CARACAS, Venezuela — I woke up sometime after 2:30 a.m. Standing in front of me was my brother-in-law — who had shaken me awake as I dozed on a pull-out sofa. It was dark. Through the windows I could make out the beach: rows of huts with dried palm-leaf roofs, part of the beach club where we were staying, a members-only compound on the coast, more than an hour from Caracas, with apartments and houses mostly owned by Caraqueños who retreat there on weekends and holidays.

“Check your phone,” he said. “I have many missed calls from my dad. And a message saying they’re bombing La Carlota and Fuerte Tiuna.” He was referring to the military airport and the sprawling base embedded in the Caracas metropolitan area.

“I lost signal,” he added. “The Wi-Fi’s down too.”

I bolted upright and grabbed my phone. No signal. We stared at each other — confused, frozen, in shock.

“Is it a coup?” I asked.

And then it clicked: Maybe this isn’t a coup.

Maybe it’s the Americans.

My sister woke up soon after, alarmed by our voices. Once we explained what was going on, she handed us her phone — an overseas e-SIM. It worked. We opened social media and saw what had seemed impossible. Explosions near the Caribbean coast by a neighboring beach club. Orange fireballs lighting up the hills of Caracas and a line of American helicopters cutting across the city’s sky. Car caravans fleeing Fuerte Tiuna. Campers up on El Ávila — the massive mountain that looms over Caracas — filming a panoramic view of the metropolis: endless twinkling lights, punctuated by sporadic blasts of firepower here and there.

Just hours earlier, under a bright full moon, the beach had been packed. Families loudly chatting, young people playing beach volleyball, children running around and people arguing over whether the Americans would finally do something after five months of escalation. The clatter and chaos of chairs, whisky bottles and rum. Now, it looked as if war had descended upon us.

Then the Wi-Fi came back. I grabbed my phone and, like a storm breaking, hundreds of messages flooded in at once. Private messages. Group chats. “Did you hear it?,” many asked. “Are you guys okay?,” others wanted to know. There were dozens of videos. It felt as if all of Caracas had jumped awake at the same time, shaken by the blast.

“This is the worst thing I’ve ever heard,” one friend wrote. “Looks like they hit El Volcán,” another said, referring to the green-and-yellow hills to the southeast, where we usually go hiking on weekends, crowned by communications towers — including one operated by my phone carrier, which explains why I lost signal.

My legs started shaking as I watched the videos. I called my mom in Caracas. “I heard the explosion,” she said, rather unfazed. “I’m okay.” By then, the bombing had already stopped. But many in the city — anxious, alert — kept listening to the rumble of helicopters hidden in the darkness of the night sky.

The three of us sat together, endlessly scrolling social media — rumors, leaks, actual news, anonymous informants — trying to piece together what had even happened. Then my sister got a call: It was the mother of one of my nephews’ schoolmates, also staying at the club. “Go to the mini-market,” she said. “It’s open. We should all buy food.” It was already 4 a.m., but after dozens of calls and messages, it felt like only minutes had passed.

My brother-in-law and I decided to head down. Outside, still under the cover of night, men and women were filling plastic Minalba bottles with drinking water from communal taps. We started walking along a long path lined with palm trees and tropical vegetation. Dozens of apartments had their lights on. Through windows, you could see families gathered on sofas, trying to tune into CNN en Español or some YouTube livestream from Miami.

In front of the mini-market, a long — very long — line was already forming. We walked up to the front of the line to see how fast it was moving. They were letting people in by turns, rationing categories of products. “Charge your phones,” some people said. No one really seemed to understand what was happening. The initial fear had given way to a calmer, collective confusion.

The line dragged on for hours. Rumors kept bubbling up. “This minister is dead,” people said on Twitter. “This other one too — a very good source told me so,” others said in the line. None of it was true. They were alive.

The sky began to turn a bright pink. An hour away, in Caracas where it was calm and eerily silent after the bombs, my friends reported the sky there had also turned a bright pink — but there, a dense layer of smog hung between office towers and the massive, multicolored mountain that crowns the city. No one had slept, here or there. My phone kept buzzing.

Then, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social. He announced that Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores, the country’s authoritarian leader and his wife, had been “captured and flown out of the Country.” I mentioned it to the people in the line, but many didn’t seem to believe it. “People here are shouting and cheering out loud,” a friend who lives in Chacao, a staunch opposition district in Caracas, told me. “Same here,” said another friend vacationing in Margarita, the country’s largest Caribbean island.

And then the crowd gathered in the queue — this sea of people coiling and gossiping outside the mini-market — started shouting and celebrating too. A young woman in pajamas, with teary happy eyes, walked up and down the line announcing, “Trump just said they took Maduro.” A man pulled out a bottle of prosecco and began passing it around, pouring it into small cardboard coffee cups as people toasted. A woman called her relatives abroad, part of Venezuela’s 8 million-strong diaspora, to announce they would soon meet again in Venezuela. But even in the middle of the euphoria, another question began to surface, whispered and then spoken aloud:

“Okay, but then who’s in charge now?”

By 8 a.m., the line had barely moved. With the people we’d met queuing, we started taking turns holding our spots. There wasn’t much left anyway: lots of water, cartons of eggs, endless snacks and chips.

We walked back to the apartment for a while, sipping cups of coffee we took from our friends’ house under the songs of great kiskadees and parrots darting through dense trees and every kind of palm.

It felt like the culmination of a series of strange vignettes in a mestizo country prone to superstition and mystic beliefs. Months earlier, the Catholic Church had canonized Venezuela’s first saints. “From today on, everything changes,” a priest had said during Mass. “Venezuela becomes holy land.” Then, the first Andean condor chick was born in Venezuela in more than 20 years. “The spell is broken,” people joked. That very night, before the bombing, a lunar halo unfurled across the sky. “It’s good luck,” I said at the club, beneath broad tropical leaves in the garden, after a midnight swim in the sea.