The Americans Outside My Window

Support for This American Life comes from Squarespace. Build a fully custom website in just a few steps using Squarespace's AI enhanced website builder, Blueprint AI. Simply provide basic details about your industry, goals, and personality, and Blueprint AI will generate high quality content along with personalized design suggestions. Highlight your offerings with a website tailored to help your business grow. Visit squarespace.com/american to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. 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 Lore Drop, which come out of 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 twenty twenty four 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 gonna 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. The world knew who won. Countries around the world, including The United States, went through the opposition's numbers, looked through 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, okay. 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 Corina Machado. 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 …