When Valerie Stramwasser woke up on Saturday, Jan. 3, she glanced at her phone and saw hundreds of WhatsApp messages. 

“I’m like, ‘Oh my god, something happened.’ I first thought that it was something in the family, and then I opened up and I hear, ‘We’re free.’ We’re free. It happened,” Stramwasser told Jewish Insider on Thursday. “Literally tears of joy.” 

Stramwasser, 37, lives in Hollywood, Fla., with her husband and two children, but she grew up in Caracas, Venezuela. She was forced to flee the country as a teenager after a failed kidnapping attempt against her. She hasn’t been back in years, not even for the funerals of her grandparents. 

The tears of joy began when she saw the news that the U.S. military had captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and flown them to New York to stand trial on narco-terrorism charges. Stramwasser and her husband, who is also Venezuelan, couldn’t wait to tell their 8- and 11-year-old children the news.

“As a mom, you tell the stories to your kids, and they know how much I miss my country. But I’ve never been able to go back,” Stramwasser recounted. Then they drove to her brother’s house to celebrate and watch President Donald Trump discuss the operation. “This is one of the most important things that, as a Venezuelan, you can hear in the past 30 years.”

“Growing up there, it was a community of about 28,000 Jews that were living there. It was a vibrant community, a very successful and respected community,” said Paul Kruss, a city commissioner in Aventura, Fla., who also owns a popular local bagel shop. “Now there’s maybe 4,500 that live there, which should tell you all you need to know about the kind of brain drain that they had. It wasn’t only the Jewish community that fled.” 

An economic crisis that began under the country’s socialist president, Hugo Chávez, who was elected in 1999, grew exponentially worse when Maduro came to power in 2013 after Chávez’s death. The resulting poverty, starvation and crime have led to a massive refugee crisis of roughly 8 million people who have left the South American country. Amid the global diaspora of Venezuelans, many are cheering the removal of Maduro, whom they view as responsible for deteriorating standards of living, repression and political dysfunction plaguing the country. 

Stramwasser is one of hundreds of thousands of those Venezuelans who now call Florida home, including several thousand Venezuelan Jews who have developed outposts of their once-strong Caracas community centers in Miami. 

“Growing up there, it was a community of about 28,000 Jews that were living there. It was a vibrant community, a very successful and respected community,” said Paul Kruss, a city commissioner in Aventura, Fla., who also owns a popular local bagel shop. His mother, who was from Warsaw, Poland, moved to Caracas after surviving the Holocaust. “Now there’s maybe 4,500 that live there, which should tell you all you need to know about the kind of brain drain that they had. It wasn’t only the Jewish community that fled.” 

The surprise operation has largely garnered support from Republicans, while Democrats are more skeptical, including many who are outspoken critics of Maduro, igniting a debate in Congress about presidential war powers. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said Trump should not have acted without congressional approval.

“Maduro is a horrible, horrible person, but you don’t treat lawlessness with other lawlessness, and that’s what’s happened here,” Schumer said over the weekend. 

In Florida, even among Democrats, the reaction was more celebratory. 

“The capture of the brutal, illegitimate ruler of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, who oppressed Venezuela’s people is welcome news for my friends and neighbors who fled his violent, lawless, and disastrous rule,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) said in a statement. “However, cutting off the head of a snake is fruitless if it just regrows. Venezuelans deserve the promise of democracy and the rule of law, not a state of endless violence and spiraling disorder.”

The question of what comes next for Venezuela remains unanswered. The country’s interim president is Delcy Rodríguez, the vice president and oil minister, who was close to Maduro. 

“The good thing about what just happened is that sometimes bad people in the world need a message to be sent. If they know that they can do bad things, and no one will come for them, well, they will just keep doing bad things,” said Brian Fincheltub. “ We want to go back, so we are very happy with this.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio laid out a three-step process for Washington’s plans in Venezuela: stabilizing the country, followed by allowing American companies access to the Venezuelan market and, finally, a transition of power. But the U.S. has not laid out plans for a new political regime in Venezuela. 

The Venezuelans cheering on the ouster of Maduro are content to wait a bit longer.

“She’s been part of the problem, no question,” Kruss said of Rodríguez. “I’m hopeful that the United States will be guiding them and letting the Venezuelan people decide who they want to be their leader, and I think this is just a transition period.”

Brian Fincheltub grew up in the Caracas Jewish community, which he called “one of the best in the world.” He was a social activist working in the slums of Caracas, but due to his ties to the opposition party, he fled the country in 2018 to avoid being jailed. Venezuela’s National Assembly named opposition leader Juan Guaidó acting president of Venezuela in 2019, setting up a showdown with Maduro, who never ceded power. Fincheltub moved to Washington to serve as Venezuela’s consul general under Guaidó’s opposition rule. Now Fincheltub works at the World Bank.

Fincheltub supports Trump’s actions, which he said is not about politics — that he would have supported the move had President Joe Biden done the same thing.

“The good thing about what just happened is that sometimes bad people in the world need a message to be sent. If they know that they can do bad things, and no one will come for them, well, they will just keep doing bad things,” said Fincheltub, 38. “ We want to go back, so we are very happy with this.”

Some Venezuelan Jews see similarities in the response of far-left activists to Trump’s capture of Maduro and their criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza.

“People who are not Venezuelan, who did not grow up under Chávez or Maduro, who did not lose their country, their safety, their future, feel entitled to explain Venezuela to us,” said Valerie Stramwasser, who has said Florida will remain her home even if Venezuela elects a new government. “The same goes for people who are not Jewish, who have never lived the history, the wars, the constant existential threat, feel entitled to explain the Israel-Palestine conflict to us.”

