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“Several helicopters were dropping bombs, and the windows shattered from the shockwaves,” Caracas resident Paola Rosal told Truthout, describing her experience of the U.S. attack on Venezuela on January 3.

Rosal, a mother of three who lives in Ciudad Tiuna, a massive government-built housing project located in the Fuerte Tiuna military complex in Caracas, said she was alone getting ready to take a shower when “the power went out, and the first bomb fell near my building.” Feeling a sense of terror and panic, Rosal describes how she fled and, for a while, was alone in a carpark. Her mother, who was in her own apartment with her daughters, witnessed a bomb drop in front of her apartment which shattered all of the windows.

“When we went outside to take cover, the next bomb fell,” Rosal told Truthout. “People didn’t know where to go for shelter. It was so awful that my daughter doesn’t want to go back, and like her, many other people feel the same way.” Rosal, a married 40-year-old owner of a bodega, has long voted for the leaders of the Bolivarian revolution: first President Hugo Chávez (1999-2013), and then President Nicolás Maduro, who won his first election by a narrow margin in early 2013.

Rosal said she has concrete criticisms of Maduro’s government: For example, she is concerned that the government’s decision to distribute weapons to citizens in preparation for a full-scale U.S. invasion could result in pro-government civilian armed groups (colectivos) gaining more power, and that worries her.

But Rosal was vehement in her outrage and fury in response to the U.S. attack.

“It was a massacre against defenseless people,” Rosal told Truthout, expressing that she is still frightened, angry and uncertain about the future and adding that the U.S. military attack “damaged the infrastructure, the buildings where we live, and killed civilians,” including “the elderly.” Full data has yet to come out on the ages of all the people killed in the strike, but The New York Times confirms that 80-year-old Rosa González was among the dead.

“The way the helicopters attacked indiscriminately is unacceptable,” Rosal added, calling Trump a “violator of all rights,” and decrying how Trump “enters our country as if nothing is wrong, and no one says a word to him.”

At around 2 am on January 3, the bombs ordered by U.S. President Donald Trump commenced falling on Venezuela. The bombs hit the country’s largest military complex, Fuerte Tiuna, whose perimeter contains the civilian Ciudad Tiuna housing project, which is far larger than the military facilities and which is home to tens of thousands of people. The capital’s electricity was also cut off for several hours in sectors of the south, center, and west of Caracas.

Near the capital, the Generalissimo Francisco de Miranda Air Base (La Carlota) was hit, as was the Port of La Guaira — the primary maritime........

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