From Sanctions to Seizure: Washington’s Use of Military Force in Venezuela

Over the last quarter century, tensions between Caracas and Washington have oscillated between sanctions, diplomatic rupture, covert operations, and military operations. From late 2025 through to early 2026, these tensions escalated into a dramatic attack on Venezuelan soil.

In the early hours of 3 January 2026, the United States executed a large-scale military raid and air campaign in and around Caracas, an operation US officials later identified as “Operation Absolute Resolve.” The operation began with multiple waves of airstrikes intended to neutralise Venezuelan air defences and secure access corridors for special operations forces, with Reuters describing a package of over 150 aircraft operating from roughly 20 bases as part of the broader strike architecture.

Within that strike umbrella, US forces raided the site where Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was located, kidnapping both him and his wife Cilia Flores from Venezuelan territory. The pair were transported onto the USS Iwo Jima before being flown onward to the United States. Between 3-4 January 2026, he was in US custody in New York, with the Trump administration publicly presenting the operation as an enforcement action linked to longstanding criminal charges, while Venezuelan officials and various other governments described it as an unlawful abduction and an assault on sovereignty.

Internationally, the episode triggered immediate controversy over escalation and legality. According to Reuters expert criticisms, indictments and counternarcotics claims do not, on their own, supply a clear basis for the cross-border use of force under international law absent self-defence or UN authorisation.

Context: the Bolivarian Revolution and Tensions with Washington

The election of Hugo Chávez in 1998 marked a turning point in Venezuela’s post-war history; Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution was anti-liberal, nationalised key sectors of the economy, most importantly hydrocarbons, and forged strategic partnerships with Cuba, Iran, and later China and Russia. Through nationalisation and tighter control over PDVSA revenues, the state dramatically expanded social spending, which rose from roughly 11% of GDP in 1998 to over 22% by 2011, while inequality fell sharply. These gains were underwritten by high oil prices and a rent-based model rather than diversification, leaving the economy structurally exposed.

Caracas’ narrative was based on an anti-imperial sovereignty that directly challenged US dominance in the Western Hemisphere. Relations with Washington deteriorated sharply following the 2002 coup attempt against Chávez, widely perceived within Venezuela as tacitly supported by U.S. actors, even as U.S. officials denied involvement.

Under  Nicolás Maduro, these vulnerabilities became acute. Following Chávez’s death in 2013, oil production collapsed, institutional capacity deteriorated, and macroeconomic imbalances spiralled into hyperinflation, peaking near 1 million percent in 2018 by IMF estimates. Between 2013 and 2021, Venezuela’s real GDP contracted by over 75%, one of the largest peacetime economic collapses on record. U.S. sanctions, which intensified after 2017 and culminated in comprehensive oil and financial restrictions in 2019, severely constrained state revenue and external financing, accelerating social breakdown. By the early 2020s, over 7 million Venezuelans had left the country, transforming a national economic crisis into a hemispheric humanitarian and political shock.

US Strategy: Sanctions, Criminalisation, and the “Cartel of the Suns”

US policy has moved from diplomatic isolation + sectoral sanctions to a more explicit strategy of criminalisation and de-legitimisation of the Maduro leadership, using counter-narcotics and terrorism authorities as its principal legal frame. The legal core predates 2025: in March 2020 the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed an indictment charging Nicolás Maduro and 14 other Venezuelan officials with, among other offences, narco-terrorism and cocaine trafficking conspiracy. In 2025 the U.S. escalated by formally targeting the alleged state-linked network itself: the Treasury announced OFAC sanctions on the “Cartel of the Suns” on 25 July 2025, alleging it provided material support to major trafficking organisations (U.S. Department of the Treasury, 2025). The State Department then stated it intended to designate the Cartel of the Suns as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, effective 24 November 2025, which, in practice, reframes parts of the Venezuelan state apparatus from “sanctioned” to “terror-linked” in the language of U.S. national security law.

