‘I Think We’re Under Attack’: Inside Caracas the Night the U.S. Captured Nicolás Maduro

In the early morning hours of Jan. 3, 2026, Regina García Cano was woken up by the sound of an explosion.

The Caracas-based reporter for The Associated Press recalls looking out the window, her building shaking.

“It was the loudest noise I had ever heard,” she says in the opening scene of the new FRONTLINE/AP documentary Crisis in Venezuela, embedded above.

Then, she sent a message on her phone: “‘Hi, I think we’re under attack.’”

García Cano and her colleagues soon learned what was happening: a U.S. military operation marking the culmination of President Donald Trump’s long campaign to topple the autocratic Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.

It was “a sort of operation you would expect in a Hollywood movie,” Miami-based AP reporter Joshua Goodman says of the raid, in which Maduro and his wife were captured and sent to the U.S. to face drug trafficking charges.

Many Venezuelans who fled their country during Maduro’s rule celebrated his removal from power. But uncertainty clouds the future of the oil-rich South American country, where Maduro loyalists remain at the head of the government.

“What I really fear is some deal in Washington that leaves this regime in place permanently, as long as they’re willing to do what we want on oil,” Elliott Abrams, a special representative for Venezuela in the first Trump administration, says in the above video.

In the weeks since Maduro’s fall, FRONTLINE and the AP have been collaborating on an examination of Trump’s yearslong efforts to oust him, the legacy of corruption and suppression of political opposition in Venezuela, and the fight over who will control the country and its oil. What they found unfolds in Crisis in Venezuela, premiering Feb. 10 on PBS and online.

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Documentary

Crisis in Venezuela

February 10, 2026

It’s the newest documentary from director Juan Ravell and producer Jeff Arak, the team behind the Emmy-nominated documentary A Dangerous Assignment: Uncovering Corruption in Maduro’s Venezuela. Now, with García Cano and Goodman, the filmmakers probe the country’s uncertain future, the U.S. role, and the Maduro insiders who’ve been left in charge while opposition leader María Corina Machado remains in exile.

Those insiders include Venezuela’s acting President Delcy Rodríguez — who, the AP found, has been on the radar of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration for years. The U.S. has never publicly accused Rodríguez of criminal wrongdoing. Rodríguez served as Maduro’s vice president for seven years as government repression of dissent intensified.

Crisis in Venezuela examines the Trump administration’s relationship with Rodríguez and its approach to democracy in Venezuela in the aftermath of the capture of Maduro, who along with his wife has pleaded not guilty to the U.S. charges.

“The end state here is we want to reach a phase of transition where we are left with a friendly, stable, prosperous Venezuela – and democratic – in which all elements of society are represented in free and fair elections,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in Senate testimony that appears in the film. “We’re not going to get there in three weeks. It’s going to take some time.”

As the documentary reports, much remains unsettled about where Venezuela goes from here.

“With Delcy becoming acting president, many, many questions were left unanswered,” García Cano says in the film. “How long is she going to be acting president? Will there be elections soon or in a year or in two years? Venezuelans are wondering about that. They want answers for those questions, right? Like, what’s going to happen next?”

For the full story, watch Crisis in Venezuela starting Feb. 10, 2026 at 10/9c on PBS stations (check local listings), at pbs.org/frontline, on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel and in the PBS App. The documentary will also be available on PBS Documentaries on Prime Video. Crisis in Venezuela is a FRONTLINE production with Mongoose Pictures and Documento Films in association with The Associated Press. The reporters are Regina García Cano and Joshua Goodman. The writers are Jeff Arak & Juan Ravell. The producer is Jeff Arak. The director is Juan Ravell. The senior producers are Dan Edge and Eamonn Matthews. The managing editor of FRONTLINE is Andrew Metz. The editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath.