Capture of Venezuelan President: Return of Colonial Seizure Politics

If reports of the capture and removal of Venezuela’s sitting president are even partially accurate, then what is unfolding is not a crisis of governance or an overdue act of justice. It is the unambiguous return of colonial seizure politics—the doctrine that powerful states may confiscate sovereignty itself when defiance becomes inconvenient.

This is not regime change as an accidental by-product of policy failure. It is regime removal as method. The familiar language of democracy, legality, and human rights is little more than ornamental cover. Strip it away and the operating logic is brutally clear: discipline the non-compliant, seize control, and reorder ownership. This is not the breakdown of the international system; it is the system functioning precisely as intended.

Venezuela was effectively subdued long before this moment. Years of sanctions did not merely “pressure” the state; they systematically dismantled its economic sovereignty. Revenues were strangled, institutions hollowed out, and governance rendered structurally unworkable. This was not unintended harm. It was preparation. Economic suffocation created the conditions in which intervention could later be marketed as inevitable rather than chosen.

When sanctions failed to produce surrender, political fiction followed. The US-engineered experiment of Juan Guaidó was not diplomacy but theater—an attempt to outsource sovereignty without tanks. When even that farce collapsed, escalation became the only remaining option. Empires do not retreat when resisted; they recalibrate.

The capture of a sitting president is not law enforcement—it is a declaration of ownership. By asserting jurisdiction over a foreign head of state, Washington is not upholding justice; it is asserting hierarchy. Venezuela is no longer treated as a sovereign political subject but as a managed space—its leadership provisional, its future externally arbitrated. This is not international law stretched beyond recognition. It is international law discarded outright.

Oil is not the subtext of this intervention; it is the text. Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Governments that privatize resources on Western terms are tolerated regardless of repression. Governments that insist on national control are destabilized regardless of elections. This is not hypocrisy. It is imperial consistency.

Dismissing Latin American resistance as “anti-Americanism” is willful blindness. From Guatemala and Chile to Panama and Nicaragua, the pattern is consistent: sanctions, destabilization, leadership removal, resource realignment. Venezuela fits perfectly—except this time, the mask is off.

This moment should not be personalized. Trump is not the cause; he is the instrument. The architecture of sanctions, energy interests, and bipartisan hostility to Venezuelan sovereignty predates him and will outlast him.

What is being normalized is more dangerous than Venezuela’s immediate devastation: the idea that sovereignty exists only by imperial permission, that sanctions are preparatory weapons, and that leaders may be seized rather than negotiated with. This is colonialism without occupation—domination without apology.