As I waited​ for José in the only bodega within hours of the desert, a boy arrived on a pink bicycle. The cashier asked whether he was Venezuelan or Colombian. After more questioning, and a long silence, he realised that the boy, who looked about seven and was covered in powder from the salt plains, didn’t understand Spanish but rather spoke one of the area’s several indigenous languages. Nervously, the boy handed over a few items and then a credit card, which was declined – something the cashier tried, and failed, to communicate. A confused silence followed, before the rest of us pitched in to pay the bill. As the boy left, I noticed his shoes: they were traditional alpargatas, or espadrilles, woven from colourful twine but with ‘Nike’ embroidered on the side.

José was coming to collect me from further up the Guajira peninsula, which projects into the Caribbean sea close to Aruba and Curaçao, east of Caracas and the state of La Guaira, where last month’s earthquakes struck. It is mostly Colombian territory, with a strip of Venezuelan land on its eastern side. The area is reserved for the Wayuu, the largest Indigenous group in both countries. It was also the site of the first US attack on Venezuela last year – a drone strike, which Trump announced on 26 December. He got the date of the attack wrong by almost a week and didn’t mention that it took place in an Indigenous reserve, which only added to the confusion surrounding the incident.

José arrived in a truck accompanied by his young son, Manuelito, who couldn’t be older than ten and quickly came up with a nickname for me: ‘Temu Bad Bunny!’ he shouted. We drove north past rows of derelict single-storey houses, newly painted with graffiti: ‘TRUMP NAZI’, ‘ALWAYS LOYAL, NEVER GRINGOS’, ‘NOBODY’S COLONY’. Caracas, where I live, is covered in similar declarations. I asked José what he knew about the attack in December. He avoided the question and instead gestured out the window. ‘The houses are in such poor condition,’ he said, ‘because gangs destroy them after chasing out the inhabitants, to ensure they won’t return.’

The drone attack wasn’t much discussed in the media, so I knew little about what had happened or its effect on the local community. I tried my question again when we stopped to fix a problem with the truck. José relented. He told me that the drone had hit a Wayuu hut at Poolosü, on the coast, at 7.40 p.m. on 18 December. No one had been killed, but the strike had left a radius of destruction thirty metres wide. Trump claimed it had destroyed a port facility used for drug trafficking, but although many in La Guajira are eager to provide testimony against the cocaine trade, which has ravaged the region, the consensus was that the hut had been abandoned for at least a year.

As we stood by the truck, the boy on the pink bike cycled past, joining a group of friends further up the road. They were dancing in gaita style to electric reggaeton. Some were wearing Nike alpargatas, others Fila or Adidas. José had a Diesel pair. I wondered where they were sold. After the airstrike, José continued, fighters from the National Liberation Army (ELN) fortified the area. In recent years the ELN, a communist rebel movement founded in Colombia in the 1960s, has taken control of some remote parts of Venezuela.

I wanted to learn about the different oppressive forces at work in La Guajira – the gangs, corrupt police, militias and, more recently, the CIA – and the problems they pose. José said that in Wayuu culture, conflicts are traditionally mediated through palabreros, ‘men of words’, and suggested we talk to other members of the community. Luis, a retired schoolteacher, served us coffee beneath an enormous mango tree in his small garden. He told us that he spent his mornings walking round and round the statue of Simón Bolívar in the concrete plaza a block away. ‘It’s been years since I felt safe enough to leave this neighbourhood,’ he said. ‘So I go round the square instead.’ Violence has become endemic to the area, as rival factions fight for control of the cocaine trade. Just a few years ago, an organised crime group killed 450 people. Pet parrots had learned to imitate the sound of machine gun fire. He had sent his only son to live across the border in Colombia.

Luis was highly critical of the government, but La Guajira is generally seen as one of the last preserves of loyalists. Chávez won the allegiance of people here early on, with his counter-poverty measures, and many have remained loyal to the United Socialist Party, despite Nicolás Maduro’s failings. It’s not surprising: the Indigenous population desperately needed the freedoms promised by Chávez’s Bolivarian revolution. My grandfather recalls that, as recently as the 1950s, wealthy landowners from the nearby city of Maracaibo would employ Wayuu men, paid only in food and shelter, to work on their farms, and killed with impunity those they thought didn’t work hard enough. ‘There is no socialism here,’ Luis said. ‘I think Venezuela is probably the most capitalist country in Latin America, because we have the lowest minimum wage’ (around 30 US cents a month). Most workers are paid close to that rate, supplemented by bonuses that range from $150 to $400, though these aren’t paid during periods of sickness or holiday. It’s an exploitative model, which the government itself adopts for many state employees.

