U.S. Abducts Maduro: As American as Apple Pie
This isn't unprecedented—it’s just another Saturday in the empire.
As if backing a genocide in Gaza weren’t enough, Donald J. Trump has now reminded the world that “international law” is like Elf on a Shelf for genocidal imperialist world leaders: a prop you move around for show, but really, it’s all just make-believe.
In the early hours of Saturday morning, around 2 a.m. Caracas time, U.S. forces entered Venezuelan airspace, struck multiple targets in and around the capital (including the major military complex at Fuerte Tiuna) killing more than 40 according to an anonymous source, and then kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores. Venezuelan officials say helicopters fired on residential areas; the government has declared a state of “external commotion” and demanded international condemnation.
Trump, of course, is bragging. According to his own Justice Department, Maduro and Flores are now on a U.S. warship headed toward New York to face an indictment that throws every magic word at them: “narco-terrorism conspiracy,” “cocaine importation conspiracy,” “possession of machineguns and destructive devices,” and more. I mean, at least they’re not talking about “WMDs” again?
And yes, I said what I said. This is a kidnapping dressed up as a cop show.
And before I forget, if you’re one of those clowns crying “this isn’t who we are” … gtfo. This is exactly who we are. This is in our DNA.
George W. Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction, invaded Iraq, and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. Barack Obama bypassed Congress to bomb Libya, shred the state, and leave behind open-air slave markets, all under the banner of “protecting civilians.” Joe Biden kept the economic strangulation of Venezuela in place, calling it “pressure,” while UN rapporteurs documented how sanctions were wrecking public health and deepening poverty. UN special rapporteur Alena Douhan went to Venezuela in 2021 and described the impact in plain language: sanctions, she said, had a “devastating effect” on people’s lives, worsening malnutrition, pushing hospitals to the brink, and hitting children, the elderly, and people with chronic conditions the hardest. In other words, before a single bomb fell this week, the United States had already been waging a slow-motion war on Venezuela’s ability to keep people alive.
But Trump doesn’t bother smoothing it over. He does the same thing with orange spray tan and a camera crew.
The bipartisan imperial project
If you only look at red vs. blue, you miss the real continuity: when it comes to Latin America, there is one party in Washington, and its name is Empire. If Kamala Harris had won, it would have just been some other country. And the libs wouldn’t care because they don’t have principles, they have teams.
The U.S. has been meddling in Venezuela for well over a century. In 1908, the U.S. Navy helped Juan Vicente Gómez seize power, ushering in a dictatorship so brutal that political prisoners were hanged from meat hooks, but Gómez was generous to Standard Oil and Royal Dutch Shell, so Washington treated him like a partner, not a monster.
In the 1950s, the U.S. backed Marcos Pérez Jiménez, another torturer who filled Venezuela’s prisons and mass graves while winning a U.S. Legion of Merit for being friendly to foreign capital.
When Hugo Chávez was elected in 1998 and started redirecting oil revenues to social programs — cutting poverty and illiteracy and building out what became the Bolivarian Revolution — DC backed a coup against him in 2002. Two of the top coup officers were graduates of the School of the Americas, the U.S. training center for Latin American repression. 1
Obama later declared Venezuela an “extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security (fun fact: Venezuela has never once in its history started a war) while the U.S. was actively bombing multiple countries and bankrolling Colombia’s paramilitary death squads.
Trump then recognized Juan Guaidó, a guy most Venezuelans had never heard of, as “interim president,” appointed Elliott Abrams as regime-change point man, and openly threatened invasion.
They do not hate dictators. They hate disobedient governments that sit on oil.
That’s the context for Marco Rubio being confirmed as Secretary of State with Democratic votes and for Democrats now pretending this is all a shocking surprise. You don’t get a U.S. commando raid on a foreign capital in a vacuum. You get it after decades of sanctions, coup attempts, and a political class that treats the Monroe Doctrine like scripture.
The “narcoterrorism” gaslight
The sales pitch this time is “narcoterrorism.” Trump’s Attorney General Pamela Bondi is out here thanking him for the “courage” to arrest “two alleged international narco traffickers” and promising they will face “the full wrath of American justice” in U.S. courts.
There are two problems with that story.
