The
arrest of Nicolás Maduro, former president of Venezuela, is neither an isolated
event nor a mere episode of political confrontation in Latin America. Rather,
it is the symptom of a structural crisis in the international order, a crisis
whose deeper meaning can only be understood if we situate it within the
historical continuity of the “war on terror” that the United States proclaimed
in 2001, and within the profound transformations that this war has imprinted on
the institutions, norms, and practices of the international system.
Official
narratives presented Maduro’s arrest and the invasion of Venezuela as an
exceptional act aimed at addressing serious crimes: drug trafficking,
corruption, terrorism, and human rights violations. Behind this legal framework,
international criminal law is invoked, along with the principle of justice and,
more subtly, a narrative of democratic restoration. However, such a reading
does not sufficiently explain the legal and extrajurisdictional violence that
enabled his capture.
To
understand this, it is essential to look beyond the immediate and place the
event within the broader framework of U.S. foreign policy over the last two
decades. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States has
inaugurated an international policy that reconfigured not only its military
strategy, but also the very understanding of international law and the global
order. What was sold to the world as a specific response to terrorism—with the
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—gradually turned into a permanent, multifaceted,
and delocalized war, characterized by: a) the expansion of U.S. criminal
jurisdiction beyond its borders; b) the normalization of a series of
extrajudicial detentions and covert operations; c) the erosion of the principle
of state sovereignty in the face of security imperatives; and d) the
subordination of international law to power practices.
The
“exception” soon became the rule. From the invasion of Iraq in 2003, to drone
operations in Pakistan, Yemen, or Somalia, including several detentions in
third countries. What is surprising is not that the United States acts beyond
its borders, but that such acts became “normal” and, in many cases, tolerated
by the very institutions that supposedly safeguard the international order.
My
former professor, a U.S. expert in international relations, Robert Keohane, one
of the leading theorists of the liberal international order, emphasized that
this order rests on shared rules, multilateral institutions, and predictable
expectations of state behavior. In his analysis, the legitimacy of the global
order lies not only in the material power of great states, but in the
predictability and stability of the norms that regulate their interactions.
Keohane argued that an international liberal order is more resilient when
institutions have autonomous authority vis-à-vis unilateral interests; insofar
as disputes are resolved by peaceful and legal means, or when hegemony operates
under the logic of public goods and shared norms, not under discretionary
coercion.
What
we are witnessing with the invasion of Venezuela and the capture of the
dictator Nicolás Maduro is precisely the collapse of that predictability. The
arrest of a sitting head of state—or even one whose mandate was marred by
electoral fraud—without the clear involvement of multilateral mechanisms, with
the clandestine participation of security agencies such as the CIA, and under
the ultimate justification of “global security,” does not meet the basic
criteria of a “liberal order based on stable norms.”
Although
many analysts interpret this arrest as a radical rupture, historical evidence
suggests that it is, rather, an advanced stage of a process that in practice
began more than twenty years ago. Coercive violence and the preeminence of
unilateral interests have their origin in post‑9/11 policies, which became the
breeding ground for the gradual erosion of international law, because the
doctrine of U.S. preeminence is justified through preventive interventions and
unilateral actions under the banner of global security. On the other hand, we
clearly see the instrumentalization of transnational criminal law with the aim
of persecuting opposing political figures, assigning them crimes that transcend
borders. Thus, the delegitimization of multilateral bodies also emerges when
these bodies hinder or question Washington’s actions.
Maduro’s
arrest, then, is not a new act of aggression, but the clear manifestation of a
pattern of global (political and military) behavior that disregards the
traditional limits on the use of force and state sovereignty. This is where
Robert Keohane’s perspective becomes most illuminating, since the international
order has not abruptly broken down, but has lost its normative coherence. The
international community currently faces, first, a set of weakened institutions,
unable to enforce their own norms; second, a U.S. hegemony lacking normative
legitimacy, grounded in imposition rather than leadership; and third, a concept
of security interpreted as a unilateral prerogative, not as the product of
shared interests.
The
result is not simply the fragmentation of the order; it is the reconfiguration
of that order through state and non‑state violence, legitimized by narratives
about U.S. national security. Consequently, the arrest of Nicolás Maduro should
not be read as an isolated turning point or a historical anomaly, but as part
of the “continuity of a global war” that has redefined international law, state
sovereignty, and the legitimacy of the use of force. This continuity finds its clearest
expression today not in open battlefields, but in the legal folds that allow
the detention of political leaders outside any agreed multilateral and legal
framework.
Far
from marking the “beginning of the end” of the international order, the capture
of Maduro—foreseen for at least a year—confirms that the liberal international
order conceived by Keohane and others has been progressively replaced by an
order based on “coercive power” and international normative arbitrariness. What
some interpret as rupture is in fact the culmination of a process that began
more than two decades ago, in which U.S. hegemony seeks to reconstitute itself
not on the basis of shared rules, but on the violent imposition of its
interests under the guise of global security.
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