The Day Power Kidnapped Law in Venezuela

We just witnessed power kidnapping the law In Venezuela!

On 3 January 2026, the world crossed a dark and dangerous threshold. The President of the United States, Trump, ordered the abduction of a sitting head of state—Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—blindfolded, seized on his own soil, and transported aboard a U.S. warship like a common criminal. This was not diplomacy. It was not law enforcement. It was not justice. It was naked imperial arrogance—power kidnapping the law in broad daylight.

Let us speak plainly. What occurred in Venezuela was not an arrest; it was a kidnapping. It was not an act of international order; it was international vandalism. And it was not an aberration; it was the logical culmination of a long American habit of treating sovereignty as conditional and international law as optional.

The Trump administration has attempted to clothe this outrage in the language of morality—invoking allegations of narco-terrorism, drug trafficking, and human rights abuses. But no amount of rhetorical laundering can cleanse an act that stands in open defiance of the United Nations Charter. The forcible seizure of a sitting president by a foreign military power has no foothold in international law—none whatsoever. It is not self-defence under Article 51. It was not authorized by the UN Security Council. It is not supported by treaty law, customary law, or any serious jurisprudence known to humankind.

What we witnessed was power replacing principle.

Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez was correct—and restrained—when she called this act what it is: a violation of Venezuela’s territorial integrity and a savage assault on the very idea of sovereign equality. Her demand for the immediate release of President Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores is not a political plea; it is a legal imperative. Under international law, Nicolás Maduro remains the sole President of Venezuela, regardless of Washington’s preferences or prejudices.

President Trump’s remarks from Florida—boasting of conversations, implying compliance, casually musing about transitions—were as chilling as they were revealing. Here was a U.S. president speaking as though nations are corporate subsidiaries, their leaders removable by executive fiat. “We’re going to do this right,” Trump said. There are moments when history recoils at such words. This was one of them.

For let us be clear: human rights law does not license unilateral military abductions. If it did, the world would collapse into permanent chaos, with powerful states seizing disfavoured leaders under the banner of moral righteousness. Human rights law binds states to standards of conduct; it does not deputize empires as global kidnappers.

And if the principle were applied consistently—if consistency mattered—then the logic advanced by Washington would compel action far closer to home. By the standards now invoked, there would be a far stronger legal and moral case to seize Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, given the extensive documentation of mass civilian harm and credible allegations of genocide in Gaza. Yet no such logic is entertained. Why? Because this is not law. It is power selecting its targets.

Regime change is not an accident in American foreign policy; it is a pattern etched in blood and footnotes—from Iran in 1953 to Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973, Iraq in 2003 and Bangladesh in 2024. But even by those dismal standards, the kidnapping of a sitting president marks a new low. This is precisely the conduct the post-1945 legal order was designed to prevent. The prohibition on the use of force is not a technicality; it is the central nervous system of international law. To violate it without authorization is to announce that rules bind only the weak.

The global response has laid bare the moral fracture lines of our age. Brazil’s President Lula da Silva rightly called the U.S. strike a “serious affront” to sovereignty. Mexico condemned it unequivocally. Cuba denounced it as criminal. China expressed shock at the blatant use of force against a sovereign state. Across the United States itself, citizens poured into the streets—Washington, New York, beyond—chanting “No war on Venezuela” and “No blood for oil,” holding aloft Venezuelan flags as a rebuke to imperial overreach. In Bangladesh, we too denounce this heinous crime in the harshest and most unflinching terms—echoing the cry “No war on Venezuela” and “No blood for oil,” while raising the Venezuelan flag high as a defiant rebuke to imperial arrogance and excess.

Yet others—most notably Britain’s prime minister and America’s ideological allies—welcomed or rationalized the crime, shedding “no tears” as law was trampled underfoot. Their complicity will not be forgotten. History has a long memory for those who applaud when might masquerades as right.
The rot, however, extends beyond Venezuela. Washington has repeatedly violated its obligations under the UN Charter and the UN Headquarters Agreement—denying entry to officials it disfavors, obstructing participation, and treating the world’s principal multilateral institution as a venue subject to American approval. When the host state of the United Nations behaves as its gatekeeper and censor, the message is unmistakable: access to international legality is conditional on obedience.

The United Nations was designed to constrain power, not flatter it. Today, paralyzed by vetoes, bullied by its host, and ignored by those most capable of violating its charter, the UN risks becoming a stage prop in the erosion of the very order it was meant to uphold. At some point, denial becomes self-deception. The system is failing not because international law is naïve, but because its most powerful beneficiary has decided it is expendable.

It is therefore time to say the unsayable. A serious global conversation must begin about relocating the United Nations away from a host state that treats treaty obligations as inconveniences. The world must also contemplate alternative global structures—ones whose authority is not hostage to a single capital, a single veto, or a single currency. Law cannot survive as a slogan. Either it restrains those who wield the greatest force, or it becomes mere rhetoric deployed against those who do not.

Donald Trump’s temerity in abducting President Nicolás Maduro is not a defence of order. It is a confession that order has been replaced by preference—and preferences, unlike law, recognize no limits. On 3 January 2026, power did not merely violate the law in Venezuela. It kidnapped it, bound and blindfolded, and hauled it aboard a warship.

The world must decide whether it will accept this new barbarism—or whether it still believes that even the mighty are bound by rules. History, as Vice President Rodríguez warned, will judge. And justice, delayed though it may be, has a way of returning the verdict.


Anwar A. Khan is a freedom
fighter who writes on politics
and contemporary issues.