Just a few hundred metres behind Gabriela Parra lies her homeland of Venezuela – but she dare not take another step off Colombian ground.
Though the highway bridge over the Tachira River that marks the border is open and flowing freely, she knows exactly what awaits her should she push on any further.
‘It would end like it has ended for many of my friends,’ she tells me, shrugging. ‘Prison. Torture. Murder.’
The 40-year-old single mother was forced to flee in 2019 after a brutal campaign of intimidation by dictator Nicolas Maduro’s henchmen.
As a journalist and opposition activist for the Vente Venezuela party, which won stolen elections last year, she was considered persona non grata in her hometown of Maracaibo.
Yet in the early hours of Saturday, having just finished a 14-hour shift earning £5 per day at a Colombian Tienda shop in the border town of Cucuta, a friend called to say Maduro had been captured. For Ms Parra, it meant only one thing. As she read the accounts of the audacious Special Forces operation, she quietly said to herself: ‘Soon, I will be coming home.’
Journalist and political activist Gabriela Parra was forced to flee in 2019 after a brutal campaign of intimidation by dictator Nicolas Maduro’s henchmen
Venezuelans living in Costa Rica demonstrate for a democratic transition, after the US launched strikes and captured its President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores
After the initial euphoria, many Venezuelans are disappointed that President Trump has sidelined charismatic opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado. Worse yet, he appears to have struck a deal with Maduro’s deputy, Delcy Rodriguez.
On Monday the US leader ruled out an election in the next 30 days, saying: ‘We have to fix the country first. You can’t have an election. There’s no way the people could even vote.’
With armed thugs returning to the streets of Caracas yesterday, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer warned that the President’s plan for Venezuela appears nothing more than ‘wishful thinking’ after a briefing by top officials.
But Ms Parra has not lost any hope that she is going home. She believes Ms Machado will soon be in power despite Washington saying otherwise.
Seeing Maduro blindfolded and bound was ‘the happiest moment’ for her as she could ‘finally see the light at the end of the tunnel’. ‘All the people who had been suffering, who had been murdered, been imprisoned, now they are getting justice,’ she said.
Ms Parra, who has a 19-year-old daughter, Valeria, and five-year-old son, Dylan, misses her homeland dearly. ‘Now I am going to cry,’ she says when asked to describe life there. ‘It was beautiful. I grew up before [dictator Hugo] Chavez and everything was good.’
But when she became a journalist critical of the Chavez regime, the intimidation began. After Maduro took over in 2013, it got much worse. ‘I think Chavez was much smarter than Maduro,’ she said. ‘When he was running the country you could actually have a kind of dialogue with him. But as Maduro wasn’t so smart, he made up for that by being way more aggressive.’
A surveillance van watched her house day and night, with government goons trailing her family, while any demonstrations were cracked down on with gas and rubber bullets.
Soon, though, Maduro graduated to real bullets.
‘I remember on March 27, 2014, we had a gathering of journalists in my apartment when the government forces tried to break in,’ she said. ‘They spent 17 hours attacking the building. They surrounded the neighbourhood. They had gas, bombs, bullets.’
Life became difficult and finally in 2019, as the regime intimidated her family, she decided to leave, alone, for Colombia.
Such methods have gone into overdrive since Saturday’s raid, with Maduro’s heavily armed henchmen seen marauding the streets declaring US ‘pigs’ will not take their country.
Footage showed interior minister Diosdado Cabello, Maduro’s closest ally, posing with a crowd of armed militia on Monday as they shouted: ‘Always loyal, never traitors.’
Mr Cabello, who has a $25 million (£19 million) bounty on his head for drug-trafficking charges, largely controls the Colectivos – the militias that rule the streets with fear.
Ms Parra remains hopeful. She settled in Cucuta six years ago and works any odd job she can to get by while acting as the local co-ordinator for Vente Venezuela. Now, she feels in her bones that it is time to return.
‘I have been imagining this moment,’ she said. ‘I am always hopeful, and I try to give that hope to all of the Venezuelans here. We have to wait a little bit more, but when you have been waiting for 25 years, a couple of minutes more it’s not so long.’
Looking out over the river, she added: ‘We will cross the bridge – all of us.’