Last Saturday, Americans woke up to the news that U.S. Special Forces had swooped into Venezuela

and captured the country's leader Nicholas Maduro and his wife, Celia Flores.

Maduro had a federal detention center in Brooklyn, New York. He arrived in the U.S. by plane,

and then he was put on a helicopter which flew right in front of the Statue of Liberty

before landing in Brooklyn. NPR international correspondent Ader Peralta is based in Mexico,

and it was just before dawn when he got wind of the story. You're awoken by your editor,

right, in the middle of the night, and you see that number and you like turn around and you're like,

the first thing you do is like, you know, what happened, right? And so, you know, the first thing you start

doing is you start calling every government source you can possibly find in Venezuela, the people

you had been talking to, you start calling, you know, even like my Cuban sources to see if they

had anything to say.

At the same time, he started thinking, where could he go to chase the story?

Venezuela is a special case in the Western Hemisphere, right?

Because, one, the airport was closed because the airspace was closed.

And then two, the government of Venezuela requires a journalist

of visa for you to get in there. And so we don't have one of those. And so you start thinking like,

okay, if we can't go, get it straight into Caracas, which is exactly where you want to go.

The next best thing is to get as

close to it as possible. Which meant right on the border. We've reached NPR's Ader-Peralta

in the city of Cucuta in Colombia, just on the border with Venezuela. Hi there. So, you know, we've made it

within eyesight of Venezuela, but we have not gotten permission to go in as journalists.

You know, we've still been talking to people who are coming in and out of Venezuela.

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