’We did this incredible thing’: Trump’s capture of Maduro and the ‘complexities’ of international law |
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.
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.
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........