by Richard M. Balzano
On January 3rd, “Operation Absolute Resolve” transformed years of coup attempts, subversion, and sanctions into outright abduction, as Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were kidnapped by U.S. forces and transported to New York. The White House framed Maduro as a narco-kingpin, head of the fictional “Cartel of the Suns,” dressing the regime-change operation in the language of law enforcement coated in uplifting rhetoric that oscillated between liberation-speak and outright resource imperialism.
Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, spent decades antagonizing Washington by committing the unforgivable crime of using Venezuela’s oil wealth to fund social programs instead of allowing multinational corporations to siphon it abroad uninterrupted. His Bolivarian Revolution improved literacy, healthcare access, and poverty indicators for millions. He also kept winning elections, which triggers Washington’s fraud reflex whenever “our guy” loses in Latin America, even though the Carter Center famously described Venezuela’s election system as “the best in the world.”
Washington did what it always does: coup attempts, sanctions, covert destabilization, media warfare, and subversive NGOs. Millions flowed through the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID, cultivating opposition parties and protest movements functioning as color-revolution infrastructure beneath the sanitized language of democracy promotion. Maduro inherited Chávez’s presidency in 2013, and Washington’s campaign simply continued under a new villain-of-the-month branding package.
A common misunderstanding in the U.S. is that Chávez “nationalized” Venezuelan oil, but Venezuela nationalized its oil industry in 1976 under the U.S.-friendly Carlos Andrés Pérez. Chávez’s alleged theft came in 2007, when he restructured hydrocarbon law and relegated foreign oil firms to minority partnerships under state oil company PDVSA. Some companies stayed, but others—namely Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips—refused. Their assets were expropriated, not “stolen.” Compensation was offered based on the undervalued figures the companies themselves had reported for tax purposes. The corporations wanted it both ways: bargain-bin valuations for taxes, premium valuations when suing Venezuela in international tribunals designed to protect Western capital. International courts ruled Venezuela owed $10 billion to ConocoPhillips, but Exxon’s inflated $12+ billion claims were slashed by 90+ percent. The dispute became the emotional centerpiece of Washington’s oil-grab narrative, transforming a resource sovereignty conflict into a morality play for cable-news audiences trained to view multinational corporations as innocent victims of tropical barbarism.
The Nobel Prize exposed its own corruptibility when it honored Venezuelan opposition figure María Corina Machado leading up to the intervention, “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela.” On international television, Machado frequently lobbied for U.S. regime-change boots on the ground, begging Washington to invade her own country. The more aggressively she aligned herself with U.S. interventionism, the more toxic she became domestically. The Nobel functioned less as recognition than narrative preparation—a moral-laundering operation designed to manufacture an internationally marketable opposition figure before regime change unfolded.
Believing its own liberation propaganda, the Trump administration assumed Venezuelans would welcome another parade of neoliberal kleptocrats with open arms. Regime change plotters in the White House failed to account for Machado’s extreme unpopularity. Despite sanction-induced deprivation and relentless media demonization, the Bolivarian Revolution retains a significant support base—certainly more support than American imperial ambitions.
The legal architecture surrounding Maduro’s kidnapping is revealing. Washington insisted Maduro personally directed a massive narco-terror organization known as the “Cartel of the Suns,” which does not exist. Even analysts hostile to Maduro acknowledged that the “Cartel” was shorthand for diffuse corruption networks involving military officials and traffickers—not a vertically integrated cartel akin to Sinaloa, personally run by the Venezuelan president. Revised Justice Department filings have now softened or abandoned claims portraying the organization as a formal cartel directed by Maduro himself, hollowing out the case before it goes to trial.
This is a critical loss for the Trump administration, as Washington needed the narco-terror framing. Once the language of “terrorism” is attached to a target, sovereignty suddenly becomes negotiable in the imperial-legal imagination. The post-9/11 era normalized extraordinarily elastic interpretations of self-defense, extraterritorial enforcement, and executive power. If branded terrorists, domestic and geopolitical enemies can be sanctioned, abducted, bombed, disappeared, tortured, or destabilized beneath the comforting glow of counterterrorism discourse. Without “narco-terrorism,” all we have is a war crime—more than half of U.S. media consumers won’t have a problem with it, but the other half might, depending on how effective the rest of the propaganda is.
None of this is historically anomalous. In 1954, Guatemala’s democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz, was ousted in a CIA-led coup; his most glaring crime was nationalizing U.S. corporate landholdings and offering compensation at the undervalued tax rate. Coups are a dime a dozen, but even outright abducting heads of state has precedent. In 2004, Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced by U.S. personnel onto an American aircraft and flown out of the country before Haiti was marched deeper into the neoliberal regime of privatization, austerity, and structural adjustment dictated by Washington, the IMF, and the World Bank. Panama’s Manuel Noriega—an actual narco-trafficker and CIA asset—met a similar fate after becoming politically inconvenient to the same U.S. security state that once valued him as a useful anti-communist ally.
The Maduro operation follows the same imperial script: transform a geopolitical enemy into a terror threat, lower the threshold for extraordinary intervention, rely on a compliant media ecosystem to repeat government claims with minimal scrutiny, and disregard international law. This is not counterterrorism—it is low-IQ imperialism.
If Washington was interested in stopping the flow of narcotics, the most effective place to begin is a mirror.
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Richard M. Balzano is an historian and political analyst peddling truths at several institutions of higher learning, quietly devoted to the art of sedition and comfortably resigned to the peripheral left.