Beyond Maduro: The Dangerous Precedent of US Action in Venezuela

Former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on board the USS Iwo Jima after being captured by the US military.

In the early hours of January 3, 2026, Caracas residents awoke to explosions, low‑flying aircraft, and the realization that the United States was attacking their capital. By sunrise, then-Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was on a US aircraft, bound for a jail cell in New York. What Washington calls a surgical extraction mission is, for Latin America, a reminder that the region’s sovereignty can still be overridden at will. 

The United Nations (UN) Charter affirms that states must refrain from using force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, except in self‑defense or with UN Security Council approval. As noted by British think tank Chatham House, the UN did not authorize US action in Venezuela, nor was there a credible claim that Venezuela was on the verge of launching an armed attack against the United States. Accordingly, US actions in the country constitute a violation of Venezuelan sovereignty and of the UN Charter, to which the United States is a party. 

The 1990 Drug Enforcement Agency-linked kidnapping of Dr. Humberto Álvarez‑Machain from Mexico illustrates how powerful states can exploit legal ambiguity to bypass the sovereignty protections that international laws are designed to uphold. In the United States v. Álvarez-Machain (1992), the Supreme Court of the United States held that Álvarez-Machain’s forcible abduction did not prohibit his trial in the US, despite the existence of the 1978 Extradition Treaty between the United States of America and the United Mexican States. In their opinion, the Court argued that, because the treaty did not explicitly forbid abductions, the defendant’s manner of capture did not affect US court jurisdiction. The Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Alvarez-Machain set a worrying precedent in international law and state sovereignty, establishing a legal loophole that allows forcible abduction to substitute for extradition, circumventing the formal treaty obligations binding the two countries. 

Latin America’s reaction to Maduro’s capture has been anything but unified, and that division is itself a symptom of how fragile the region’s sovereignty has become. On one side, far‑right leaders such as Argentina’s Javier Milei and Chile’s José Antonio Kast have celebrated Maduro’s fall as a victory for freedom, framing the US raid as a necessary intervention against a dictatorship. On the other side, left-leaning governments, many of them harsh critics of Maduro’s authoritarian rule, have denounced the raid as a dangerous precedent. Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva warned that Washington had “crossed an unacceptable line” and evoked “some of the worst moments of interference” in the region’s past. In addition, Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum cautioned that the strike threatened regional stability, Chile’s outgoing president Gabriel Boric called it a violation of international law, and Colombia’s Gustavo Petro condemned it as an act of “aggression against the sovereignty of Venezuela and Latin America.” 

What unites these left‑of‑center leaders is not sympathy for Maduro, whom many have criticized for repression and electoral fraud, but a shared belief that sovereignty is the only protection smaller countries have in an international system tilted toward larger, more powerful countries. Selective defense of international norms and ignoring violations against your enemies weakens the very legal and institutional principles that medium and small powers depend on for security against larger states. While the UN Human Rights Council found that Venezuelan security forces had committed crimes against humanity under Maduro, humanitarian concern cannot retroactively justify violations of international law. Permitting powerful states to use humanitarian concern to excuse military action provides the justification they need to intervene in another state’s domestic affairs. Today, the toppled regime is led by a widely disliked Venezuelan strongman. Tomorrow, it might be a government whose only crime is to defy US commercial or security priorities. 

For regional analysts, US actions in Venezuela signal not only a return to blunt US realpolitik but also a shift toward what some have dubbed a new doctrine of hemispheric hierarchy. The Elcano Institute points out that the raid shows Washington’s willingness to dispense with multilateralism when it conflicts with perceived security interests, compelling others to abandon the fiction that all states’ sovereignty is equally respected. Abandoning multilateralism forces Latin American governments to constantly weigh their positions on China, migration, and energy against the risk of economic or even military punishment from the United States. 

If Latin America treats the Maduro raid as just another episode in its endless ideological tug‑of‑war, it will miss the larger danger of normalizing the undermining of state sovereignty and international law. The region’s governments should be able to agree on a basic rule: no foreign power should abduct a sitting president from their soil, no matter how objectionable that president may be. Condemning the operation at the UN and in regional forums will not free Maduro or reverse the raid, but it would reaffirm that international law still applies in Latin America. 

Image Credit

U.S. Department of Defense, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons