The mother of a Venezuelan soldier who was killed when U.S. forces swept into Caracas earlier this month to capture the country’s deposed president, Nicolas Maduro, has revealed the chilling final words he spoke to her.
“I love you. It has begun,” Saul Pereira Martinez, 18, said on the phone call with his mother, Natividad Martinez, 38, at around 2 a.m. on January 3 as fire and billowing smoke from U.S. air strikes lit up the night sky over the capital city.
He repeated that he loved her and instructed her to look after his two brothers, aged two and nine, before hanging up, she told CBS News, and that was the last she heard from him.
Saul Martinez, a military academy student who had only completed his initial training with the Honor Guard in December, had just finished his shift on guard duty at Fort Tiuna – where Maduro was quartered that night – when “Operation Absolute Resolve” commenced. Martinez was killed during the mission.
His story exposes the human cost of President Donald Trump’s intervention, which he claimed had been achieved without casualties but which, in fact, resulted in the deaths of at least 83 people, including 47 Venezuelan soldiers and 32 Cuban security guards, according to Venezuela’s defense ministry.
Visiting her son’s grave at the General Cemetery of the South on Sunday in the company of her husband – Saul’s stepfather – and the deceased’s grieving girlfriend, Natividad Martinez told CBS: “You can’t come to my country and kill people like that. Because [they said] ‘it was a clean operation.’ It wasn’t clean. Do you know how many people died?”
The stepfather, who declined to be named because he works as a police officer and government security official, said his wife had heard the explosions over Caracas that night and screamed in terror, worrying for her son’s safety, all too aware of his likely proximity to Maduro.
“I told her to stay calm, we don’t know what’s going on,” he said.
“The president didn’t always stay in the same place,” the stepfather added, explaining that Maduro’s whereabouts were a closely guarded secret at all times and that only an insider could have tipped off U.S. intelligence as to his location on that particular night.
“[The death of] my son was a collateral effect,” he said.
Natividad Martinez said that her son had joined the military along with a childhood friend, who was himself wounded in the leg at La Carlota air base during the Trump administration’s operation.
She added that joining the armed forces had instilled Saul with discipline, and instead of “partying, going here and there, doing nothing at home,” he had changed his trajectory and dedicated himself to studying, even cleaning their house when home on leave.
Hours after the attack, she said she arrived at Fort Tiuna with her customary food package for Saul but found no sign of him. Subsequently demanding answers from his battalion when news of fatalities began to come to light, she recalled: “They had to tell me.”
Saul Pereira Martinez was posthumously promoted in honor of his service and now lies in a cement tomb, where, CBS reports, his name is spelled out in yellow, blue, and white flower petals.
“Those who died are also human beings,” Natividad Martinez told the network. “They are all Venezuelans. On one side or the other, they are all human beings; they all have people who mourn them.”
Expressing pride in her son’s memory, she said, “He died for his country. Regardless of what they say, to me, my son was a patriot, and that’s what matters to me.”
Maduro was extracted from the country along with his wife, Cilia Flores, and taken to New York City to answer narco-terrorism charges. He duly pleaded not guilty in a Manhattan court and insisted he remained Venezuela’s rightful leader.
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