Tanya Lukyanova.

I was an active participant throughout Venezuela’s 2024 presidential cycle, serving as an electoral coordinator in the July 28 elections and fighting to prevent Maduro from illegally seizing power. On July 30, after he claimed victory, I was detained and charged with four offenses: resisting authority, obstruction of public roads, incitement to hatred, and terrorism.

My stay in the torture center known as Tocorón, in Aragua state, lasted two months, 18 days, and 15 hours.

Inside, I lived through the greatest horror I can imagine. We were tortured. We had no access to clean drinking water and no proper food. Medical care was deficient or delayed, and our rights as citizens were trampled by the regime’s lackeys.

When President George W. Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq in 2003, I was about to graduate college and was two weeks away from going on active duty in the Marines. I listened to Bush’s speech with a mentor of mine, a Marine captain who’d taken a sabbatical to earn his master’s in international affairs. We grew depressed as we listened to the president’s remarks; we thought we had missed the war.

As Bush went on about the stunning achievements of his “coalition of the willing” and the success of his shock and awe campaign, my friend couldn’t take it anymore. He switched off the radio. “Sucks to have missed this,” he said. “But these things never go as planned. Good chance there’ll be an insurgency.”

By all accounts, this weekend’s raid in Venezuela was an unqualified military success. In five hours, the U.S. military captured the dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife while sustaining zero U.S. casualties, thereby decapitating a regime that has preyed on its people for years and driven a once-prosperous nation to the brink of collapse. Those in uniform should be applauded for again proving the U.S. military is second to none in executing these types of complex operations.

In the earliest hours of January 3, a group of U.S. Delta Force operators broke into the heavily fortified presidential compound of Nicolás Maduro, the dictator who has ruled Venezuela since 2013.

Maduro tried to shut the door to a steel safe room, but it was too late. By 4:29 a.m. Caracas time, he and his wife were aboard the USS Iwo Jima bound for New York, where they are set to be arraigned as early as Monday.

“I watched it literally like I was watching a television show,” an exultant President Donald Trump told Fox News over the phone. Later, in a press conference, he compared the operation to “World War II” and to the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities this past June.

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, days after Zohran Mamdani was sworn into office as New York City mayor, Charles Lane revisits George Orwell’s 1937 classic, The Road to Wigan Pier—which he characterizes as a prescient commentary on today’s socialist revival.

Among my prized possessions is a first-edition copy of George Orwell’s nonfiction The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937 by Britain’s Left Book Club. It’s not much to look at. No illustration or artwork adorns its faded orange limp-cloth cover. The spine is split and stained black, as if with coal dust Orwell picked up while he researched the book, in mining regions of industrial northern England.

Still, I treasure this beat-up volume for its searing description of life among the ill-paid, socially marginalized workers upon whose backbreaking labor the entire British economy depended, and for whom Orwell expressed respect, bordering on awe.

“In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal-miners working,” Orwell wrote, after a harrowing visit deep underground. “It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an ‘intellectual’ and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior.”

In a swift and stunning surprise attack early Saturday morning, U.S. forces landed in Venezuela, captured its self-proclaimed president, Nicolás Maduro, and put him and his wife, Cilia Flores, on a ship and then a plane bound for America, where they will face trial for drug trafficking.

Critics are condemning this operation, especially because it lacked approval from Congress. The New York Times editorial board criticized it Saturday morning. New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani is among the many Democrats who have condemned it. He called the operation illegal and an “act of war.”

But what does the law actually say? Here’s the answer. Under current U.S. doctrine and precedent, what President Donald Trump just did in Venezuela is almost certainly legal; in fact, the U.S. did the very same thing in Panama four decades ago, and the courts upheld it after years of litigation and careful consideration. But Trump’s plan to “run” Venezuela for the foreseeable future, declared at a press conference earlier today, is much murkier.

The success and professionalism of the U.S. seizure of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro—with complete secrecy maintained and with no Americans killed—may soon look like the easy part. President Donald Trump’s press conference on Saturday left a confused picture of who will do what next—and who the president thinks should govern Venezuela.

It should be easy. In January 2019, Trump called Maduro an illegitimate ruler, and in 2020 Maduro was indicted. In 2024, Maduro stole another election, declaring himself the winner when the democratic opposition forces won 70 percent of the vote. His regime has produced the worst mass migration crisis in Latin American history (eight million so far); has engaged in drug, gold, and human trafficking; has allied itself with Iran, Cuba, Russia, and China; and has destroyed democracy and prosperity in what was long a rich and free country. Grabbing Maduro and making him face a jury is a great idea.

But now what? Again, the answer should be easy: The United States should be backing Venezuela’s democratic parties. They united last year under María Corina Machado as their candidate for president, and she would have won the election. When Maduro barred her from running, they united under retired career diplomat Edmundo González as a substitute candidate. Though he was almost unknown in Venezuela, he won a huge landslide because Machado backed him, and because he represented a return to democracy. The unity and effectiveness of the opposition last year were remarkable as it fought an election under the worst circumstances—with the danger of arrest, exile, or worse constantly present, with rallies broken up violently, with no access to state media. Its victory is both a tribute to the opposition leadership and a measure of what Venezuelans want.

In the early hours of Saturday morning, Venezuelans awoke to the sound of U.S. helicopters overhead. Per President Donald Trump, the U.S. conducted a “large-scale strike” on facilities in what he has dubbed the “narco state” of Venezuela.

The U.S. has arrested Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Hours after the swift operation, Attorney General Pa…

In the early hours of Saturday morning, Venezuelans awoke to the sound of U.S. helicopters overhead. Per President Donald Trump, the U.S. conducted a “large-scale strike” on facilities in what he has dubbed the “narco state” of Venezuela.

The U.S. has arrested Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Hours after the swift operation, Attorney General Pam Bondi unsealed the U.S. government’s charges against the now-deposed Venezuelan leader: narco-terrorism, conspiracy to import cocaine, drug trafficking, and possession of machine guns and destructive devices.

Then, in a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump said the U.S. would “run” Venezuela “until such time that we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.”

Why did Trump decide to act in Venezuela? Are the administration’s actions legal? What will happen to Maduro when he reaches American soil? And what will come next—both for Venezuela and for U.S. foreign policy?

Join The Free Press today to make sense of this extraordinary news. We’re kicking things off with a 1:30 p.m. ET livestream with The Free Press’s Rafaela Siewert and contributors Niall Ferguson and Elliott Abrams.

Paid subscribers can join the livestream here.

We also have two initial pieces for you on the news. The first, by Free Press staff writer Eli Lake, recaps how Donald Trump took out Venezuela’s strongman—and why. Read Eli’s essential account of what led to this bold move, and what could come next.

The second is from Venezuelan writer Quico Toro. Venezuelans around the world are celebrating, says Quico. But he asks: What will come next for his country? Read his thoughts here:

To go deeper on Venezuela, listen to Bari Weiss’s interview with opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado:

Stay tuned for more from The Free Press on this story in the coming days.