First: drugs. Trump’s own DEA has acknowledged that Venezuela plays an extremely minor role in the flow of drugs into the United States, a finding backed up by UN and EU reports that do not treat Venezuela as a major node in global narcotics supply chains.
The big corridors are still Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and the routes through Central America and Mexico.
So why turn Venezuela — specifically Maduro’s government — into a “narco-terrorist organization”?
Because once you rebrand a sovereign government as a criminal gang, you can stop pretending this is war in any formal sense. The DSA calls this the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, the Western Hemisphere becomes a U.S. “defense perimeter,” and anything from sanctions to airstrikes to kidnapping a head of state can be sold as a police action in a permanent “non-international armed conflict” with cartels.
That framing isn’t coming out of nowhere. According to detailed reporting and leaks, a secret Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memo argues that:
The U.S. is in an armed conflict with “narco-terrorist organizations,”
Designating a group as a Foreign Terrorist Organization helps turn it into a lawful military target,
And the president can order strikes under Article II commander-in-chief powers, without treating them as “hostilities” under the War Powers Resolution — because U.S. personnel are supposedly never at risk.
It’s a Choose Your Own Adventure where everything leads to the same page: the president can do what he wants, where he wants, to whomever he labels a cartel.
“International law” says something different. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter flatly prohibits “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State.” Legal analysts have also pointed out that sitting heads of state normally enjoy personal immunity from arrest by foreign governments under customary international law and the Vienna Convention. Calling Maduro a “narco-terrorist” doesn’t magically erase that; it just signals that Washington thinks it can unilaterally decide which leaders still count as leaders and which ones can be treated like fugitives. And instead of extradition through courts, this was an old-school “transboundary abduction” – the same playbook the U.S. used with Manuel Noriega in Panama, now updated with smart bombs and drone footage.
In other words: this isn’t law enforcement going long. It’s piracy.
This was never about drugs
Strip away the “narco-terror” branding and you’re left with the same old motives.
Venezuela has the largest proven petroleum reserves on the planet. And they were further defying the U.S. by selling the oil to Cuba.
Its government has tried, however imperfectly, to keep a chunk of that wealth under public control and to build a regional project (read: the Bolivarian Revolution) that redistributes resources downward and promotes sovereignty across Latin America.
And for the last twenty-plus years, Washington’s answer to that has been:
sanctions, economic strangulation, support for coups, and now open war.
The administration says this is about “justice” and “the rule of law.” But you don’t restore the rule of law by bombing a capital city, abducting elected leaders, and holding them on a warship while your lawyers retrofit a legal theory to match what you already did. You don’t defend human rights by collapsing a country’s economy and then using the resulting crisis as evidence that the government must be removed.
You especially don’t get to call anyone else a “rogue state” when you’re carrying out the exact behavior you claim gives you the right to invade.
As American as it gets
So no, this isn’t a glitch. Everything is working just as designed. And we are the bad guys, as usual.
It’s the Monroe Doctrine; now streaming in 4K. It’s Iraq with Spanish subtitles. It’s Libya with Caracas in the crosshairs instead of Tripoli.
And it’s happening in the same political moment that the U.S. is arming and shielding a live-streamed massacre in Gaza. The message to the rest of the world is not subtle: borders and sovereignty exist when they protect U.S. allies and profits. They dissolve when they get in the way.
This was never about drugs. It was never about “spreading democracy.” It’s about oil, about crushing a government that refuses to hand the keys to Chevron and Exxon and about reminding every country in the hemisphere what happens when you stop obeying.
You are supposed to feel shocked that Trump went this far. You’re not supposed to notice how much of the machinery was built by people with better grammar and a Peace Prize.
Don’t let them launder this as “justice” or “accountability.” Call it what it is:
A war crime. A kidnapping. A naked imperial smash-and-grab in a region the U.S. has treated as its back yard for 200 years.
And until we dismantle the bipartisan machinery that makes this possible — the sanctions, the bases, the OLC memos, the Monroe Doctrine mindset — every administration will keep a version of this option on the table.
This isn’t an aberration. It’s U.S. foreign policy in action.
Wilkins, Brett. January 28, 2019. The History – and Hypocrisy – of U.S. Meddling in Venezuela. https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/14263/