The Trump administration has just violated international law — specifically Article 2, Section 4 of the United Nations Charter — by kidnapping the sitting president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, and placing him on trial under drug-trafficking charges that critics across the Global South and international legal scholars describe as politically motivated and fraudulent.
Now ask yourself this: Can you imagine if Russia or China sent a helicopter into the United States, turned off all electricity and the lights in Washington, D.C., and kidnapped the American president?
There would be wall-to-wall coverage.
Emergency U.N. sessions.
Sanctions.
Threats of war.
But because the United States did it, corporate media is treating this not as a war crime, but as a political development.
Under international law, the forcible seizure of a head of state is a grave breach of sovereignty and an act of aggression. Yet we are once again reminded that international law does not exist.
Instead of reporting on that fact, Western corporate media is pushing the same script across all platforms.
Wait — I thought this was about drug trafficking?
Right now, from CNN to the BBC, audiences are being flooded with footage of wealthy Venezuelan expatriates in Miami celebrating — cheering, waving flags, and calling this “liberation.”
Across social media, many of these viral videos of Venezuelans celebrating Trump abducting their leader are actually AI-generated. They are fake, and they are being shared by right-wing influencers such as Nick Shirley to their millions of followers.
What is not being shown are the millions of Venezuelans in the streets of Caracas protesting foreign U.S. intervention, denouncing sanctions, and rejecting U.S. interference and the kidnapping of their elected president.
At the same time, as these same images and the same script are repeated and amplified, corporate media is recycling a single narrative to justify a so-called humanitarian intervention.
We have seen this exact storyline before — in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria, and across the Global South.
First, the leader is dehumanized.
Then the country is morally simplified.
Legitimate frustration with economic issues is weaponized and used to call for regime change.
Then, before long, international law disappears.
Luxury watches.
Starving people.
Brutal police committing rape.
This is manufactured consent.
As Noam Chomsky famously observed, any dictator would admire the uniformity of the U.S. corporate media.
While there is legitimate concern about Venezuela’s economic crisis, corporate media leaves out critical context: the U.S. “maximum pressure” sanctions regime — one of the most aggressive economic sieges imposed on any country not formally at war — is central to the suffering.
U.S. officials, including figures such as John Bolton, have openly stated the purpose of economic sanctions: to create enough suffering that people turn against their own government.
That suffering is not a mistake.
It is the policy.
U.S. sanctions have blocked access to cancer treatments, diabetes medication, dialysis supplies, food imports, hospital equipment, and industrial machinery.
Multiple humanitarian studies have linked sanctions to hundreds of thousands of deaths in Venezuela because lifesaving medicines were prevented from entering the country.
Yet CNN and the BBC rarely lead with this. Instead, they tell audiences Venezuela collapsed because of one man — Nicolás Maduro.
This is the part corporate media almost never tells you.
As Venezuela was being strangled by U.S. sanctions, it turned to another sanctioned country: Iran. Two countries under economic siege began cooperating to keep people alive.
Iran sent food, fuel, medicine, and humanitarian supplies.
This was not charity. It was solidarity between two countries punished for resisting U.S. and Israeli imperial power.
The U.S. response was to seize Iranian ships carrying hundreds of tons of aid to Venezuela in international waters.
This is state piracy.
When Venezuela tried to feed its people, the ships were seized.
When Iran tried to help, the cargo was taken.
Then corporate media blamed Venezuela for shortages.
Venezuela holds the largest proven oil reserves in Latin America, alongside vast gold and mineral wealth. Yet U.S. sanctions prevent the country from importing refinery parts, drilling equipment, and mining machinery.
Despite enormous resources, Venezuela is blocked from accessing its own wealth.
That is not mismanagement.
That is economic strangulation.
U.S. intentions are explicit. The head of U.S. Southern Command, Gen. Laura Richardson, has openly stated that Latin America’s oil, gold, lithium, and rare earth minerals are vital to U.S. military and technological dominance.
