Last Saturday, the world’s eyes turned toward Venezuela as the United States conducted an unexpected military action against the South American nation. Acting unilaterally, the Trump administration ordered air strikes against the Venezuelan mainland near the capital city of Caracas. The New York Times reports that a senior Venezuelan official claims at least 80 people, including civilians and members of both Venezuelan and Cuban security forces, were killed by the American strikes. Among the casualties were civilians living in an apartment building in the city of Catia la Mar, where a strike collapsed a wall of the three-story building.
The U.S. succeeded in its goal to arrest – or abduct – the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, who has been indicted on U.S. domestic charges of drug trafficking and possession of machine guns. The Trump administration has, on the one hand, claimed that the arrest of Maduro was simply a “law enforcement action,” not a military campaign or a declaration of war, and thus did not require approval by Congress, or even their notification. On the other hand, having captured Maduro, Trump now claims that the U.S. will run Venezuela, especially to the benefit of U.S. oil companies, suggesting an American occupation, though Secretary of State Marco Rubio has walked back that stance. It currently appears that the American position is “do what we tell you or we’ll bomb you again.”
The Venezuelan flag [alexandersr, Pixabay]
The strikes and abduction were plainly illegal under U.S. and international law, violating the sovereignty of other countries and the war authorization powers held by Congress. Nor is there even the fig leaf of a claim to “restore democracy” in Venezuela. While Maduro himself has been captured, the state apparatus remains in control of his party, and Trump immediately dismissed the idea that María Corina Machado or Edmundo González Urrutia, the opposition leaders most international observers believe actually won the 2024 Venezuelan elections, should be brought into power.
In short, in exchange for swapping Maduro for his own vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, Trump and his administration has made a mockery of law, shown the utter hollowness of the so-called “rules-based international order,” and, most importantly, murdered 80 people, many of them civilians, none of them aware that they were at war with a superpower willing to bomb them in their beds without warning at 2:00 AM.
It’s unclear how things will unfold from here, and I am no expert on Venezuela or the region; I am only an American furious at how those who rule in my name treat the lives of people in the Global South as though they were beneath notice or respect. As the story moves forward, I hope that my fellow readers in America and other privileged nations will remember that Venezuela is a real place, filled with real people, and that none of them deserved to die in their beds for American adventures.
The Wild Hunt does have the good fortune that one of our staff writers, Alan U. Dalul, is Venezuelan. He has experienced life under the rule of Maduro and has written about leaving Venezuela to make a new life in the United States. His work has taught me many things about life in Venezuela that I would never have encountered otherwise, and has often challenged my preconceptions and made me aware of my unconscious biases regarding Latin America.
Unfortunately, for reasons that go beyond the power of anyone at The Wild Hunt to resolve, Alan is unable to write new material for us for the time being. (It is not a health issue or anything like that – just boring, frustrating legal complications.) I deeply regret not being able to turn to him for insights on the current situation, and for the lack of his perspective as a Venezuelan Witch in the global conversation.
However, as the story develops, I hope that you, reader of our publication, will take some time to go back and read some of Alan’s work about his country, and especially to read it with the intention of making that place as real in your mind as your own country. None of our human lives is less worthwhile or more easily replaced because of the happenstance of our birthplaces. Venezuela, and the Venezuelan people, are real, not just the backdrop for geopolitical games.
Merida, Venezuela [Wikimedia Commons CC 3.0, George Miquilena]
Much of Alan’s early work for The Wild Hunt covers Venezuelan folklore, including columns on El Silbón, La Llorona, and Ánima Sola, among others. Each of these columns offers a fascinating glimpse into the mythic culture of Venezuela and is filled with knowledge that most Western Pagans are unlikely to encounter otherwise.
Alan’s work has also chronicled his own complicated relationship with Venezuela. His first column for us, back in 2018, declared that “Witchcraft is Everywhere” in his homeland; not long afterwards, he wrote about the protective magic he used to guard himself against assaults as he walked the streets of his country.
Alan eventually left Venezuela to emigrate to the United States, a process he wrote about at length in our pages. He wrote about packing the suitcase that would take him away from Venezuela and his family there, his first time at a Witches’ market in the U.S., and his status as an immigrant in the U.S. during “National Immigrant Heritage Month” – a time that now seems stunningly far away.
Alan’s catalogue of work in The Wild Hunt is voluminous, and much of it is also available in Spanish; he has written extensively about many things besides Venezuela and its folklore, including his journey as a writer, as a Witch, his experiments with using popular culture in his magic, and his many, many reviews of Pagan, Witch, and other occult books.
But the column that I can’t shake the memory of today is one more about his relationship with his home country, “Healing with the Venezuelan Flag,” which he wrote in 2022, a meditation on the symbols of his homeland and how to reconcile himself to them. I recall that it was not an easy column for me to edit at the time, nor a column that is easy for me to read today. But it expresses clearly the message I hope to leave you with: the reminder that the Venezuelan people deserve to be treated with dignity, with complexity, with humanity.
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