“To say this is about the US intervention is not true. We are celebrating that Maduro is gone,” she said. “It’s like we are celebrating, but at the same time, no … there’s hope, but we understand that this isn’t our last chapter because we don’t know what will happen next.”
Oliveros, who arrived in Clyde, south-east of Melbourne, in 2016 from Puerto Ordaz in the country’s southwest, has many family members in Caracas. Her uncle was sleeping in an apartment next to an airport that was bombed by the US when they succeeded in their operation to capture Maduro on Saturday.
Venezuelan-Australians gather in a Melbourne restaurant to celebrate the ousting of Nicolas Maduro.Credit: Wayne Taylor
Oliveros says Trump’s promises of rebuilding the country offer more hope than previously existed.
“People saying Trump is not doing this for Venezuelans, we know he is doing this for petroleum, it’s an opportunity for him, but for me, I see that opportunity as liberation, for me to return,” she said.
Snap protests have been organised in four Australian capital cities by the Palestinian Action Group on Sunday night, with the pamphlet titled “Hands off Venezuela. Stop the bombings.”
One of the protests at Sydney’s Town Hall is scheduled to start at 6pm, the same time and location where another unauthorised gathering, a Venezuelan celebration, is set to take place. NSW Police said unauthorised protesters would be issued move-on orders.
Caracas-born Australian journalist Claudianna Blanco said that while news about Maduro’s capture had brought hope to many Venezuelans in Australia, the protest’s message might not be well-received by the Venezuelan community.
“From the community perspective, the fact that there are groups saying ‘hands off Venezuela’ – [the community] feel that they’re not being heard or seen, that their perspectives are not being valued to the same level as the perspective of those who oppose US intervention,” Blanco said.
“The rejection of the idea of a US intervention, or the US breaking the international agreement-based order, [Venezuelans] see that as more geopolitical. They feel that those groups may be considering those views, the geopolitics of it is more important than the suffering and the voices of the Venezuelans that haven’t been heard for so long and in the context of 20-plus years of erosion of democracy to then dictatorship.”
“In that context, when your voice is consistently silenced and ignored by those in power, from a citizen’s perspective, it is kind of repeating that trauma of your desires for democracy are not important, your desires for change don’t matter.”
