How Venezuelans Outmaneuvered Censorship to Uncover the Truth of the January 3 U.S. Attack
Before dawn on Saturday, January 3, the thunder of falling bombs announced the start of a U.S. military strike on Venezuela, jolting awake sleeping residents of Caracas’ La Carlota neighborhood. The community sits adjacent to a local airbase, one of the core targets of Operation Absolute Resolve.
When the floors, walls, and windows of her second-floor apartment began shaking, Marina G.’s first instinct was that an earthquake had struck. Her cat bolted and hid for hours, while neighbors’ dogs barked nonstop. But the persistent low, strange thrum of engines—she would later learn it came from low-flying military jets circling the city—paired with the sight of cadets in t-shirts and shorts fleeing Army headquarters, made clear this was no natural disaster.
Marina could not turn to the mainstream, easily accessible news outlets that people in most other countries take for granted. She did not even bother turning on her television or radio for updates on the coordinated attacks that had just hit 11 military sites across Caracas and three other Venezuelan states. While bombs were falling, state-run Venezolana de Televisión (VTV) continued airing a report on the culture minister’s visit to Russia. Her cell phone still had service, though, and dozens of WhatsApp messages flooded her screen within minutes: “They’re bombing Caracas!”
In those chaotic, terrifying early hours, no team of independent reporters was able to venture out to document what unfolded on the streets. After years of government-led harassment, censorship, and imprisonment of journalists, newsrooms were hollowed out, resources gutted, and basic safety for reporters was non-existent. No organization could keep the public informed as the crisis unfolded in real time.
The fear that haunts Venezuelan journalists is shared by ordinary people across the country: fear of arbitrary detention, wrongful imprisonment, torture, and extortion. This constant threat has pushed Venezuelans to adopt long-held digital safety habits just to navigate daily life. They restrict sensitive conversations, store compromising content in hidden folders, set messages to auto-delete, and leave their phones at home whenever possible. If they must carry a device, they delete every photo, sticker, and meme that could even remotely be labeled subversive before leaving the house. Yet this culture of collective caution has also allowed Venezuelans to stay informed and resist authoritarian control.
This working information network is built almost entirely by ordinary citizens. Within minutes of the January 3 bombings, the first user-recorded videos began circulating. People captured blasts from their windows, balconies, even nearby beaches where some were still celebrating the New Year. Hikers camping on the summit of Cerro Ávila in Waraira Repano National Park even managed to capture wide panoramic shots of explosions blooming over the Caracas Valley. It was not long before international outlets confirmed the on-the-ground footage.
Connectivity is even more fragile in Venezuela’s rural interior. In San Rafael de Mucuchíes, a quiet Andean village in Mérida state sitting 10,300 feet above sea level, a group of hikers struggled to follow the fast-moving news through spotty, intermittent internet. They got their first updates via phone calls through providers Movistar (Telefónica) and Digitel, not through WhatsApp. They also pushed past the regional information gap thanks to a portable Starlink satellite internet antenna one traveler had brought along. SpaceX made the service free for Venezuelans during the crisis.
Three hours after the first strikes, at 5:14 a.m., Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López posted a video confirming Venezuela had been targeted by “the most criminal military aggression by the United States government.” He was the first official government spokesperson to address the attack publicly.
Rumors that President Nicolás Maduro had been captured spread just as fast as citizen videos across social media. At 5:21 a.m., former U.S. President Donald Trump confirmed on his Truth Social platform—which is blocked within Venezuela—that Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores had been captured and moved out of the country.
Venezuela’s independent media outlets quickly formed a collaborative alliance to break through the information blackout around the U.S. operation that ousted Maduro, launching their effort within hours of the January 3 bombings. For nearly 11 hours straight on YouTube, a group of Venezuelan journalists—some living in exile, some still inside the country, many hiding their identities for safety—hosted a joint live broadcast providing minute-by-minute coverage of an event unprecedented in modern Venezuelan history. This virtual newsroom was the first source to tell Venezuelans about Trump’s announcement that Maduro and his wife had been captured and transferred to the U.S. to stand trial.
Still, many Venezuelans lost all connectivity that morning, and only learned of the historic attacks through word of mouth, or much later once they reconnected to the internet. Parts of Caracas, especially areas near bombing sites like Fuerte Tiuna—the sprawling military complex where Maduro lived and where he was captured by U.S. Delta Force—suffered hours-long blackouts for both power and internet.
The information gap around the intervention lasted for days after January 3. Acting President Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s former vice president, ordered all radio stations in the country to play only solemn music, mourning the Venezuelans killed in the attack. To date, the new U.S.-backed government has not released the full final count of dead and wounded, nor the identities of the victims. Former Interior and Justice Minister Diosdado Cabello has said more than 100 people were killed, while the Venezuelan army and militia have published 24 obituaries for uniformed personnel on their separate Instagram accounts.
Surviving Crises and Decades of Censorship
The Venezuelan people’s drive to uncover the truth during the information blackout that accompanied the recent U.S. military operation is the product of more than 20 years of navigating repeated crises and chaos under the Chavista regime. Over two decades, they have learned how to outmaneuver censorship, misinformation, and fear, building a system to both report news and stay informed under authoritarian rule.
