Name: Mariana Van Zeller Was Stuck in Niger During a Military Coup
Uploaded: 2024-01-25T18:18:49.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Mariana Van Zeller Was Stuck in Niger During a Military Coup' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-01-25. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Mariana Van Zeller Was Stuck in Niger During a Military Coup' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-01-25. Transcript available.

What did you get involved with this season?
Well, it ended with a military coup in Africa where my team and I got stuck.
So that was sort of a good kickoff to all of it.
It was in Niger, so it's in the Sahel region of Africa.
The U.S. has actually a military presence.
Remember a few years ago when there were these four U.S. Marines that were
killed in the Sahel in Niger
and nobody even knew they were there?
Well, there's actually over 1,000 troops stationed in Niger.
And we were there in a little town called Agadez, which is sort of the southern
border of the Sahara Desert.
And we were doing a story about gold mining.
So the story itself was incredible.
We had to, you know, we had a military convoy with us because it's an
incredibly dangerous part of the world.
You've got terrorism, you've got ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, you've got kidnappers.
So it's very, very dangerous.
So we'd gone there with the permission of the government, but only if we had to
have a military convoy with us at all times.
So we're talking about four armored trucks with lots of trained soldiers that
every time we stopped, they'd get out of the trucks and basically point their
guns all around.
They were very well trained.
Wow.
A lot of them are actually trained by the American military.
And we went out into the desert and visited these gold mines, which are crazy.
It was an eight-hour off-roading into the desert to arrive at these illegal, unregulated
mines.
We're going down these tunnels and it's, you know, a hundred meters down, hand
dug tunnels with nothing to buttress them, no safety precautions or anything.
But we filmed it all and we get to the end and there's people basically mining
for gold.
And again, constantly with the idea that the military is telling us, okay, we
have to film fast.
We have to do this fast.
We can't be out at night.
So we went to a sort of safety, more safe location to sleep that night under
the stars.
And then the next day, it's time to come back to Agadez, the town, which is
about a hundred miles, but takes anywhere between like three to 12 hours to get
because you can, lots of things can happen along the way.
And we arrived in Agadez and we got word that there had been a military coup
and the president had been deposed.
And he was now being kidnapped inside the presidential palace.
Basically, he was stuck there with his family and that we were about to lose
our military compound and security.
And they closed all the land borders and the airspace.
And we were stuck with no way out because you can't travel by road without
security in that part of the world.
And there were no planes leaving.
So we were stuck.
Wow.
How long were you stuck for?
It was about nine days.
The military coup happened on a Wednesday and we left on a Thursday.
Sorry.
So eight days.
But it was eight incredibly scary days.
You know, I've been a journalist covering black markets and going to war zones
and conflict areas all my life.
But this was, I think, the most uncomfortable and scared I've ever been because,
first of all, the uncertainty of not knowing.
There were all these, the West African states were threatening invasion.
The Wagner group, the Russian mercenary group, were saying that they were going
to come and protect the new military coup leaders.
And so it was a power struggle between the United States and Russia.
And that's sort of the last place you want to be, right?
Wow.
And again, no protection.
I'm there with my team.
I'm sort of the boss in that situation because I'm the owner of the company
that produces this.
I'm the host of the show.
I'm the executive producer.
And I felt very responsible for my team as well.
And yeah, the clock is ticking.
And they're telling us that in a few days we're going to invade and there's
going to be a massive possibility of a massive war.
And we're stuck with, again, no protection and no way out.
So it was really, really scary.
How did it get resolved?
That's the interesting part.
So the funny thing is that there was an American military base, actually, one
of the biggest Air Force bases ever built.
Costs over $100 million to build just two miles from our little hotel in Agadez.
We were the only foreigners there apart from aid workers that sort of live
behind barbed wire and in compounds.
But we were the only foreigners staying in a hotel.
This hotel, interestingly enough, was actually built when Gaddafi came to visit
in the 90s or late 80s.
