Rats and Bananas: Western Media, Violence, and Freedom in Venezuela

On the morning of 26 March 2026, two crowds gathered outside of the federal courthouse in Manhattan where President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores sat awaiting their trial, set to begin at 11AM that day. On one side was a group of protestors gathered behind a large yellow banner that read “Free President Maduro and Cilia Flores.” On the other, separated by a metal barrier, was a smaller group, largely of Venezuelans cheering on the prosecution. Nearly the entire press presence was located on the anti-Maduro side: around the time the trial was set to begin and during the two hours leading up to it, there was roughly one journalist for every member of the opposition from outlets such as CNN, AP News, The Guardian, and BBC.

“I wonder how many of those people [supporting Maduro] are actually invested in this issue in the long-term,” The Guardian’s reporter told me after I casually asked who she was reporting for and if she had talked to both sides. When I mentioned that I had returned from 3.5 months in Venezuela the day before, and that I was in Venezuela during the 3 January bombing of Caracas, she promptly told me that she had to “circulate some more” and scurried off to talk to more members of the anti-Maduro side of the protest.

The Rat, Banana, and Right-Wing Violence 

Prominently featured in the center of the anti-Maduro protest was an effigy of the president dressed in orange prison clothes, with a chain around his hands and his neck; red, bulging, rat-like eyes; and oversized hands with pointed fingers that appeared almost rodent-like. Stuffed into the effigy’s handcuffs was a banana, not unlike the racist imagery that US President Donald Trump recently used to degrade former President and First Lady Barack and Michelle Obama. The latter was met by outrage, yet the ape-ish prop adorning Maduro went largely unnoticed—or unreported—by the press.

This sort of symbolism speaks volumes: what Maduro, and Chávez before him, represent to the Venezuelan elite is a process through which the poor and working class stood up to demand not only access to basic human rights such as literacy and health care, but also dignity and a say in the direction of their country. To them, Maduro, a former bus driver, is a banana-holding ape, a less developed species that should have stayed in the barrio from which he came.

“I’m from Venezuela! They [are] not from Venezuela!” shouted one man holding the shackled Maduro and banana. Others hit the effigy in the eyes, strangled its neck, and hung it from a tree as others cheered and laughed. The zealous violence inflicted upon this effigy is not merely symbolic: it is a defining feature of Venezuela’s right wing. In the guarimbas, violent right-wing protests that swept the country in 2004, 2014, and 2017 and were championed by opposition leader María Corina Machado and others, Chavistas—or anyone assumed to be a Chavista if they were dark enough or looked poor enough—were attacked, beheaded, stabbed, shot, and even burned alive. (It is worth noting that Corina Machado’s role leading this violence is among the reasons she was not eligible to run for president). Accountability for such crimes—or even common crimes, if perpetrated by the right wing—are portrayed by the ‘international community’ as authoritarian repression.

William Camacaro, a pro-Maduro Venezuelan activist protesting in front of the courthouse on Thursday, told me about the historic impunity of the elite in Venezuela, and how the justice system had changed over the 26 years of the revolution. Before the revolution, he said, “suspending constitutional rights was a sport… People would be murdered in the street without anyone being held to account”—even when the state killed thousands of Venezuelans in the Caracazo uprising, including three of his cousins. Since Chávez’s election in 1998, he continued, “there have been gross excesses on the part of the opposition. There have been takeovers, arson attacks, people have been burned alive. They have done everything, and yet constitutional guarantees have not been suspended.”

