The New Yorker:

To many on the ground, civilian fatalities were simply the cost of ousting Nicolás Maduro.

By Oriana van Praag

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. Rosa slept on a pullout bed in a room with Jimmy, Griselda’s nineteen-year-old son. The constant company seemed to erase all traces of her dementia, Griselda told me. Rosa went everywhere with the family and insisted on helping her as she swept the floors and washed the dishes.

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