And it was a rundown hotel.
We were there, again, no protection, nothing.
And the military base is just two miles from us.
And we'd tried to get inside the base to film and we'd been denied access to
the base.
But when the coup happened, we managed to get a contact inside and started
asking them, we're here with no security.
Can you guys come and help us and figure out, you know, take us into the base?
We're all American citizens except for our fixer, our local guy who was
actually from Mali.
But everybody else was American.
And they were stuck in the situation that all the other countries had started
calling this a coup, but the U.S. government did not.
And because the moment they called it a coup, they would have to remove the
military, possibly remove military, remove their aid from the country.
And that's the last thing you want to do.
So they didn't want to evacuate us.
They didn't want to call it a coup.
They didn't want to get us out of there.
Their hands were sort of tied.
That's how they told us.
And we started seeing slowly as the days started passing and the situation was
deteriorating.
We started seeing, you know, the French were sending planes to take out all the
French nationals, the British, the Portuguese, which is where I'm a double
nationality, where I'm from.
And I'm on the phone with the ambassador for Portugal telling me there's a
plane for you.
There's like seats for you in the capital.
But the capital is eight hours away or 12 hours away by land.
And we can't go because it's too dangerous.
No airplanes would take us there.
And eventually we realized that the only way that we'd be able to get out is if
we took matters into our own hands.
So actually my team in L.A. found an evacuation company willing to fly a plane
in the middle of the night to get us out.
That sounds like a Chuck Norris movie.
Oh, it was an evacuation company.
It was actually Argo.
Have you watched the movie Argo with Ben Affleck about the guys in Iran?
Oh, yeah, I did watch that.
Yeah.
And how they don't know until the last minute if they're going to leave or not.
It was exactly that situation.
So we get to the airport in the middle of the night.
So they told us that we had to be at the airport at this time, that we had to
take security with us because the pilot was refusing to land unless we had
security there.
Police.
The police was supposed to show up.
They never did.
We arrive at the airport.
It's sunrise.
And the military is there waiting for us.
Yeah.
It's one of those.
And they start creating all sorts of problems saying we don't have the right
paperwork.
They're not going to let us leave.
Meanwhile, there's this amazing man, local man, who worked at the airport that
I'd met a few days before when I went there to try to see if there's any plane
leaving, let us know.
And so I stayed in touch with him.
And I had told him that it was my son's birthday, which was partially not true.
It wasn't his birthday, but he was about to leave camp.
And I've got this tradition as a working mother who travels all the time.
We have this tradition that I always pick him up from camp and it's performing
arts camp.
And so I told him.
Sorry, this is a very long story.
No, no, it's good.
So I told him, you know, so he was there to help us, but the military was also
there and they didn't want us to leave and creating all sorts of problems.
And then we see the plane land and we see the pilot come out and we see the
military start walking towards the pilot to tell them that we didn't have the
permission to leave.
And my fear was that the pilot was immediately going to turn around because he
had told us that we had 20 minutes.
He was going to spend 20 minutes on the ground.
And if we couldn't get into the plane, he's going to leave without us.
And they get there and he starts talking to them and I'm on the phone with the
team in L.A.
And I'm freaking out and telling them, oh, this is horrible.
This is happening.
They don't want us to leave.
And then my husband's on the phone with me as well.
He's telling me, I see the pilot's name and I think he's Portuguese.
Run to him.
And I ran to him at the same time as a military and I started speaking to him
in Portuguese and telling him the situation and that do whatever you can to get
us out.
And the military can't understand Portuguese.
So there was a secret communication happening between me and him.
And he was Portuguese and he decided to take the risk of getting us on the
plane and we managed to get out of it.
But the guy from the military was still yelling as the door closes.
But so was the guy that I'd met at the airport who turns to me, yells my name
and I look back and he says, hey, Mariana, say happy birthday to your son.
So in the midst of the craziness, it was also a beautiful moment of connection
and humanity.
Thank you.