WikiLeaks cables show that regime change has long been US strategy. A 2006 US Embassy document set out a strategy to “strengthen democratic institutions, penetrate and divide Chavismo, and build independent society”. The legal groundwork for escalation was established in 2015 when Barack Obama’s administration declared Venezuela a “national security threat,” allowing more coercive pressure.

Since at least 2002, the United States has worked to cultivate an opposition-aligned “civil society.” By working with Venezuelan opposition groups behind the scenes and by financing a dense ecosystem of NGOs through agencies such as USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, Washington has worked to reengineer Venezuela’s political terrain and bring about a government favorable to US interests. What is labeled “democracy promotion” serves a core function of hybrid warfare: it provides plausible deniability for a real project of foreign intervention.

The most visible expression of this political warfare was Washington’s recognition of Juan Guaidó in 2019 as Venezuela’s “interim president.” This became the centerpiece of an international effort to construct a parallel state apparatus abroad, presenting Guaidó as the legitimate head of government. This fiction provided the political foundation for the seizure of Venezuelan assets, massively stepped-up economic strangulation, and the channeling of diplomatic and financial support to a US-backed opposition. Nearly sixty countries were enlisted in this coordinated attempt to isolate Maduro. It was about manufacturing the conditions for regime change behind the language of constitutional legitimacy.

Yet, this hybrid-warfare campaign didn’t work. Despite mounting pressure — political warfare, economic strangulation, lawfare, diplomatic siege, and constant behind-the-scenes efforts to fracture the Bolivarian Revolution — this strategy failed to deliver. Donald Trump even dismissed Guaidó as the “Beto O’Rourke of Venezuela,” with reference to the failed US presidential candidate — a fitting epitaph for the collapse of this particular initiative.

As the Guaidó project fell apart, Washington leaned on a tried-and-tested script for intervention in Latin America — the War on Drugs — using indictments, rewards, and narco-terrorism allegations to rebrand regime change as law enforcement.

Journalists across mainstream media amplified a cartel narrative that recast Maduro as a drug kingpin — the alleged head of the so-called Cartel de los Soles. What had once been framed as a struggle over “democracy” was now described as a criminal manhunt for a leader of a narco-terrorist organization.

The weaponization of War on Drugs narratives to justify foreign intervention in Latin America has been a central pillar of US geopolitical strategy for decades. It has functioned as a key pretext through which Washington has exerted political leverage, tying access to trade, financial markets, security cooperation, and diplomatic legitimacy to compliance with US strategic priorities. Governments that fall out of favor, even as they announce record drug seizures, are branded as “drug leaders” and “narco-regimes” — a label that serves to delegitimize them internationally and open the door to sanctions and more overt forms of coercion. Through the strategic initiative of Plan Colombia from 2000 onward, billions of dollars in military assistance were poured into Colombia to combat leftist insurgents, even as wide sections of political society actively collaborated with drug-funded right-wing paramilitaries.

Under the second Trump administration, this logic was fully operationalized. The bounty on Maduro’s head was raised from $15 million to $50 million by the US Department of State in a move designed to intensify pressure. An aggressive campaign portrayed Venezuela — not the far more central producers and trafficking hubs in Colombia or Mexico — as the epicenter of the global drugs trade. Even the DEA’s own 2025 National Threat Assessment didn’t list Venezuela as a major producer or a trafficking hub, instead singling out Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Mexico.

A whole procedural storyline, facilitated by the US court system — indictments, warrants, and state-sanctioned reward programs — was deployed to present escalation as “due process” and generate the illusion of plausible deniability for regime change. This was “statecraft by indictment” — the criminalization of the Bolivarian leadership, as the new spearhead of Washington’s hybrid war.

Efforts to manufacture consent were paired with a massive intensification of coercive operations against Venezuela, supposedly to stop drugs from reaching US shores. This military build-up took concrete form in a major US naval deployment to the Caribbean, backed by extensive sea and air power. The United States sought to economically strangle Venezuela by targeting its primary export, oil, enforcing a “total and complete blockade,” seizing tankers in international waters, and as of January 7, claiming they were going to control sales.

In the months leading up to Maduro’s kidnapping, counter-narcotics claims were used to justify military “strikes” against sea and land targets in and around Venezuela. At least 110 people were extrajudicially executed on boats by the start of this month, with Trump baselessly claiming that “every one of those boats . . . kills 25,000 Americans” — and insisting that “Maduro’s days were numbered.” At the same time, strategic planners such as Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, working with their friends in the media, constantly repeated that the unprecedented escalation was law-enforcement rather than a hybrid regime change operation. This was the political purpose of the drug-war framing: to provide moral cover for a geostrategic offensive as part of the wider project to restore US dominance in Latin America.

Operation “Absolute Resolve,” as it was dubbed by US strategic planners, was a hybrid operation par excellence. It brought overt and covert methods of warfare together to achieve a key objective: the kidnapping of President Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores.

