Dear Editor,
Yesterday, President Donald Trump announced that the United States had ‘captured’ Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife and flown them out of the country after “large-scale” strikes. But does this to an end to the major concerns surrounding the recent behaviour of the American administration. I think not.
In ‘America Unbound in the Caribbean: The Real Costs of Washington’s Use of Force (FA, November 26, 2025), Brian Finucane argues that the position taken by the current US government in relation to the situation in Venezuela is extremely dangerous. He notes that between September and the time he was writing, the administration of President Donald Trump had carried out over 20 lethal strikes on vessels on the high seas killing more than 80 persons, claiming that the boats were carrying drugs from South America; had been attempting to cloak the strikes in the guise of counterterrorism efforts and had even promised to unilaterally invade the country to accomplish regime change.
‘These attacks endanger the legal order both domestically and internationally. They suggest that the U.S. executive holds a license to kill and possibly the United States could well embolden other states to conduct their own extrajudicial killings. As Trump wields deadly force without constraints, he offers a model for lethal, lawless action, thereby posing a threat to international security that extends well beyond the Western Hemisphere.’ He argues that a host of legal professionals have denounced the Administration’s actions as illegal and even Britain and France have distanced themselves from actions that are likely to be considered ‘extrajudicial killings’.
As a personal backdrop, in 1971, my second year at university, using such notions as colonialism, imperialism, dependency, etc., Eduardo Galeano, wrote ‘Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent’, in which he described the history of European and United States of America (USA) interventions in the region as one of economic exploitation and political dominance. The book became a reference for a generation of leftist thinkers and was banned in several countries but almost four decades later, Hugo Chavez, who was elected president of Venezuela in 1998, was a huge fan.
Chávez began his tenure with a socialist programme to quickly improve the conditions of the poor and dispossessed by redistributing wealth, empowering marginalised communities etc. Of course, this required substantially dismantling the power of the extant political/economic elite and would have met with severe opposition in almost any competitive political context. He also devised a new constitution that established the ‘Bolivarian Republic’, nationalised several industries, and importantly, his foreign policy was strongly anti-American; and supported movements that challenged U.S. regional hegemony.
Liberal democratic politics is not amenable to the kind of quick revolutionary changes that Chevez sought and this led to the mobilisation of domestic and international interests that accused him of eroding democratic institutions by suppressing dissents, manipulating the electoral processes and consolidating his power by fostering an authoritarian regime that has brought ruination upon the population and led to a massive refugee problem that is affecting the entire region.
By 2006, the USA already had their sight on Chavez. During the Doha Round negotiations, trade ministers were invited to dinner at the residence of the director of the World Trade Organisation that overlooked the river Rhine. The Barbadian Minister and I were looking at the river and conceptualising the possibilities of the Essequibo, when the United States Trade Representative arrived and asked me as the minister responsible for Small and Vulnerable Economies whether it was true that Venezuela was attempting to join the group. I told her that Venezuela was too economically large to join and the discourse ended with her apparently spontaneous statement that ‘if the Venezuelan government continues the way it is it will become small and vulnerable indeed.’
Chevez was quite lighfooted on the Guyana border issue which, following the line taken by Cheddi Jagan, he rightly claimed in a 2004 public speech at the Guyana Pegasus was concocted by the United States as a contingency in the event of the People’s’ Progressive Party (PPP) taking government in Guyana and seeking to fulfill the promise we are now aware it made to introduce communism in South America. He was also not coyish about his intentions: at his first meeting with President Barack Obama at the Fifth Summit of the Americas (VSOA) meeting in 2009 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, after arguing in favour of lifting the American orchestrated embargo of Cuba, he reinforced his point by presenting Obama with a copy of Open Veins.
But I must admit that given the regional experiences of Cheddi Jagan of Guyana in the 1950s, Salvadore Allende of Chile in the 1970s and even Morris Bishop of Granada in the 1980s, I was somewhat surprised and thought it foolhardy that Chevez could have been so blasé about his intentions. Perhaps he surmised that since Soviet communism was dead, radical socialism was acceptable but if so, he was wrong. Chavez died in 2013 and was succeeded by his vice president Nicolás Maduro who continued along a similar trajectory, and as fate would have it, Barack Obama was the one who, on 9th March 2015, signed and issued an executive order declaring Venezuela a national security threat.
The international community appeared to have concluded that the official opposition had done its best but needed help if the Maduro regime was to be encouraged to change track or be removed. Over the years, it has been using pressure of various kinds to encourage reforms and finally to support regime change. Revolutionaries and their supporters would not easily surrender government, thus notwithstanding that it has the largest oil reserves in the world and was comparatively quite prosperous, today Venezuela has indeed become economically small and politically vulnerable.
While there is nothing wrong with providing help to populations under pressure from an overweening state, it is quite another story for one to make war, or take similar type action, on a sovereign state without the requisite authority. Since President Obama is in our frame please note that when early in his presidency he was offered the Nobel Peace Prize, to many it appeared inappropriate since he was pursuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that he had not even begun.
In his acceptance speech Obama held to the ‘Just war theory’ which requires among other things that wars and other such actions should be a last resort, and that self-defence declared by legitimate authority is permissible. In the case of 9/11, the United States suffered an armed attack on its soil, which by international law gave it a right to self-defence and by a resolution passed on September 12, 2001, the UN Security Council recognised that right.
Closer home, if Brian Finucane is correct – and he appears to be – it seems that the current US administration went for Maduro and his government without national or international authority. Apart from concerns about adherence to due process for the victims, relatively small states cannot survive sensibly in the absence of a substantial, progressive international legal regime, and it does appear that with or without the capture of Maduro, the present position of Washington already endangered the existence of such an international regime and should be judicially pronounced upon and compensated for if the situation is to be salvaged.