Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, available 247 at background briefing.

I'm Ian Masters and today we'll examine a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with the seizure of Venezuelan's Maduro and his wife hauled out of bed in the early hours of Saturday by U.S. Special Forces,

and now in a Manhattan federal prison facing a 2020 indictment from the Southern District of New York on drugs and weapons charges.

Joining us to discuss Trump's boast that we will run Venezuela is David Smiley,

a professor of human relations and senior associate at the Center for Inter-American Policy

and Research at Tulane University.

He has published five books on Venezuela and lived in the country for over 33 years,

living there for most of that time,

and is the co-author of The New Book, The Paradox of Violence and Venezuela,

Revolution, Crime and Policing, During Chavismo.

He's the author of the substack, Venezuela and the United States,

and we'll look into the Trump version of the Monroe Doctrine, he calls the Donro

doctrine, which has him threatening Greenland, Canada, Panama, Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil,

while supporting right-wing authoritarian governments in Argentina, El Salvador, Honduras, Chile, and Ecuador,

whose leaders like him, while spurning the Nobel Prize-winning

leader of Venezuela's opposition in favor of keeping on Maduro's vice president to do his bidding,

assuming she agrees. Then we'll assess the Trump oil grab of the world's greatest known reserves,

which he crowed about at his press conference on Saturday,

promising the Venezuelan people would benefit from a bonanza of investment from U.S. oil giants,

who will recover their, quote, stolen property, and then pump baby pump.

Joining us is Francisco Manaldi. the fellow in Latin American Energy Policy at the

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