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........

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