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In the early hours of Saturday, January 3, a man living on the outskirts of Caracas heard explosions. “I had never heard a bomb go off, never in my life,” he said, asking not to be identified by name for safety reasons. “There is no way that you could mistake a bomb for a firework… it’s horrible.”
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The target of the explosions was a cluster of antennas on a hill about a mile from his house, which caught fire. The following day, he found that Movistar, his cellphone provider, was down.
He wasn’t worried—he had multiple backups: an eSIM from another mobile provider, fiber-optic internet that continued to work after the explosions, and two Starlink receivers—one registered in Colombia, the other in Argentina—which connect to satellites operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. “You’re always over-prepared here,” he says.
Starlink’s ability to provide connectivity in conflict zones has turned Elon Musk into a geopolitical force. That night, after news broke of the U.S. capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, he saw an email from Starlink giving him a month of free credit for the service. “In support of the people of Venezuela,” wrote Elon Musk on X, in reference to the company’s announcement that it would provide “free broadband service to the people of Venezuela through February 3.”
The internet was a way to understand what was happening. “I thought it was a domestic coup. I didn’t think it was the U.S.,” the man, who is a lawyer, says. It wasn’t until his daughter, who lives abroad, told him to check X that he realized what was going on.
Starlink doesn’t officially provide service or directly sell receivers in Venezuela—it is one of the only Latin American countries that remains dark on Starlink’s service map, with no information about when official service might begin.
But that hasn’t stopped Venezuelans from accessing the service for a reliable connection to the internet in remote regions and as a way to…
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