Key Highlights
- While this was not the only period of transition the country would experience (since the process that began in 1958 consolidated a more open and enduring political regime), the transition of 1936 was longer and more complex, resembling the one Venezuelans are now experiencing after the capture of Nicolás Maduro on 3 January 2026. Coromoto Escalona, a 35-year-old woman, was preparing her baby’s feeding bottle when she heard some strange noises in the house.
- It was two o’clock in the morning.
- She wondered whether the fridge had broken down, since it sometimes made strange noises when it was damaged.
- Her eldest daughter, who was scrolling on WhatsApp, shouted from her room: “Mum, they’re bombing us.” The two of them stopped what they were doing, grabbed the essentials – the feeding bottle, water and some food – and ran to an underground room in their house, an old colonial mansion in La Pastora, a working-class neighbourhood in central Caracas. Coromoto’s testimony is one of many you hear in Caracas these days, a week after the US military attack on the Venezuelan capital which concluded with the capture of Maduro.
- The event, other Caracas residents recount, felt like a repeat of what they experienced on 4 February 1992, when the city was also bombed – not by the US, but by Hugo Chávez’s military officers, who had risen up against the existing democratic system.