That designation architecture became the normative bridge to operational escalation in late 2025 and 2026: US enforcement of sanctions expanded beyond officials and PDVSA-linked entities into traders, tankers, and maritime logistics, paired with interdictions and a visibly reinforced naval posture in the southern Caribbean. For example, the US seizure of the tanker Skipper, which was reported as carrying roughly 1.8 million barrels of crude from a Venezuelan port before interception was presented as a sanctions-enforcement action backed by US judicial process, and U.S. officials signalled further seizures could follow (Reuters, 2025). The campaign also widened to private intermediaries: the Financial Times reported US sanctions on four oil trading firms accused of shipping Venezuelan crude, as Washington coupled financial measures with a heightened military posture; it also reported SOUTHCOM lethal strikes on five vessels in one week, with eight alleged traffickers killed, illustrating how “counter-narcotics” was being operationalised as coercive leverage against Caracas (Financial Times, 2025).

Domestic Fragility

Inside Venezuela, prolonged economic contraction, infrastructure decay, and political polarisation undermined state capacity and social cohesion. Oil production, once exceeding three million barrels per day, had declined precipitously, eroding fiscal bases for public services and social programs. Migration flows have reshaped labour markets across the region, with millions of Venezuelans seeking refuge in Colombia, Brazil, and the Caribbean.

US pressure has not only targeted oil revenue and shipping, but has also materially impeded Venezuela’s ability to procure medicines, medical equipment, and inputs, even where humanitarian trade is formally exempt. In 2019, the former Americas executive director of Human Rights Watch, Jose Miguel Vivanco warned: “Human Rights Watch is deeply concerned that recent US sanctions on Venezuela will further exacerbate the suffering of the Venezuelan people. While the purchase of food and medicine is in theory excluded from the sanctions, foreign providers fearing punishment under the sanctions may limit their transactions with Venezuelan authorities in ways that could seriously harm even more Venezuelans’ economic and social rights” (Human Rights Watch, 2019).

International health and human rights reporting has repeatedly linked this sanctions-finance environment to concrete medical scarcity. In 2019, sanctions had “blocked” imports of medicine, more than 300,000 people were at risk due to lack of lifesaving medications and treatment (The Lancet, 2019). In 2021, the UN Special Rapporteur on unilateral coercive measures Alena Douhan reported: “Medical staff positions in public hospitals are 50-70% vacant. Only around 20 per cent of medical equipment is currently functional. The country faced severe shortages of vaccines against measles, yellow fever, and malaria in 2017–2018. The lack of tests and treatment for HIV in 2017–2018 reportedly resulted in the severe rise of the death rate.  The diversion of assets of PDVSA’s United States subsidiary, CITGO, has prevented transplants of liver and bone marrow to 53 Venezuelan children; such transplants were reportedly done in Italy and Argentina before 2016 at the expense of the state.” among other findings such as “Nearly $2 billion in gold owned by the Central Bank of Venezuela and held in the Bank of England is also frozen as a case proceeds in British courts” (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2021).

The Atlas Institute for International Affairs has also explicitly addressed the medicine-procurement constraint dimension of sanctions, citing cases such as refused payments for 300,000 insulin doses and pharmaceutical firms’ refusal to issue export certificates for cancer drugs in its September analysis of US measures against Venezuela (Atlas Institute for International Affairs, 2025). It is evident that shortages are not merely a function of domestic mismanagement or infrastructure decay but they are also mediated by international payment channels, where sanctions compliance and risk avoidance have functioned as a blockade, with downstream effects on health, wellbeing and mortality.

Escalation of Conflict and Operation Absolute Resolve

The final months of 2025 were characterised by a marked escalation in US pressure on Venezuela. On 16 December, President Donald Trump announced a complete blockade of sanctioned oil tankers trading with Venezuelan ports, an act condemned in Caracas as a threat to its national sovereignty. This naval quarantine was enforced alongside the seizure of vessels in the Caribbean, including the oil tanker Skipper, which the US described as part of a shadow fleet evading sanctions (Reuters, 2025). Simultaneously, US military forces conducted strikes against maritime targets alleged to be involved in drug trafficking, killing dozens across multiple engagements. Although portrayed as “counter-narcotics” actions, these operations also sent a clear signal of willingness to use force in and around Venezuelan territory.

