The Americans Outside My Window
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What bonus episode is being introduced?
Hey, everybody. Ira here. This thing that you're listening to right now is a little bonus episode that we decided to throw down the feed in addition to the new show that we just made, which is called New Lord Drop, which came out at the regular time on the feed Sunday night and should be sitting right next to this bonus episode in your podcast app. Let me take a second and explain what you're listening to right here. When the United States attacked Venezuela last week and captured its president, Nicolas Maduro, I kept thinking about this story that Nancy Updike did for our show a while back about the 2024 election in Venezuela. In that election, there was this massive grassroots effort not just to oust Maduro and elect the opposition candidate, but also they knew that they were going to have to prove that the opposition actually won.
And so what that meant is tens of thousands of volunteers around the country planned and trained for months. And then on election day, they not only managed to get a huge turnout going out and voting, they also organized this whole thing where they went around and they collected paper copies of the vote totals from most of the voting centers around the country. Okay, so they have these paper receipts. They scanned these vote totals, added them up, put everything online, proving that the opposition candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, beat Maduro and beat him decisively. Their numbers showed a two-to-one victory. People hated Maduro that much. But election authorities declared Maduro the winner. He stayed in power.
People protested. Maduro cracked down with mass detentions. Over 1,500 people The United Nations looked into it and found that many of those detainees were tortured.
What happened during the recent U.S. attack on Venezuela?
The world knew who won. Countries around the world, including the United States, went through the opposition's numbers, looked at the receipts, concluded they were solid, and officially recognized Gonzalez, the opposition candidate, as the winner and rightful president of Venezuela. But this past week, as you probably saw, when the United States captured President Maduro... President Trump did not say, OK, here's the guy who actually won the election. Here's the woman who leads the opposition that he's part of, Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Karina Machado.
How did Venezuelans organize to oust Maduro in the election?
Let's finally put them in power. Which made me wonder, what do all those Venezuelans who were part of this big organized movement to vote Maduro out of power and prove that they won, who did all that so, so well, what do they think of the events of the last week? What's this been like for them? Are they angry? Do they see any hope that they might get a shot? Well, Nancy Updike and reporter Ana Yancey Diaz-Cortez reached out to one of those people and talked to her. She said all kinds of interesting and eye-opening things that we have not heard elsewhere in the coverage. So what you're about to hear, you'll hear Ana Yancey interpreting. She's helped us with all of our Venezuela coverage. And what you're going to hear is her live translation recorded during the conversation.
So it's not word for word exact, but it's close. Because this conversation is so of this moment, we thought it made the most sense to put it out now and not wait for some theme or something. Hence this extra episode this week that you're listening to. Here's Nancy Updike.
A lot of Venezuelans were expecting some kind of big move. The U.S. had been bombing Venezuelan boats for months. American aircraft carriers and destroyers had been assembling in the Caribbean. It was clear something was about to happen. The woman I talked to, Teresa, had also been expecting. She didn't know what. When the attack happened, she was at home in her neighborhood just outside the capital, Caracas, with her family, including her two grown children. Teresa is not her real name. It's still too dangerous in the country for anyone who organized against Maduro. The attack started in the middle of the night, her time.
How I experienced it is that, you know, we're on vacation, you know, it was late, but we were up late.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What bonus episode is being introduced?
0:00–1:53
2
What happened during the recent U.S. attack on Venezuela?
1:53–2:28
3
How did Venezuelans organize to oust Maduro in the election?
2:28–13:39
4
What was the reaction of Venezuelans to the U.S. capturing Maduro?
13:39–18:22
5
How did Teresa describe her experience during the attack?
18:22–19:07