The raid began with overwhelming air dominance and military action that served as a “shock and awe” strategy designed to spread fear and disorientation across an entire city. Power outages and blackouts were reported across Caracas, with Trump boasting that the “lights of Caracas largely turned off due to a certain expertise that we have; it was dark, and it was deadly.” The operation drew directly from the repertoire of hybrid warfare, fusing military force, intelligence operations, and the law enforcement framing into a single, tightly choreographed act of coercion.

The special-forces assault on Maduro’s residence benefited from speed and surprise: far from any recognizable arrest or judicial process, it was a capture by force. The night-time kidnapping brutally executed the lawfare strategy.

What followed over the next hours and days was an avalanche of propaganda as Maduro’s kidnapping was legitimated with constant references to legality and “judicial processing” by mainstream media. The “law enforcement” narrative was placed front and center on networks like CNN and Fox News, as cameras and commentary fixated on “indictments” and the “processing” of the “captured” and “arrested” Maduro. Leaked emails show that the BBC directly instructed its staff to refer to the kidnapping in these terms — thus presenting Maduro as a wanted man, running from the law.

The framing was perverse but central to the operation: it chose to launder a naked act of state terror, recasting it as the legitimate execution of a court order. With hollow references to “law and order,” the victims, including civilians, were reduced to disposable figures in a grand performance of imperial legality.

Yet the operation and media fanfare that accompanied it were about more than Maduro himself. They were a form of geostrategic communication: a moment of spectacle and intimidation that also provided an opportunity to warn others. Reading from a carefully prepared script on January 3, Trump declared that the “extremely successful operation should serve as warning to anyone who would threaten American sovereignty or endanger American lives.”

In this new phase of hybrid warfare, the United States’ Venezuela policy is no longer contested through election disputes or self-proclaimed presidents, but a more open form of coercion and submission to empire. Indeed, Venezuela occupies a critical position in the architecture of contemporary imperialism, where struggles over strategic resources, the US-China rivalry, Latin American autonomy, and the survival of the Cuban Revolution converge.

As Trump openly admitted, Venezuela is one of the few Latin American states that has maintained a long-term refusal to fall into line with US strategic priorities. It has redirected oil, finance, and security cooperation away from Washington and toward strategic rivals of the United States, building close alliances with China, Russia, Iran, and others. This makes Venezuela not just an economic prize for a few US multinational corporations, but a strategic hinge in the quest for regional and global dominance.

The broader ambitions were clearly spelled out in the US National Security Strategy, unveiled in November: “the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.”

Venezuela possesses the largest oil reserves in the world, a commodity foundational to military projection and the stability of the international political economy. The scale of Venezuela’s reserves is such that they can shape the viability of long-term geopolitical objectives even in a context of low prices and production decline.

Control of energy resources is intimately intertwined with the dollar system and strategic-alliance politics. When a major oil producer like Venezuela aligns with powers seeking to structurally reform the Western-led world order, it threatens to erode the pillars of US power – which explains why the United States treats Venezuelan oil as a strategic asset worth breaking international law for, and why the kidnapping is about more than War on Drugs rhetoric.

In its struggle to survive economic warfare, Maduro’s government has been pushed toward using yuan pricing, oil-backed debt resettlement, experimentation with cryptocurrencies, intermediary trading, and relabeling Venezuelan crude. In other words, sanctions had the unintended effect of incentivizing Caracas to develop alternative mechanisms that reduced its dependence on dollar-cleared markets and made Venezuelan oil a vehicle for challenging the very financial levers the United States relies on to enforce its hegemony.

There are also other geopolitical issues at stake. Washington has long viewed the Bolivarian Revolution as a center of gravity for political resistance in the region — not least because of its crucial solidarity with the Cuban Revolution. Far from being “just another left-wing government,” the Bolivarian Revolution has sought to build an alternative political-economic project by reorganizing key state institutions — including a civil–military alliance — toward sovereignty and redistribution, moving away from the liberal “democratic” forms of governance that so effectively allow US interests and dominant class forces to penetrate civil and political society.

Unlike other electoral left-leaning governments that proved fragile in the face of coups, lawfare, economic attack, and elite sabotage, the Venezuelan project has endured prolonged internal and external pressure, making it a qualitatively different form of state project — and therefore a uniquely high-value target for regime change. Together with its strategic assets, commitment to a multipolar world order, and political resistance to the United States within Latin America, Venezuela represents not simply a local nuisance but a challenge to the global hierarchy of imperialism.

Ultimately, the kidnapping was the violent escalation of a hybrid strategy designed to bring a strategically positioned nonaligned state back under US control. The narrative of the War on Drugs and the media fixation on Maduro’s courtroom processing are not incidental: they are the ideological cover that converts a kidnapping into a fraudulent exercise in due process. This is how consent is manufactured for a power play aimed at restoring US dominance in the western hemisphere and warning others who may dare to defy the Empire.