“The same ones that were attacking Israel and the Jewish people are the same ones, or many of them, that are attacking President Trump, or that are attacking what happened in Venezuela,” Fincheltub said. “This is not about President Trump or President Biden. This is about the liberation of Venezuela.”

Stramwasser posted a video making a similar point on Instagram, where her posts usually get a couple thousand views. This one has been viewed more than 500,000 times.

“People who are not Venezuelan, who did not grow up under Chávez or Maduro, who did not lose their country, their safety, their future, feel entitled to explain Venezuela to us,” said Stramwasser, who has said Florida will remain her home even if Venezuela elects a new government. “The same goes for people who are not Jewish, who have never lived the history, the wars, the constant existential threat, feel entitled to explain the Israel-Palestine conflict to us.”

History, she added, will be on her side.

“History is very clear about this,” Stramwasser said in the video. “Those who confuse aggressors with victims don’t end up on the right side of history.”

The U.S.’ capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Saturday is expected to weaken Iran’s terrorism efforts, weapons production and economic activity in Latin America, experts say.

With Vice President Delcy Rodriguez taking power — and the Trump administration expressing willingness to work with her — it remains unclear whether Maduro’s regime will largely remain intact with American supervision or if the government will ultimately be replaced by the democratic opposition, led by Nobel Peace Prize recipient Maria Corina Machado, or someone else.  

While Venezuela’s future remains unclear, Israel’s leaders applauded what they saw as a pro-American turn, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressing support for the Trump administration’s “determined decision and action of the United States to restore freedom and justice to that part of the world.”

“Across Latin America right now, we are seeing a transformation,” Netanyahu said. “Several countries are returning to the American axis and, not surprisingly, to a connection with the State of Israel. We welcome this.”

Emmanuele Ottolenghi, senior research fellow at the Center for Research on Terror Financing, told Jewish Insider that “if the regime remains in place [under Washington’s supervision], there will have to be adjustments in its regional posture and foreign policy. That means, of course, the role that nefarious foreign actors such as China, Russia, Cuba and Iran played in Venezuela will change.”

Danny Citrinowicz, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, told JI that “the Iranians turned Venezuela into a strategic hub, and now that has disappeared.”

“Iran built a very deep operative and strategic relationship with [Maduro’s predecessor Hugo] Chavez, and it uses Venezuela … as its jumping-off point for influence in Latin America,” he said.

Ottolenghi said that Maduro’s government allowed Iran to operate freely in Venezuela, which Tehran took advantage of in a variety of arenas, including propaganda, terrorism and arms manufacturing.

Tehran established a drone factory in Venezuela, in which Venezuelans produced Iranian drones, Ottolenghi said.

The recently foiled terrorist plot to assassinate Israel’s ambassador to Mexico was planned by Iranian operatives in Caracas, Ottolenghi added.

“The Iranians made Caracas the hub of all their propaganda and soft power operations in the region, including their Spanish-language 24/7 news network,” Ottolenghi said. “They established a permanent presence in Caracas for their missionary network, under the umbrella of the sanctioned Al-Mustafa International University.”

After former Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi visited Caracas in 2023, scientific and academic exchanges between the countries grew, and Iran was granted greater access to Venezuela’s economy.

The economic relationship with Venezuela has been important for Iran, Ottolenghi said.

“Venezuela assisted Iran in evading sanctions prior to the JCPOA [2015 Iranian nuclear deal], but since 2019-2020, when the Venezuelan economy sharply deteriorated, Iran gained the upper hand in the relationship,” he said. “Maduro essentially joined the ‘axis of resistance.’”

The country with the largest proven oil reserves in the world needed to buy refined gasoline from Iran because of “the dramatic deterioration in quality in the oil industry in Venezuela after years of cronyism, brain drain, corruption and mismanagement purging the national oil company,” Ottolenghi explained. “The Iranians stepped in to stop Venezuela from collapsing for lack of refined [oil] products, providing technicians, technology, refined gasoline shipped from Iran in exchange for gold. That gave [Iran] even more leverage inside Venezuela, including the ability to operate one of the refineries for their own needs.” 

As for Hezbollah, Citrinowicz noted that the Lebanese terrorist organization is “very important to [Iran], in that it connects the Shi’ite communities in Latin America.” 

Ottolenghi said that Hezbollah “benefitted from both the protection of the regime and the large expat community of Lebanese immigrants and their descendants … who are sympathetic to the movement and enabled them to become involved in money laundering and other financial activities … including crypto and reportedly illegal gold mining in the southeast of the country.” 

Though Hezbollah is an Iranian proxy, it has independent sources of income, including the Latin American drug trade.

Maduro’s fall “will make it hard [for Hezbollah] to keep up those ties,” Citrinowicz said.

Ottolenghi said that “traditionally, [Hezbollah] has played mainly the role of intermediary for drug cartels, providing services in logistics, distribution and financial channels to move the money in complex translational transactions.”

However, he noted that, as opposed to Tehran, Hezbollah’s operations in Latin America have not been primarily based in Venezuela, and that until recently, the terrorist group’s senior official in Latin America was based in São Paolo, Brazil. 

“Insofar as Maduro’s removal may curb Iran’s influence and its proxies in Venezuela, it does not address necessarily what Hezbollah is doing in other countries,” Ottolenghi said.

Maduro’s fall is one of “a series of blows” to Iran in recent years, Citrinowicz said, with the governments of Bolivia, Chile and Argentina turning more pro-American, and the same is likely to happen in Colombia in its upcoming presidential election.

“Iran likes working with socialist regimes that counter the West,” Citrinowicz said. “They can’t leave Latin America entirely. … They will need to work with what’s left and emphasize Cuba and Nicaragua.” 

Citrinowicz said that Iran will likely pivot its investments of time and money to Africa.