Will Grant

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Ja nyt meillä on linjoilla Veera Espoosta. Sinä onnistuit naarmuttamaan äitisi autoa. Siis mä huomasin, että mun punainen kynsilakka on just samaa sävyä kuin Mutsin auto. Mikä tsekää? Aika hyvä tsekää. Päivän auttaa vähän, hetken tarjoaa IF, joka auttaa paljon.

For more, I spoke to our correspondent Will Grant, who is on the Colombian border with Venezuela. I started by asking him about this military presence.

It is really, genuinely nothing less than historic. It is an extraordinary moment in US-Latin American relations, obviously in US-Venezuelan relations, but it has implications that go beyond the borders of Venezuela. First and foremost and most immediately, the Colombian president has said that he is sending troops to the Colombian-Venezuelan border.

Let's not forget that there are left-wing armed groups, armed rebels that still operate in Venezuelan soil and move back and forth through that porous border. And he fears that they would become drawn into whichever conflict, further conflict that may take place in Venezuela. There are also implications for Cuba, which is thoroughly dependent on Venezuelan crude oil for its revolution to be successful.

Joten se on hyvin erityinen tilanne nykyisessä Latino-Amerikassa. Ja tietenkin emme tiedä, missä seuraava konfliktin jälkeen mennään. Tiedämme tietenkin, että Maduro ja hänen isänsä, Presidentin Trumpin, sanoivat, että he eivät ole enää Venäjällä. Ja heidät on saanut Yhdysvalloille, joilla uskomme, että he pitävät haasteita.

Mutta me olemme kuulleet vain Venäjän puolesta, että huoneet ylittävät lisää puolesta, puolesta puolesta puolesta puolesta puolesta puolesta puolesta puolesta.

and a message has gone out to all of the socialist allies within Venezuela in militias and civil militias and grassroots organizations as well as putting the military on a war footing. So the picture for ordinary Venezuelans is deeply worrying. How was this operation possible? How were US troops able to fly in to Caracas presumably and capture the Venezuelan president?

Well, we can only speculate at this stage. There is a press conference in Mar-a-Lago, President Trump's Florida residence, due in a few hours, and hopefully we'll hear more information there. But we speculate that there must have been, or we believe there may have been, some kind of inside information making its way directly to Washington state.

insecure channels, that may mean that somebody quite close in Mr. Maduro's inner circle has turned on him. That is the plausible explanation for how this could have unfolded quite so cleanly and quickly. Marco Rubio apparently spoke to a senator in the United States and made those sorts of explanations. It was Republican Senator Mike Lee who said that

Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, had told him that Nicolas Maduro has been arrested by US personnel to stand trial on criminal charges in the United States. And that, as he put it, the kinetic action we saw tonight was deployed to protect and defend those executing the arrest warrant. And further down he added in a comment to that post on social media, he anticipates no further action in Venezuela now that Maduro is in US custody.

We are yet to get, as it were, more detail, the full story of these points being raised on social media by senators and by other members of the administration. But we do know the US has been massing military forces off Venezuela for months and threatening military action. What more do we know about the sites that were targeted overnight?

No, niitä on kaksi. Ne ovat militäriset installaatiot Karakassan sisällä. Ensimmäinen on nimeltään La Carlota. Se on militärinen airstrippi, joka on oikeastaan hyvin keskustelussa Karakassa. Sitä menetetään, kun otat yhden tärkeimmän tarifeen kautta kaupungin ympärille. Ja se on vain siellä.

The other is called Fuerte Tiuna. That's the most important military base. One of the most important military bases in the country. Certainly the most important in Caracas. Very large, important military base. We don't know what the damage, the full extent of the damage has been to those two sites. We do know that power went out to both of them and to surrounding communities when those strikes took place. You're in Washington. What will Americans make of this after President Trump promised not to get involved in foreign wars?

Luulen, että se on yleinen kuvauksena. Tietysti Venäjä-amerikkalainen ja kuban-amerikkalainen yhteisö, jotka ovat konservatiivisia, konservatiivinen osa niistä yhteisöistä, voivat kiittää ideaa, että Nicolas Maduro on poistettu ja hänen isänsä on saanut Yhdysvalloille haittaa. Joten jos yhdysvallojen kohdalla Yhdysvalloissa on jotain, jota voidaan tehdä, niin vain noin 30 prosenttia votoja tuntuu, että Yhdysvalloissa on Yhdysvallan militiaalinen tehtävä.

President Trump has a lot of his constituency still to win over by the idea of this. Now, that polling was taken before there had been any military action and before it could be deemed as it were successful or painted as being successful by the Trump administration.

One will be interested to see exactly what the reaction is now that Nicolas Maduro has been removed. And if the Trump administration can show that was done with no harm to civilian population or to US service personnel, then he will be able to more easily portray it as a victory.

There were numerous sort of near simultaneous explosion, reports of explosions in several places across Caracas.

They include military installations, including La Calota.

Now that's a military airfield right in the center of the city and the main military base called Fuerte Tiuna.

It was a very warm welcome for Benjamin Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago, the president's Florida residence.