On Jan. 3, 2026, Wilmer Jimenez awoke to texts from his mother who was at home in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela. Jimenez, a Junior studying at Northwest Missouri State University, was in the United States preparing for the spring semester.
The texts came in the middle of the night: Caracas, and the surrounding region, were under attack by U.S. military forces; there was widespread confusion.
“I was just scared, I didn’t know what was going on, and my hometown is one the country’s principal ports, about two hours from the capital,” Jimenez said. When it became clear the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, had been captured and brought to the U.S. to stand trial, here were celebrations in Venezuela and abroad.
“Now, we are just wondering what will happen next,” he said.
Jimenez, along Leonardo May and Clement Carrasquero, came from Venezuela to attend high school in the U.S. before matriculating to Northwest and joining the men’s baseball team. The three met in their coach's office before an afternoon practice on Jan. 14 to share their perspective on the headlines coming out of their home country.
All three were in the U.S. when they heard of Maduro’s capture; the president had become widely unpopular during his 13-year presidency, overseeing an economic collapse, rigged elections, and violent protests ahead of the 2018 election.
In removing Maduro, May, a sophomore from Caracas, said, in his view, “the U.S. did a good job. People were happy about it. But right now, the principal point is that we are just waiting.”
Waiting, that is, for the rest of Maduro’s regime to be removed. Since Maduro’s capture, his ally and former Vice President, Delcy Rodríguez, has taken control of the government, and appears to have made an at least temporary peace with the Trump Administration.
Meanwhile, many Venezuelans are hoping María Corina Machado, the principal opposition leader, will come to power.
Clement Carrasquero, a freshman from Maracaibo, explained Venezuelans “want to change the government, and she is the one person…with the greatest willpower to fight the government. The one who faces the government and says, ‘this needs to change.’”
Carrasquero said he hopes Machado, and fellow opposition leader Edmundo González, widely considered the true winner of the country’s 2024 presidential election, will come to power.
“He is the president the people truly voted for, and the person who will bring change,” Carrasquero said.
Offering their views on their country’s unfolding situation, all three spoke of Venezuela’s beauty and wealth of natural resources. In the early 2000s, the country’s oil reserves powered a decade of economic growth. But during Maduro’s rule, those resources diminished until a socioeconomic crisis made it impossible to secure necessities.
In the years of 2014-17, “you couldn’t find food. There was no internet. You couldn’t find water,” May recalled.
“The only way to survive was [if] someone from the family left the country for the U.S., Peru, Colombia – somewhere – and worked really, really hard, to send money back home. For me it was my dad,” May said. “He left in 2017 and came to the U.S.”
All three live in the aftermath of that diaspora. Their greatest hope, they said, is that Americans will understand Venezuelan immigrants in the country today “are not bad people. We are just trying to find something better. Trying to find new opportunities,” May said.
“We hope Venezuela gets better so we have the same opportunities over there that we have here, like it was before,” Jimenez said.
