From Fox News: NPR correspondent Eyder Peralta was amazed during a segment Friday by his recent trip to Venezuela following President Donald Trump’s arrest of the country’s president Nicolás Maduro.
“It is absolutely surreal because you land at the airport and the signs are in Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Chinese, which tells you just where this country was facing a few months ago,” Peralta told host Steve Inskeep. “And then you go out on the streets and people here tell you that they feel like a weight has been lifted.”
He continued, “For the first time in a long time, there are street protests. Opposition groups are holding public meetings. I was at the justice department building yesterday, and there was a group of protesters calling for all political prisoners to be released.”
Peralta interviewed Edward Ocariz, a former political prisoner who had “faced the wrath of this government.”
“But then, right there in public, he taunted the government. They call us traitors, he said, but look at them now,” Peralta said. “‘Now it’s them who are not only kneeling,’ he’s saying, ‘but sleeping with the United States.’ And to be clear, he thinks the U.S. intervention was regrettable, but he also thinks that something good came out of it, and that allows him to say this in public without being thrown back in prison.”
Peralta reported “lots of smiles” during Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s visit as he was brokering a deal with the interim Venezuelan government, including attempts to secure a deal for minerals the U.S. needs.
“And those are the minerals in your laptop, for example, and he says Venezuela likely has those minerals,” Peralta said. “American companies would like to extract them, and Venezuela could suddenly become key in helping the U.S. break reliance on China — a win-win, he called it. And yesterday, Trump said, quote, ‘Venezuela is working.’ Once again, he was framing it as the model for regime change.”