This is about supply chains for weapons systems, surveillance technology, artificial intelligence, and electric vehicles.
It also explains why governments that refuse to open resources to Chevron and ExxonMobil are targeted.
Within 12 hours of capturing President Maduro, Trump went on Fox News and said the United States was taking over Venezuela’s oil industry.
Corporate media also insists Venezuela’s elections are corrupt.
I was in Venezuela in 2021 as an independent international election observer. I saw the process firsthand, alongside hundreds of observers from around the world.
Venezuela’s elections are among the most transparent and heavily audited in the world, featuring biometric verification, paper trails, public audits, and international observers.
But when elections produce outcomes Washington dislikes, they are declared illegitimate — not because of fraud, but because of politics.
Meanwhile, U.S. elections, dominated by corporate money, lobbying, and foreign influence, are never sanctioned or delegitimized. The double standard is obvious.
Corporate media has also largely abandoned the drug-trafficking narrative.
Why?
Because it collapsed under scrutiny.
If Donald Trump and Marco Rubio truly cared about drug trafficking, they would examine political protection and pardons at home — such as Trump’s pardon of one of the world’s biggest cocaine traffickers, former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández.
For decades, the U.S. has funded and legitimized Venezuelan opposition groups, including factions that engaged in violent destabilization.
Public records show tens of millions of dollars funneled through USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy.
During the guarimbas, opposition-linked groups used firearms, Molotov cocktails, and improvised explosives, killing civilians and attacking public institutions.
When violence failed, U.S. pressure escalated: sanctions, blockades, blackouts, and extraterritorial threats.
History has repeated itself.
In 2002, the U.S. backed a coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Chávez was detained, removed, and flown out by helicopter, replaced by a U.S.-backed regime that immediately dismantled democratic institutions.
What stopped the coup was not international law.
It was the people.
Millions flooded the streets. The military fractured. The coup collapsed, and Chávez was returned because popular resistance made regime change impossible.
The U.S. campaign against Venezuela cannot be separated from Israel and Palestine.
This is not only a U.S. project.
Opposition leader María Corina Machado has pledged to open oil to U.S. corporations, reverse nationalization of resources, and establish an Israeli embassy in Venezuela — ending the country’s historic solidarity with Palestine, made a national cause by Chávez.
In the days leading up to intensified pressure on Maduro, Israeli officials were engaging regional partners, including in Paraguay, to discuss removing him.
Venezuela’s resistance to U.S. and Israeli imperialism is not incidental. It is one of the main reasons it is targeted.
This leads to an unavoidable conclusion.
This is not just a campaign against a president. It is not even just a campaign against a government or drug trafficking.
It is a war on the Bolivarian Revolution itself.
That revolution represents something Washington cannot tolerate: working-class independence, national sovereignty, public control of resources, and a political project that openly rejects capitalism, U.S. domination, and Israeli imperialism.
It is a model rooted in the belief that a country’s wealth should serve its people — not multinational corporations, foreign militaries, or global elites.
That is the real threat.
And that is why Venezuela has faced sanctions, economic siege, media demonization, violent opposition funding, attempted coups, and now the normalization of abducting leaders.
What this proves is simple.
International law does not stop the United States and Israel from committing war crimes.
The so-called rules-based international order is selectively enforced — used against the Global South and discarded when inconvenient.
The United States asserts the right to sanction populations, starve economies, remove governments, and criminalize sovereignty. Corporate media exists to normalize it.
History shows something else.
The Chávez coup failed because the people refused it.
Venezuela’s resistance continues because the people refuse it.
When international law is ignored, only popular resistance remains.
And that — not media scripts — is what decides the future.
Mnar Adley is an award-winning journalist and editor and is the founder and director of MintPress News. She is also president and director of the non-profit media organization Behind the Headlines. Adley also co-hosts the MintCast podcast and is a producer and host of the video series Behind The Headlines. Contact Mnar at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter at @mnarmuh.
