In our little room, someone turned off all the lights, and a group of agents came in and forcefully took away my cellphone and my backpack. They furiously went through all my personal stuff. They patted me down from head to toe. María went through the same humiliating experience with a female officer. I asked if we were being detained. They said no — but still they didn’t let us leave the room.

Finally they told María and me to join our colleagues on the bus. They said they wanted to take us to our hotel. But we refused again. At that point we were very concerned about our safety and the possibility of being taken to a detention center or an even darker place.

We were taken to the street, where Mr. Rodríguez came out to complain about the interview and the way we had conducted ourselves. I told him that our job was to ask questions, and that they had stolen our interview and our equipment. By then, we later realized, the first reports about our detention were already being published. They couldn’t keep it a secret anymore. It was about 9:30 p.m., more than two hours after the end of the interview.

Our driver, who had been waiting all this time on one of the side streets, suddenly appeared. At that point, the same people who had detained us wanted us to leave. Fast. And so we did.

We piled into the car and went back to the hotel. Members of the government’s intelligence agency cordoned off the hotel so we couldn’t leave. A few hours later, an immigration official came to inform us that we would be expelled from the country in the morning. Around 1 a.m., a self-described “captain” — one of the men who had detained me at the presidential palace — came to my room and returned my cellphone in a plastic bag. All of its contents had been deleted. I assume they had first hacked into whatever they could.