Transcript
A (0:00)
Hello. Today in Iran, anti government protests are spreading across the country. We hear from those calling for a return of the Shah in Tehran. We're at a street party in Miami among the city's Venezuelan community in the hours after the US seized President Maduro. We're in India's far northeast where we witness a centuries old stone pulling ceremony, albeit with a little help from a modern day digger. And finally, in a warehouse in a suburb of Berlin, factories have been repurposed into creative spaces, but ones being retooled for war. But first, America's nighttime military operation in Venezuela last weekend seemingly caught the whole world off guard as the U.S. army's elite Delta Force unit seized the country's president Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Celia Flores. Venezuelan Officials said around 100 were killed in the assault. The couple were swiftly transported from Caracas to New York, where Mr. Maduro faces allegations of narco terrorism. Appearing in court, the couple pleaded not guilty to all charges against them and Mr. Maduro declared he had been kidnapped. Our correspondent Will Grant reflects on his years reporting on Nicolas Maduro's leadership.
B (1:25)
There was a time when you could simply get Nicolas Maduro on the telephone almost 20 years ago, in late September 2006, I called a number, as arranged, in New York, of all places, and he picked up with a buenas tardes, good afternoon. In his unmistakable baritone. Timber. A day earlier, the Venezuelan president at the time, Hugo Chavez, had delivered one of the most memorable speeches the UN General assembly had ever seen. He called President George W. Bush the devil and said it still smelled of sulphur. At the podium where he was standing, the delegates delighted in it or shifted uncomfortably in their seats, depending on their political leanings. In my telephone interview with the then Venezuelan Foreign Minister, Nicolas Maduro, I asked him about the backlash. Critics had said Chavez had gone too far, had used language that wasn't becoming of a head of state. Nonsense, retorted Maduro. Comandante Chavez was right, he insisted. Bush is the devil. The devil incarnate, he added with a flourish. It struck me then, and only more so when I moved to Venezuela a year later, that Mr. Maduro was pretty happy being Chavez's foreign minister. A bus driver turned union leader turned socialist politician, Maduro travelled the world relaying his political mentor's message, displaying undying loyalty to the man and his movement in the process. It was that loyalty which saw him promoted to the top job a few years later, following Chavez's untimely death from cancer. As his anointed successor, Maduro initially found it tough to replace the eternal commander. So he tried to emulate him by copying his voice, his expressions and hand gestures. But he was a pale imitation. His critics, of whom there were many, saw him as a buffoon and christened him maburro burro, meaning donkey. Yet as the months and then years passed, Maduro grew into the role. He became his own version of a South American strongman, crushing opposition rivals by banning them as election candidates, rounding up his critics and cracking down hard on dissent. So hard, in fact, that scores were killed by the Venezuelan security forces in protests in 2014 and again in 2017. His repression was enforced by loyalist armed motorcycle gangs called colectivos, and the intelligence services identified protesters based on social media posts and took them from their homes. The oil price dropped and the economy began to spiral into hyperinflation. Venezuelans headed for the exit. Millions of young people fled the Maduro regime, saying they didn't earn enough to feed their families. Millions of children were going without sufficient calories each day, their parents fainting with hunger. The elderly were dependent on government subsidized food parcels, which had largely dried up. Meanwhile, Maduro made matters worse at every turn. He dined with his wife, Celia Flores, in the luxury restaurant of the Turkish celebrity chef Salt bae, famed for its expensive cuts of meat. Video of the Venezuelan head of state and the first combatant, as Flores insisted on being called, puffing on cigars, quaffing fine wine and eating prime steaks as their people starved, fermented nothing short of mockery. All of these things flashed into my head this week, following another phone call not with but about Nicolas Maduro. This time it was a video call from my friend Vanessa Silva, an indefatigable Venezuelan journalist in Caracas. She had just been woken by the most almighty explosion inside La Calotta, a military airstrip in the capital. My heart is pounding. The whole building shook, she told me, pointing her phone from her balcony so I could see the grey plume of smoke still rising. We will. It's started, she said. It must be the Americans. Vanessa turned out the lights, fearing being spotted from above, the darkness in her apartment only adding to her sense of vulnerability. It soon turned out she was right. It was indeed the Americans. Within hours, Donald Trump announced that Maduro and his wife had been captured and flown out of the country. And within the day I had arrived in Cucuta, on the Colombian border with Venezuela. The border town has often received influxes of Venezuelans trying to get out of the country over the past few years. This time it received an influx of international journalists trying to get in the Venezuelan authorities weren't opening the door, though they have strived to project an image of business as usual in some of the most unusual times the country has ever known. Instead, the journalists gathered on the Simon Bolivar Bridge, which links the two nations, and set up their cameras next to Colombian tanks and soldiers sent to maintain calm in a region where left wing rebel groups and drug gangs move back and forth with ease as a shackled Nicolas Maduro appeared in a New York courtroom on drug trafficking charges and declared, I'm a president and a prisoner of war, the reporters stood in the shadow of the Venezuelan mountains and tried their best to answer the one question no one has the answer to what happens.