Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. I'm John Batscher speaking with Allison Federka of the geopolitical futures a

subscription site. She's an analyst looking at the states of Latin America where there is surprising

development and the one we go to now is Venezuela. Since last we talked

Allison, the news items include Madura has announced his candidacy for the presidency, announcing a date in July for the election.

Madura has met with Rouhani of Iran looking to patch up the relationship that was frayed having

to do with trade, oil trade I believe.

Machado, the candidate for the opposition, has been ruled out of order by the Supreme Court and her own

colleagues have urged her to step aside because she can't be on the ballot and it

appears that Mr. Maduro is not at all intimidated by the

prospect of sanctions from the US being returned because of his bad acting and then there's the threat to Guyana.

In my version from the outside Madura is acting extremely confident and building a case for his next move. Will that next move include Russia, Iran,

China? Will they all be present for strengthening Madura or does he need them anymore?

I think the answer to that question depends in a large part to what the

opposition decides to do in terms of a candidate. So the agreement that the

opposition and government have with the United States is that just an

opposition candidate needs to be present and does not mean to be Machado,

which means if the opposition can come together

and present a single candidate that is an alternative to her,

they would meet the requirements

and that would give the US a reason on paper not to

reimpose sanctions on Venezuela's oil sector. So if that's the case and

Maduro can keep the sanctions off of Venezuela, he's in good position and

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