Towards the end of our conversation, Luis and I discussed the US attack on Caracas in January. I described the fear in the city that night. ‘Caracas is a long valley, with steep mountains bordering its edges; the noise of missiles echoing in that chasm must have driven you all mad,’ he said. ‘But for us, here in La Guajira, nothing is more important than controlling crime. I’ll vote for anyone who will do something about that.’ As we drove away from his house, a white truck overtook us, a group of armed men in the back. Three people on a motorbike followed: a driver, a young man and an older woman, who was supporting the young man’s head. Her hand was bright red with his blood.

We stopped for water at a house belonging to one of José’s friends. I talked to Vicente, a man in his mid-twenties who worked as a weaver, something José said was controversial. Weaving is the chief craft among the Wayuu but this sort of work is usually done by women and gender roles are strictly enforced here. Vicente was twisting some neon green twine as he spoke. ‘Being Indigenous and growing up on the reservation radicalises you,’ he said. ‘I’ve been aligned with the regime most of my life, but eventually you realise it’s all rhetoric – yet another way of oppressing the proletariat. I’m not interested in politics any more; no one represents us.’ The reactionary politics of the exiled opposition leader, María Corina Machado, have divided the Indigenous community. Her proposals for mass privatisation, support for the 2002 coup attempt against Chávez and repeated calls for the US and Israel to invade Venezuela have led some to despair and abandon politics altogether. Others have doubled their support for Maduro’s successor, Delcy Rodríguez.

José took me to meet Julieta, a woman whose family had been caught up in the wave of repression that followed Maduro’s abduction. As we arrived at her house, a one-storey concrete building near the coast, I saw a young girl in a white pinafore turn and run away. Inside, José introduced me to Julieta. He told me that because of the shape of the peninsula and the local currents, cargo lost at sea often washes up on these beaches. When the US attacks boats in the Caribbean, intelligence agents come here to look for cocaine. ‘That’s what happened on 23 January,’ Julieta said.

That day, a number of masked men had arrived in the village, some in four-wheel drives emblazoned with DAE (Division of Special Affairs) and PNB (Bolivarian National Police) insignia, others in unmarked vehicles. All of them were holding guns; Julieta gestured to her torso to indicate their length. Four months earlier, after one of Trump’s first attacks on a boat supposedly carrying drugs, similar men had come to the house and taken her niece’s husband away for questioning. He worked as a fisherman and, because he had been out on the water that day, they thought he must know the location of the cargo. Since then, Julieta told me, her five-year-old daughter runs away whenever a car arrives. Fishermen are usually freed in exchange for information, but her niece’s husband insisted he knew nothing and is still being held.

Julieta’s patio had no trees or shelter, so we sat in the hot sun. Her mother lay on a daybed, facing away from us. ‘My mother says it’s my fault,’ Julieta told me. ‘I’m the one who suggested protesting.’ The agents who arrived in Julieta’s village on 23 January began arresting Wayuu men who had been out fishing that day. Some of the villagers attempted to intervene. Julieta and her niece, still distraught at her husband’s detention, tried to block the road out of the village by putting Julieta’s motorbike across it. The agents responded by driving their vehicles directly into the women, killing her niece and leaving Julieta with severe burns. ‘I remember the moment she stopped breathing,’ Julieta said. She and her niece had been government loyalists, even organising rallies in support of Chávez and Maduro. ‘None of this would have happened if it weren’t for Trump’s attacks in the Caribbean,’ she added. ‘And I don’t think they would have hit my niece and me if it weren’t for their rage after Maduro’s capture. They weren’t like that six months ago.’

I asked José and Julieta whether some Wayuu men are involved in drug trafficking. Julieta replied that, since the Wayuu can cross the border freely, the cocaine industry is keen to use them as couriers. Some are coerced into accepting; others are driven by poverty. Since Maduro’s abduction, Trump’s rhetoric has shifted away from so-called narcoterrorism and towards obtaining control of resources. One of his Truth Social posts shows a doctored Wikipedia page with Trump as ‘acting president of Venezuela’. Labelling drug couriers ‘terrorists’ makes it easier to dismiss their murders and serves as a pretext for intervention. The term functions in much the same way ‘savage’ did in the era of colonial expansion. During the drive home, José told me that most people have abandoned the practice of consulting palabreros; disputes are instead mediated by the ELN. The militia acts like a police force and is treated as such by the community. After all, it is more likely to deliver justice than any government body, in part because it is still motivated largely by ideology rather than self-interest.