Social Debt

The revolution marked a significant change not only in the long-held impunity of the elite, but in paying the ‘social debt’ owed to the Venezuelan population at large and democratizing society, allowing historically disenfranchised sectors of the population to be the drivers in creating a new, democratic society. Whereas the Venezuelan elite had previously been the primary beneficiaries of the wealth from the country’s oil reserves (the largest in the world), after the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998, 75 percent of national spending was directed towards social investment for the population at large. A series of social missions focused on lifting the population out of poverty: Mission Robinson taught three million people how to read and write and achieved 100 percent literacy in the country while Mission Sucre graduated over 600,000 professionals from universities; Mission Vivienda granted over 5 million homes to families across the country; Mission Barrio Adentro built health clinics across the country; and Mission Milagro restored the eyesight of some 300,000 Venezuelans while providing eye surgery to 1 million. Dozens of missions focused on various aspects of well-being that had long been out of reach for the majority of Venezuelans. Beyond the services they provided, missions were also a way for working-class people to take a leading role in building the new vision for their country and the organizational structure to sustain it, such as by sending Venezuelans to Cuba to learn from the country’s hugely successful literacy campaign and lead the campaign back home.

Yet these programs have suffered tremendously since the imposition of US sanctions, when Venezuela experienced a “deep deterioration in health, nutrition, and food security indicators… [that reflected] the largest economic collapse outside of wartime since 1950,” as Venezuelan economist and opposition supporter Francisco Rodríguez reported. By March 2020, former UN Special Rapporteur Alfred de Zayas estimated that 100,000 Venezuelans had died as a result of the sanctions. Outside of the courthouse on 26 March, this hardship was a common point of discussion—but the factors causing it were not. Nor was there any mention of what life was like for the majority before 1998.

That day—as is often the case in discussions about Venezuela within the US—the theme that centered “the Venezuelan perspective” came up again and again. The opposition supporters claimed to speak for all Venezuelans, a narrative that the press eagerly amplified. Yet, in addition to seeming only to interview Venezuelans on one side of the barrier in front of the courthouse, press coverage left out the voices of Venezuelans in Venezuela. So, what do Venezuelans in Venezuela think? What would they have told the reporters?

Freedom 

Over the last three and a half months, I asked Venezuelans across Venezuela what they thought of the diaspora in the United States’s claims that they represent the voice of their country in celebrating freedom after the fall of a dictatorship, as many in front of the courthouse expressed. “If this is a dictatorship”, Andreína Álvarez, a young afro-Venezuelan woman, told me the day of the communal consult on 8 March, “I don’t know what you call the actual dictatorships in the world, which the oppressors and, well, the empire, don’t [say anything about]”. “The dictatorship that those… stateless people talk about, who aren’t even here in our country fighting the fight—it’s a complete fabrication”, Jenifer Lamus, a mother and leader of the Maizal Commune, told me. ”Those of us who are here are working and we’re pouring our heart and soul into every organizational process.”

One taxi driver in Caracas who never voted for Chávez or Maduro, and supported neither, told me with horror what it was like to be woken up at 2 AM with hundreds of helicopters descending upon his city. Anaís Marquez, a mother of three and member of the 5 de Marzo Commune, recounted that ‘When [the bombing] started, I was with my children, and they didn’t know what to do. They asked me, “mom, what’s going on?”. My youngest daughter is seven years old, and she thought it was a tsunami or an earthquake. I hugged them and I told them to be still, to stay calm, and to get dressed to find out what was going on.’

Was it worth it, I asked her? Did she feel that she had been freed, as many Venezuelans abroad were claiming? Her voice shook with anger. “We’re not a repressed people; we are a free and sovereign people, and we are fighting… for our president Nicolás Maduro and for our [first] combatant Cilia Flores… And now, more than ever, [for] Trump to get out of Venezuela.”

What was clear to me was that Venezuelans in Venezuela—both those who support and oppose the revolution and President Maduro—were overwhelmingly horrified by the actions of the United States and want the right to determine their own path, and to sort through their own internal contradictions, without foreign intervention. “Bullets don’t care if you’re a Chavista” was a phrase I heard over and over again.

Venezuelans across the political spectrum each had a story of the collective trauma imposed by the 3 January bombing and kidnapping, from tending to their children who could no longer sleep without being woken by nightmares to the common experience of jumping up at each sound, unsure if it the backfiring of a motorcycle was just that or the dropping of another missile. Despite years of foreign intervention—from illegal US sanctions and unliteral coercive measures to an information war and US funding of opposition groups—support for US actions within the country is a marginal phenomenon blown out of proportion by Western media.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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