In response, President Maduro stated on in an interview that aired on New Year’s Day that Venezuela was open to negotiating an agreement with the United States on combatting drug trafficking. He reiterated that the US wanted to impose regime change in Venezuela and gain access to its vast oil reserves (Associated Press, 2026).

On 3 January 2026, the United States launched a series of air and special operations strikes across Venezuela, codenamed Operation Absolute Resolve. US Delta Force commandos and Air Force assets penetrated Venezuelan airspace and urban areas around Caracas. In a highly controversial action, forces captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, placing them aboard the USS Iwo Jima before conveying them to New York to face US federal charges (Reuters, 2026). He is accused of the organising of cocaine smuggling; the sale of diplomatic passports to drug traffickers; hiding drug revenues; controlling gangs to protect and facilitate drug trafficking’ organised kidnappings and murders of people who owed money or threatened his drug business (US Department of Justice, 2026; Reuters, 2026).

On 5 January 2026, the initial court hearing in the case of President Maduro will take place in the Manhattan federal court. The case will be handled by judge Alvin Hellerstein, who has previously handled many high-profile lawsuits. The hearing will be purely procedural, where the court will determine the fundamental parameters of the case.

US officials framed the operation as a combined law-enforcement and military initiative aimed at detaining an indicted criminal and dismantling trafficking networks. Critics, both within international law scholarship and among foreign governments argued the incursion violated Venezuelan sovereignty.

Caracas’ Supreme Court immediately installed Vice President Delcy Rodríguez as interim president, rejecting the legality of Maduro’s removal. Venezuelan and allied governments denounced the operation as “state terrorism,” and protests erupted across regional capitals. Cuba’s president explicitly condemned the action: “It is a shocking violation of the norms of international law – the military aggression against a peaceful nation that poses no threat to the United States.” Venezuela supplies 30% of Cuba’s oil imports in exchange for medical personnel. The potential loss of oil would largely diminish Cuba’s energy supplies.

Selective Enforcement and the Limits of the “Counter-Narcotics” Rationale

Washington’s insistence that the seizure of Nicolás Maduro reflects a neutral application of counter-narcotics law is undermined by the highly selective way such legal authorities are exercised. A revealing counterpoint lies in the US treatment of Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who was sentenced to 45 years in jail in US federal courts for conspiring to traffic hundreds of tonnes of cocaine into the United States and for accepting millions of dollars in bribes from major drug cartels (US Department of Justice 2024). The scale of the crimes attributed to Hernández, whose tenure coincided with deep US security co-operation in Central America exceeded those alleged against many non-state trafficking figures, yet his case was handled strictly through judicial channels without military action, cross-border force, or claims of emergency sovereignty override (US Embassy in Honduras.

This contrast is not simply legal but deeply political. Honduras has long functioned as a strategic US partner in Central America, hosting US military infrastructure and aligning closely with Washington on regional security priorities (Al Jazeera, 2025). Even after Hernández’s conviction, executive clemency, a tool fully available within the US President’s power was deployed and on 1 December 2025, Hernández was released from prison (US Congressional Research Service, 2025). The existence of these facts display the extent to which counter-narcotics enforcement is a selective narrative rather than applied as a uniform doctrine.

Seen in this light, the argument that the Maduro operation was not about oil but purely about drugs collapses under scrutiny. If narco-trafficking alone justified cross-border military seizure of a sitting head of state, then precedent would demand similar action against allied leaders whose criminal conduct was demonstrably proven in US courts. Instead, enforcement thresholds appeared to align with strategic utility: hostile governments are criminalised, delegitimised and subjected to force, while cooperative states remain insulated from escalation.

Bibliography:

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