The day before I left La Guajira, as a delayed celebration for my birthday, José organised a trip to Playa Castilletes, the peninsula’s most beautiful beach. We picked up groceries, gasoline and passengers and drove north, crossing a long row of strange geometric buildings. Maracaibo, the nearest city, is known for its Brutalist buildings, constructed after the discovery of oil reserves in the early 20th century. There are some buildings in the same style in La Guajira, too, but in the desert setting they look ancient, closer to Native American idioms than postwar European functionalism. After a while, we passed Poolosü – the site of the first drone strike. José, who is well known in the peninsula for founding a local news website, is the only journalist who has been allowed to visit. He told me that the ELN wanted someone to make sense of what had happened. As a condition of his visit, however, he had to look like a member of the group, wearing a balaclava and holding an (unloaded) AK-47. He saw burned trees and fragments of shrapnel bearing the word ‘Warning’. ‘We thought it was a lightning strike,’ one witness told him. Another said he had been temporarily deafened by the blast. Locals have apparently stopped fishing or going near the coast.

José was at home writing up his story when three armoured vehicles arrived. Agents from the General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence emerged, wearing combat gear and waving assault rifles. They told him in no uncertain terms not to write about what he’d seen. At first he followed orders, but eventually he decided to try to get the story published by an international outlet. After three attempts fell through, BBC Mundo published a shortened version on 2 January, more than two weeks after the attack and hours before Maduro was seized. The timing meant that the story quickly disappeared from view (a familiar experience for anyone writing about Indigenous Venezuelans).

One of José’s friends, another journalist, sat beside me on the drive to Playa Castilletes. He had a tattoo of Chávez’s signature on his wrist, recognisable because it is one of the motifs painted by government-sponsored graffiti artists in Caracas. When I asked him about it, he said that he was planning to get it removed. Many young Venezuelans are disillusioned. I was raised a party loyalist; a picture of Chávez still hangs in the living room of my family home in London, put there by my father, who continues to believe in the Bolivarian dream, and hated by my mother, who does not. We left Caracas in the violent aftermath of the failed coup of 2002 and my father took a job at the UK’s only daily socialist newspaper, for which he was paid a pittance. I was brought up to believe in revolution’s liberatory potential. I still do, which is why I am critical of the current government. ‘Viva la revolución’ is a call to change, not – as Maduro and Rodríguez would have it – an empty slogan.

When I moved back to Venezuela in my early twenties, it wasn’t hard to assess the political landscape, the masked men with rifles, the attitude of ‘to doubt is treason’ from government officials, the daily fear of an overwhelmed populace. The economic crisis is severe and nearly eight million people – more than a quarter of the population – have left in the past decade alone. But the attacks on Venezuela’s sovereignty threaten to make an already desperate situation worse. It is worth noting that the only country in Latin America with a diaspora greater than its resident citizens is the only official US colony, Puerto Rico.

I wanted to visit La Guajira to learn about the airstrike but also to see genuine resistance. Under attack from the US, who better to turn to than a people who have preserved their languages and traditions despite centuries of colonialism? I didn’t find a template for defiance, but my trip did make clear its urgency. The landscape, overrun by plastic waste because there is no infrastructure for its removal; the extreme poverty that has become the norm in the region, with no social welfare, no running water anywhere and frequent power cuts – all of this shows why Venezuela must not become a colony, even if some in the diaspora have urged the US to intervene.

We finally arrived at Playa Castilletes. The beach tops a U-shaped cove at the tip of La Guajira. On one side is Venezuela, on the other Colombia. The white sand glared in the midday sun, the waves glittered and the desert stretched out endlessly behind us. I took off my new Nike alpargatas – a birthday present to myself – and Manuelito and I raced into the water. ‘This is much nicer than the beaches near Caracas,’ I told him, as we swam back and forth between the two countries. ‘Happy birthday, Temu Bad Bunny!’ he said. ‘Don’t let anyone say that Venezuela is an ugly place!’