It shouldn’t be shocking and yet it still is. Images of the leader of a sovereign, oil-rich nation humiliated and handcuffed by the world’s superpower using tactics as crude as the resource it seeks to control. We have seen this before, after all.

Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Congo’s Patrick Lumumba, Iran’s Mohammad Mosaddegh, Chile’s Salvador Allende and Panama’s Manuel Noriega all met the same fate (a full list would take up the entire article). Regime change, rinse, repeat.

‘He effed around and he found out’

By most accounts, Maduro seems to have gotten off lightly. In 2019, US Senator Marco Rubio threatened that the Venezuelan leader would meet the same fate as Qaddafi, tweeting a photo of the bloodied Libyan general before he was reportedly sodomised and killed by US supported rebels. The CIA has long preferred assassination as the policy option for stubborn leaders using underhanded tactics like poisoned cigars, turning lovers into honeypots, planting a Brutus within a Caesar’s inner circle. That is until Trump decided the US no longer needed to operate from the shadows.

In 2017, Trump considered the assassination of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, reportedly saying “let’s f***ing kill him! Let’s go in. Let’s kill the f***ing lot of them.”  And it seems with Maduro, someone did try. A few months after Rubio’s threat, there was an attack against Maduro’s life, which was “the world’s first known attempt to kill a head of state with a retail drone, purchased online and armed by hand with military grade explosives”.

After spending many years trying to illegitimise the Venezuelan leader in order to pave the way for the invasion, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who has the verbal range of a legacy-admitted frat bro at an American university, said that Maduro had his chance but had “effed around and he found out”. He also said, in an effort to appease the Republican MAGA base, that this regime change operation was “America First” and he was right in a way; the biggest winners of the night were Texan oil barons.

‘We’re going to take back the oil’

The plot to overthrow Venezuela started when Hugo Chávez was elected into power. “Washington has never forgiven Chávez for nationalising the oil”, says Paul Craig Roberts, economist and Assistant Treasury Secretary for President Ronald Reagan, “and using the revenues from the oil flows for Venezuela rather than for the profits of American firms”. Chávez, a savvy economist advancing his state’s interests, wanted oil prices as high as they could go and lobbied fellow members of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to cut oil output to keep prices high. He was charging American corporations a premium for his oil, a super heavy and filthy oil which they covet.

Chavez’s handpicked successor, Nicolás Maduro, wanted to continue his legacy when he was elected into power in 2013 but his woes began soon into his premiership.

In 2014, the US worked with other oil-producing countries to intentionally depress the price of oil to undermine the economies of oil-dependent Russia and Iran.The biggest casualty of this cabal though was Venezuela whose economy was ‘destroyed’ given oil accounted for 96 per cent of its exports.

Soon after, President Obama imposed sanctions on the country claiming perversely that it posed a national security threat to the US.

Trump levied an even worse financial embargo that cut Venezuela off from almost all borrowing, stole its assets (with the help of European allies) and plunged an already economically distressed country into ruin. Tens of thousands of Venezuelans have been killed due to restrictions on food and life-saving medicines with reports from renowned economists indicating that sanctions “fuelled an economic collapse equivalent to three Great Depressions”. All the while, the West collaborated to starve Venezuela and then blamed the country for starving.

However, Maduro clung to power and refused to sell his country to the US. His opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, who the US had touted as his replacement until the invasion, has been very clear that he would sell the country in a handbasket, having declared in the past: “I will open up the Venezuela oil fields to American companies.”

Maduro’s intransigence left Texan energy executives with three options — either import that oil from Canada which would take too long (7-14 days), or the Middle East which would take even longer (43 days), or install a puppet government in Venezuela which would give them cheap oil quickly (4 days).

For the final option, the government would follow a tried and tested two prong approach; illegitimise the government to topple it, and if that doesn’t work, invade.

‘The legal classification … is complex’

The process of illegitimising a government is led by rhetoric paid to a sacred set of rules we call international law. These rules are then set aside immediately once the illegitimising has proved fruitless and invasion is deemed to be required.

Maduro, we heard almost daily from mouthpieces in the West, is in flagrant violation of international human rights standards in his oppressive tactics and corrupt practices. Yet when the US invaded the country and captured its leader to overthrow him, suddenly international law becomes a very complex byzantine system that nobody without a doctorate should attempt to understand.

The lily-livered German Chancellor has said ‘[t]he legal deployment of the US deployment is complex. We will take our time with that.’ The craven Greek prime minister, after deploring Maduro’s violations of international law, says “this is not the time to comment on the legality of recent actions”. The Ukrainian Foreign Minister has pretty much said that if the government is bad enough, a country can be invaded. Apparently non-ironically.

I can quote international law by the yard and it is as clear as it can be. America’s actions are a violation of Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter and a clear act of aggression. The US’ own legal actions reflect this.

In the operation to abduct Maduro, the Trump administration has relied on a highly controversial 1989 legal memorandum claiming the President does not need to abide by the UN Charter as a matter of domestic law. That is as clear an admission of a violation as we can get from the US, which often cloaks its actions in the framing of self-defence, as it did with the assassination of Qassem Soleimani in 2020.

Moreover, while Maduro is a lawful military target during the conduct of hostilities as commander-in-chief of the National Bolivarian Armed Forces; when captured, he becomes a Prisoner of War protected by the Third Geneva Convention.

He can only be tried for war crimes, and not the domestic charges laid against him by a jurisdiction to which he should not be subject. While it seems to be the case that Maduro negotiated this exit himself, unfortunately for the German Chancellor, the international law violated here would be obvious to any first year student at any law school.

‘We can take care of the country’

Since the US has said, as per President Trump, that it will ‘run the country’ for an indefinite period and has also accepted that American boots were on the ground in Venezuela, the US will be an occupying power. The occupation will be governed by international law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits changing any laws in the occupied territories ‘unless absolutely prevented’ from doing so.

This provision was left to collect dust in Iraq when the US coalition went so far as to pretty much rewrite the Iraqi constitution.  Paul Bremer, the American leader of the Coalition Provisional Authority, said that “[m]ost Iraqis have no experience of free thought. They vaguely understand the concept of freedom, but still want us to tell them what to do.”

The Venezuelans, it seems, will be suffering the same fate. They will be told what to do while their natural resources are privatised by cowboy moguls, their land is exploited by property tycoons, and their foreign policy decided by pro-Zionist wonks in Washington.

China and Russia will look on with dismay but apathy; if the Americas belong to the US, then Europe can belong to Russia and Asia to China. The Global South will pound their fists but know that it can and will happen again. And Iran will wait with bated breath.

Header image: Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is pictured after his capture by US forces on December 3. — Screengrab via X/@RapidResponse47