The Overlooked Deaths of the Attack on Venezuela

"It was the second night of the year, and Rosa González was watching her favorite television show, "La Ruleta de la Suerte." Onscreen, contestants raced to solve word puzzles, spinning the wheel of fortune and following clues about Christmas carols. After a while, Rosa told her niece Griselda that she was going to bed, but she quickly came back, unable to rest without knowing the end. At eighty years old, mind games helped her stay sharp."

"Rosa had spent most of her life in Catia La Mar, a small port city on Venezuela's central coast. Her house by the water had been where family and friends gathered to celebrate baptisms and weddings. During the pandemic, Rosa's memory had started to fade, so Griselda and her siblings had brought her to an apartment that they shared nearby. Griselda, a preschool teacher, slept in one room, her brothers Wilman and Wilfredo in another."

"Griselda stayed up later, scrolling on her phone. "Two minutes after I finally lay down, I felt a missile coming toward us," she told me. "I don't know how, I just sensed it." She rushed into the hallway and watched as the projectile, which had pierced through the bathroom wall, landed in Rosa and Jimmy's room, erupting in flames. The blast sent Griselda flying into the living room,"

Rosa González, eighty, lived with relatives in a shared apartment in Catia La Mar after her memory began to fade. The family included niece Griselda, her nineteen-year-old son Jimmy, and Griselda's brothers. On a quiet evening while watching television, a missile pierced the apartment, entering through a bathroom wall and landing in Rosa and Jimmy's room, causing a fire. The blast threw Griselda into the living room amid rubble and left household members covered in dust and traumatized. The attack shattered the family's sense of safety and compounded vulnerabilities that emerged during the pandemic.

Read at The New Yorker