US air strikes are the latest blow to Venezuela’s decimated science infrastructure

One of Venezuela’s leading scientific research institutes was damaged during the US military action in the country earlier this month to capture Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. The timeline for repairing the damage at the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research (IVIC) is uncertain, observers say, especially given the country’s ongoing economic and political crisis. Also hard to predict is how the damage from the air strikes might have an impact on the country’s research sector, which was already battered by shortages.According to Venezuelan minister for science and technology Gabriela Jiménez Ramírez, five of the institute’s scientific research centers were damaged: the centers of mathematics, chemistry, physics, ecology, and nuclear technology.Of these, she said, in a statement published on the social media site Telegram, that the center of mathematics—which housed servers and other essential equipment—bore the brunt of the US assault and ended up being “completely destroyed” in the strike. Jiménez Ramírez did not specify how much damage the other four centers sustained. But Pedro José Silva Mujica, who heads the institute’s center of physics, tells C&EN that several laboratories in this center were also severely affected. The other three centers experienced only minor damage from the blast, he says.The US Department of Defense declined to comment on why IVIC was targeted during the Jan. 3 air strikes, which were supposed to dismantle and disable the air defense systems in and around Caracas. Researchers familiar with IVIC tell C&EN that they suspect that the actual targets were communication antennas located on the