The shockwaves from the forcible removal of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by the United States have yet to settle. Initial disbelief has already given way to something more unsettling: resignation. The operation-ordered by US President Donald Trump and executed by American military forces on international waters-marks a historic escalation in Washington’s approach to Latin America. While the United States has intervened militarily in the region countless times before, it has never done so with such openness, speed, and disregard for even the appearance of legal or moral justification.

That Maduro presided over an authoritarian system accused of widespread human rights violations has made the act easier to rationalize in some political and media circles. Yet legality does not bend simply because the victim is unpopular. What occurred was not regime change through diplomatic pressure, elections, or multilateral action, but the physical abduction of a sitting head of state-an act that strips away any remaining pretense of a rules-based international order in the Western Hemisphere.

This moment represents more than the fall of a man. It signals the end of an era in which US power, though often coercive, was still wrapped in the language of democracy, human rights, and international law. What has replaced it is something far more primitive: an exercise of raw power that requires no justification beyond the ability to impose it.

US intervention in Latin America is hardly new. From Guatemala in 1954 to Chile in 1973, from Panama in 1989 to Honduras in 2009, Washington has repeatedly shaped political outcomes through force, covert operations, or economic coercion. These interventions were often framed as necessary evils-measures taken to stop communism, defend democracy, or preserve regional stability.

What makes Venezuela different is not the act itself but the manner in which it was carried out. There was no United Nations resolution, no coalition of allies, no invocation of humanitarian intervention. There was not even an attempt to construct a legal narrative, however strained. The United States did not claim to be liberating Venezuelans or restoring democracy. It simply acted.

In his second term, Trump did not invent a new foreign policy. Tariff wars, unilateral sanctions, threats, and disregard for multilateral institutions were all hallmarks of his first presidency. What has changed is the absence of restraint. Trump’s Venezuela operation was not cloaked in euphemisms or diplomatic language. It was raw power exercised openly, without apology.

When journalists asked, half in disbelief, “What’s next, Mr. President-Colombia?” Trump’s response-“It sounds good to me”-was not a joke. It was a declaration. Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Greenland: no place appears off-limits if it falls within Washington’s perceived sphere of influence. “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again,” Trump declared, not as a warning to adversaries, but as a message to the world.

To understand how the United States arrived at this point, one must return to the origins of its hemispheric worldview. In 1823, President James Monroe articulated what would become known as the Monroe Doctrine, warning European powers against further colonial ambitions in the Americas. While framed as a defense of newly independent Latin American republics, the doctrine carried a deeper implication: that the Western Hemisphere was the exclusive domain of the United States.

The phrase “America for Americans” encapsulated what would become an enduring misunderstanding. The United States appropriated the identity of “America” for itself, relegating the rest of the continent’s peoples to secondary identities-Latin Americans, South Americans, Caribbeans-never simply Americans. From the outset, equality among the continent’s nations was never part of the vision.

Subsequent presidents expanded Monroe’s original idea into something far more aggressive. In 1880, President Rutherford B. Hayes asserted the US right to control Central America and the Caribbean, particularly any future interoceanic canal. In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt went further, proclaiming that the United States had the right to intervene militarily in any Latin American country if its interests were threatened. Sovereignty became conditional, granted or revoked at Washington’s discretion.

Trump’s recent “corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine adds little conceptually. The foreign power to be excluded is no longer Europe but China. The difference lies in execution. Where previous administrations at least pretended to respect international norms, Trump has discarded them entirely. Venezuela was not a warning; it was a demonstration.

There is no question that Venezuela under Maduro was an authoritarian state. The United Nations has documented systematic torture, enforced disappearances, and extrajudicial killings. In 2021, the International Criminal Court opened a formal investigation into crimes against humanity committed by Venezuelan authorities. Elections were manipulated, institutions hollowed out, and dissent criminalized.

Yet none of this explains the timing or nature of Trump’s intervention. If democracy and human rights were the true motivations, Washington had decades to act through international mechanisms. Instead, the United States tolerated Maduro when it was convenient and moved against him when it was strategically useful.

The operation that removed Maduro took eight minutes. Thirty-two Cuban guards protecting him were killed. The regime itself, however, remained intact. Power did not transfer to the democratic opposition or to an internationally supervised transitional authority. Instead, Maduro’s vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, was installed as interim president with Washington’s blessing. Her brother Jorge Rodríguez, Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, and Armed Forces chief Vladimir Padrino López-pillars of the old system-retained their positions.

Venezuela did not become free. It became a protectorate.

The priorities of the new arrangement were made clear immediately. Questions about elections, political prisoners, or democratic reforms were brushed aside as “premature” by Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The only urgency concerned oil. Control of energy resources, not political transformation, was the true objective.

For years, Venezuela’s opposition pursued every conceivable strategy to remove Maduro: protests, negotiations, international pressure, sanctions, election boycotts, and electoral participation. None succeeded. After the opposition’s disputed victory in the 2024 presidential election was ignored, desperation set in.

María Corina Machado, the opposition’s most prominent figure and recent Nobel Peace Prize laureate, placed her hopes in US intervention. She argued that military pressure, narco-terrorism accusations, and Washington’s looming presence would finally topple the regime and allow a democratic transition.

When Maduro was seized, Machado declared that the opposition was ready to “assert its mandate and take power.” Trump’s response was blunt and dismissive. She was sidelined, accused of lacking sufficient “respect” and “support.” The message was unmistakable: Venezuelan democracy was not the plan.

In a final, almost tragic attempt to regain relevance, Machado offered Trump her Nobel Peace Prize-an object he has long coveted. Even that gesture failed. The prize, the Norwegian Nobel Institute clarified, cannot be transferred.

Celebrations erupted among Venezuelan exiles across the Americas when Maduro’s fall was announced. Inside Venezuela, there was no such reaction. People understood what had happened. One ruler was removed, but the system remained-now operating under foreign supervision.

This is the most dangerous aspect of Trump’s action. By eliminating even the pretense of legality, the United States has normalized something far worse than intervention: unpredictability. No country in the region can be certain it will not be next. There is no doctrine to interpret, no legal threshold to avoid crossing. There is only power and submission.

International law, once at least a contested terrain, has been reduced to irrelevance. Institutions meant to restrain unilateral force appear as broken toys, incapable of protecting even the most basic principle of sovereignty.

Venezuela is not the end of this story. It is the beginning of a new phase in hemispheric relations-one defined not by doctrine, diplomacy, or even hypocrisy, but by what might best be described as jungle law. The strong act. The rest adapt-or wait their turn.

And in that silence, the warning has already been delivered.

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Source: Weekly Blitz :: Writings