Will Grant

But there's no doubt that Mexico is an important partner.

Now, would they step in and replace Venezuela entirely or...

Well, I think then we need to look at Claudia Sheinbaum's list of priorities.

I think that there will be significant pressure put on her government by the Trump administration to not replace Venezuela, to not replace Nicolas Maduro's relationship with Cuba.

Absolutely.

And I can't imagine that any kind of negotiation will be acceptable to the White House or to Marco Rubio that didn't involve, as you say,

basically root and branch reform.

And quite clearly, that isn't acceptable to the Cuban government.

So it currently looks like yet another moment of political conflict, if not spilling over into actual conflict for the time being.

It's been a pleasure.

President Trump said that he had ordered the closure of this prison and today we see this action. So I think this move suggests that Jelsi Rodriguez, the acting president of Venezuela, might be indeed cooperating with President Trump. We can see some intelligence forces coming out of the prison. So people in Venezuela don't know what's actually happening, don't know who is actually living.

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