Anxious uncertainty hangs over Venezuelan Americans like Liz Rebecca Alarcón of Doral, Fla., a heavily Venezuelancity outside Miami. Routine conversations at the grocery store or at Ross Dress for Less have been overtaken by questions about whether, when and how President Trump might escalate its use of force against Venezuela.
“What’s going to happen?” friends, neighbors and shopkeepers ask each other, Ms. Alarcón said. “We don’t know what the outcome is going to be or what the strategy is.”
The administration has been ratcheting up its pressure campaign against Venezuela for months, with deadly boat strikes, which a range of experts in laws governing the use of armed force have denounced as illegal, and a significant buildup of U.S. Naval forces in the Caribbean. Recent days have felt like whiplash, Ms. Alarcón and several other Venezuelan Americans said, as military intervention seemed imminent, only to have Mr. Trump say he would be open to talks with his Venezuelan counterpart, Nicolás Maduro.
Yet the many Venezuelans who fled to South Florida over the past two and a half decades — after Hugo Chávez and then Mr. Maduro, his successor, came to power — do not all agree on what should happen. The differences of opinion, complicated by unease over Mr. Trump’s immigration policies, are creating tense divisions among Venezuelans in South Florida, as supporters of U.S. intervention try to drown out critics whom they consider a small minority.
“In theory, we should be united by the same thing, which is liberty for Venezuela,” said Esteban Hernández Ramos, 30, who lives in Fort Lauderdale. “In practice, there’s this division.”
Mr. Hernández left Venezuela when he was 16 and now works for a right-wing media outlet that publishes pro-Trump news in Spanish. He wants the U.S. military to occupy Venezuela for a sustained period, not only to take down Mr. Maduro, who is widely seen as having stolen the country’s 2024 presidential election, but also to dismantle the military leadership that has kept him in power.
Ms. Alarcón, 36, was born in the United States and works as a Democratic political analyst. She wants a peaceful transfer of power from Mr. Maduro to Edmundo González, the diplomat who defeated Mr. Maduro in a presidential election last year by more than 2 to 1, according to the Venezuelan opposition’s vote count. But she said she was cynical that Mr. Trump’s pressure would result in her desired outcome.
Venezuelans’ ties to South Florida date back decades, but their numbers grew significantly during the Chávez era and again after Mr. Maduro came into power. Embraced by Miami’s influential Cuban exiles, who saw them as ideological brethren fleeing a dictatorship, Venezuelan American voters were courted by Republican politicians, who succeeded in persuading many of them to support.
Now, disagreeing with Mr. Trump is seen among many Venezuelan Americans as unpatriotic and disloyal — including some old enough to remember past disastrous U.S. military interventions in Latin America.
“It’s like, if you’re not 1,000 percent with them or you don’t want a military intervention, then you’re a collaborator,” said Luis Fernando Atencio, 32, a co-founder of the Venezuelan-American Caucus, a Miami-based activist group allied with the left-leaning Latino Victory Project. He said he feared military intervention because it could result in Venezuelans’ being injured or killed.
The vast majority of Venezuelans in the United States oppose Mr. Maduro and would like to see him gone, said José Antonio Colina, a former Venezuelan military officer who fled his country for Miami in 2003 after being accused of planting bombs in Caracas. The United States decided not to extradite Mr. Colina, 51, who now runs a group called Politically Persecuted Venezuelans in Exile.
“Since that regime is there by force,” he said of Mr. Maduro, “it has to be taken out by force.”
But some Venezuelan Americans, including Mr. Colina, cannot accept the pressure campaign given the Trump administration’s simultaneous push to end temporary legal status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants. In Doral, business owners and residents have noted that the city feels quieter as Venezuelans get deported, leave voluntarily or stay in their homes out of fear.
“There are at least 660,000 Venezuelans that are being threatened to be sent back to Venezuela under this regime that apparently is about to be attacked by the U.S. military,” Adelys Ferro, another co-founder of the Venezuelan-American Caucus, said at a news conference last month. “How can you reconcile these realities?” she asked.
Ousting Mr. Maduro should take priority over deporting Venezuelans and leaving their fate in Mr. Maduro’s hands, Mr. Colina said. He could accept Mr. Trump’s immigration policies if Mr. Maduro and his allies were no longer in charge, he added.
He and other exiles who have long condemned Mr. Maduro have lately found themselves vilified by other Venezuelans for questioning Mr. Trump. On social media, Mr. Colina said, many try to shut him down.
Such behavior, he said, “is irresponsible and does not take into account the suffering of thousands of Venezuelans.”
César Miguel Rondón, one of Venezuela’s best known radio journalists, who fled the country for Miami eight years ago, has also faced online attacks for voicing skepticism about Mr. Trump’s approach. He has been called a Maduro government collaborator, an attitude he says leaves little room for nuance or middle ground.
Social media has turned into “a sort of firing squad,” Mr. Rondón said in an interview.
“Here, I’ve had to take great care in opining, for reasons very similar to why I had to be careful in Venezuela,” he said. “I had to leave Venezuela precisely for opining and calling out the dictatorship. But here, the intransigence, especially among ourselves, has become something incredible.”
At least some of those who criticize Mr. Rondón and others see any questioning of Mr. Trump’s approach as an implicit questioning of María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last month. She has been a strong supporter of the American pressure campaign.
“It sows many doubts,” Mr. Hernández, the young conservative, said of the opposition to U.S. military intervention. He wondered whether Venezuelans in that camp truly want Mr. Maduro gone, refusing to consider that they are instead grappling with what role, exactly, the United States should play.
“Maybe it’s naïveté. Maybe it’s complicity,” Mr. Hernández said of the skeptics’ hesitation. “One has room to debate, but what more is there to debate?”
Patricia Mazzei is the lead reporter for The Times in Miami, covering Florida and Puerto Rico.
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