To understand how Venezuelans adapted to the steady erosion of press and speech freedom, we have to go back to 2014, the year that reshaped Venezuelan journalism. That year saw a wave of mass protests against the Maduro regime, and dozens of legacy print outlets were sold to business groups loyal to the government, which immediately flipped their editorial lines to match the regime’s agenda. Many journalists left these outlets to launch independent digital platforms, building a new ecosystem of independent media. These outlets often have smaller reach and tighter budgets than the legacy outlets they replaced, but they remain committed to practicing journalism in an environment defined by growing censorship, threats, disinformation, and repression.
2014 also saw Twitter (now X) emerge as a powerful alternative news source, at a time when more than 400 media outlets had shut down across Venezuela over two decades. According to the 2023 annual report from press freedom group Espacio Público, 285 of those shuttered outlets were radio stations, making up 71% of all closed media outlets in the country.
But internet restrictions quickly undermined this digital expansion. The latest data from Venezuela’s National Telecommunications Commission (Conatel), released in 2022, puts the country’s internet penetration rate at just 55%. Digital rights group VE sin Filtro (Venezuela Unfiltered) reports that what was once a relatively competitive internet market has declined to become one of the worst in the world.
Worse, internet shutdowns and crackdowns are intentional state policy. A report from TOP10VPN ranks Venezuela as the second-most affected country in the world by government-mandated internet censorship, second only to Russia. These shutdowns have cost the Venezuelan economy more than $1.91 billion, and have cut off access for more than 17.9 million people for a total of more than 5,900 hours.
Censorship and digital shutdowns are paired with a host of other repressive tactics, all well-documented by the Press and Society Institute of Venezuela (IPYS Venezuela). These include arbitrary detentions (journalists arrested without warrants, often held incommunicado and denied due process), forced displacement (threats and intimidation that push journalists to flee their homes and even go into exile to avoid retaliation), and judicial harassment (the arbitrary use of laws to criminalize journalistic work).
Looking at this history, it is clear that Chavista-era Venezuela became a testing ground for authoritarian social control through the domination of communications.
As public debate and media consumption shifted online over the past decade, the Maduro government built out a system to control and monitor the digital space. The regime forced domestic internet providers to block independent media outlets as part of its broader campaign of digital repression. This crackdown intensified around the July 28, 2024 presidential election, when Maduro refused to recognize results that clearly favored opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia. An opposition coalition has presented evidence showing González won 67% of the vote to Maduro’s 30%, a figure aligned with analyses from the Associated Press and other international media and monitoring groups. The Maduro government’s official results claimed he won with 51% of the vote to González’s 44%.
According to VE sin Filtro, at least 61 independent digital media outlets remain blocked in Venezuela, affecting 90 separate domains. That number does not include temporary restrictions on major platforms like Signal, YouTube, TikTok, and Telegram, which are often put in place during political events like elections or mass protests.
Today, most Venezuelans rely on virtual private networks (VPNs) to access X. After the 2024 electoral fraud crisis, Maduro tightened communications controls, one of which was removing X from all domestic internet services, claiming the platform “incited hatred, fascism, civil war, death, and conflict among Venezuelans.”
In August 2024, Maduro also urged his supporters to delete WhatsApp from their devices, claiming it posed a threat to military personnel, police, and pro-Chavista community leaders. “Say no to WhatsApp,” the now-removed leader declared at the time, also calling on users to abandon other platforms including Meta’s Instagram and TikTok, which he labeled the main tools “amplifying hatred and fascism.” Maduro encouraged his supporters to switch to Russian-owned Telegram.
But once again, Venezuelans found digital tools to bypass the new restrictions. In 2024, VPN provider Proton AG began offering its services for free to all Venezuelans, allowing people to bypass government blocks on social media, at least most of the time.
Social Control, Reimposed After Maduro’s Fall
Three days after Maduro’s ouster, the streets of Caracas looked outwardly normal, even as social media—especially WhatsApp—overflowed with a mix of joy, grief, and uncertainty over the future. But the illusion of relatively open online debate vanished on January 5, when the new National Assembly was sworn in at the Legislative Palace in central Caracas’ historic district. That same day, Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as acting president, and 14 journalists covering the official inauguration ceremony were arrested, with one deported shortly after.
A decree with the force of law was issued the same day as the January 3 U.S. bombings, declaring a state of external emergency. Among other restrictions, the decree suspended the right to protest and assemble in public, placed all public services and the oil industry under military control, and ordered the arrest of anyone who promotes or supports “the armed attack by the United States against the Republic.”
The decree went into effect immediately as a show of state force. Just hours after the U.S. operation, four men—two in Mérida state and two in Carabobo—were arrested on allegations of supporting the attack. On January 12, 15 teenagers celebrating Carnival in a neighborhood of Barcelona, Anzoátegui state, were detained and charged with “incitement of hatred, treason, and criminal association.” The minors were released hours later.
After the violence that followed the fraudulent July 28, 2024 election results, Venezuelans already practiced self-censorship in their online activity, out of fear of physical retaliation. State security agents and pro-government colectivos (armed vigilante groups that operate with official permission) have been given free rein to stop pedestrians and drivers at random to check the content on their phones, even though the practice is technically illegal under Venezuelan law.
It remains unclear whether this widespread culture of surveillance will continue in post-Maduro Venezuela, during the democratic transition the U.S. has promised. For now, the interim president and other new government officials have reactivated their X accounts, but the platform remains difficult for the general public to access. While 18 journalists were released from prison in a single day after Maduro’s ouster, colectivos and police continue to detain people after searching their cell phones—sometimes even when no “problematic” content is found. For now, life inside Venezuela’s digital cage has only grown more complicated.
This article was originally published by WIRED en Español, translated from Spanish by John Newton.
