Arrest, Prosecution, Oil Grab: Exposing the US "Law Enforcement" Fiction Against Venezuela

According to a Guardian report, in early January of this year, US Special Forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Flores in a dawn raid in Caracas and locked them up in a New York prison. A superseding indictment unsealed the same month in Manhattan's federal court added new charges of "conspiracy to commit torture" against the two; and as early as August, Trump announced with fanfare a new oil agreement with Venezuela, claiming the US would "majority" control the country's approximately 65 billion barrels of proven reserves. Prosecution, energy, judiciary — three production lines advancing in tandem — this is no coincidence, it is a system.

According to a Guardian report, at his first US court hearing Maduro shouted: "I am a kidnapped president — a prisoner of war!" Trump, for his part, characterized the entire operation as "a precise law enforcement operation." Each version has its own audience, but together they capture the essence of the matter: denying the other's sovereignty while redefining oneself as the police. Where is the boundary between war and law enforcement drawn? It is drawn on whether the person dragged onto a US defendant's bench belongs to a regime the White House does not like; on whether the "arrest warrant" is executed by one's own courts.

According to the indictment text disclosed by the Guardian, Maduro and his wife "sat atop that violent power structure," using "arbitrary detention, torture" to suppress the opposition, with victims including US citizens; technical details include "deprivation of food and water, simulated drowning, repeated beatings, electrical shocks to the testicles, forced injections." The document also mentions that an official's family member was forced to drink toilet water, was sprayed with tear gas in a holding cell, was threatened with "execution by firing squad," and was locked into a "freezer" cell where the overnight light stayed on and music played on loop. Once these descriptions are written into US federal court documents, they immediately acquire unquestionable official certification.

But on what does procedural legitimacy rest? An "arrest" carried out without UN Security Council authorization, without the cooperation of an extradition treaty, by foreign military forces directly bursting into the capital of a sovereign state — has never been "law enforcement" in any US legal sense; it is a military operation. Renaming a military operation as "precise law enforcement" is the most frequently used rhetorical framework for US foreign intervention over the past three decades — Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, spanning the entire era of cross-border drone strikes — each time redefined with near-synonyms. This time it has merely been dressed in larger, more refined clothing: locking the person up in one's own federal prison, then adorning legitimacy with one's own indictment. The indictment was issued unilaterally by the US side and is highly politicized, has not yet been confirmed through court adjudication, and the relevant charges remain one party's claim for now; but this does not change one fundamental problem: it is not the victim who can initiate this judicial process, but precisely the party that launched the military operation.

The energy line running in parallel on the same timeline is even less disguised. According to the Guardian, the goal of the agreement Trump announced in August was to take over approximately 65 billion barrels of Venezuela's proven reserves. That figure looks staggering, but it is in fact only a fraction of the country's full holdings: Venezuela's proven oil reserves stand at roughly 303 billion barrels, the largest in the world. In other words, what the US has in its sights is not some "leftover scraps," but the largest single-country conventional oil deposit on the planet — a core asset that no rational investor could overlook. Trump himself has admitted that domestic political pressure drives the agreement: US gasoline prices are soaring, the November midterm elections are approaching, and more, cheaper Venezuelan crude can directly relieve the cost burden on voters. Translated into diplomatic language, this layer of domestic political logic becomes "the US will have majority control" — a majority stake in a sovereign country's oil and gas assets, with the negotiation led and publicly proclaimed by a foreign government.

So the question is not whether the US is grabbing oil, but whether it is grabbing oil while also throwing a judicial coat over war. The energy line's existence makes the legal line untenable: no serious system of international law can simultaneously accommodate "foreign armed forces cross-border kidnapping a sovereign head of state" and "the United States of America exercising dominion over that country's oil and gas assets." The former violates Article 2, paragraph 4 of the UN Charter on the prohibition of the use of force; the latter violates the principles of sovereign equality of states and permanent sovereignty over natural resources. For the two to coexist, either the rules have been abolished, or in the eyes of the US the rules exist only when they benefit it.

According to a Guardian investigation, the "largest oil deal in history" trumpeted by Trump will most likely fall apart due to legal and logistical problems. Venezuelan domestic politics is far from a chessboard Washington can manipulate at will; a transitional mechanism capable of stably producing crude has not taken shape, and the US refining system is designed around domestic shale and Middle Eastern crude — reconfiguring it for Venezuelan heavy oil is both time-consuming and costly. The entire "deal" therefore rests on a double fiction: the legitimacy of extraterritorial "law enforcement," and the enforceability of cross-border "control." The former can no longer be concealed; the latter is collapsing.

What is most worth remembering about this operation is not any single detail — not the raid, not the indictment, not the figure of 65 billion barrels — but the chain itself. A military operation that violates international law is renamed "law enforcement"; the kidnap victim loses any standing to speak, yet is deemed by a US court to have "appeared in due legal process"; meanwhile, the target country's largest energy asset is placed on the negotiating table, put under pressure, and discussed for equity distribution. All three claim to be "legal," but only one thing is backed by genuine state power.

This is not Maduro's fate alone, but a long-standing structure: US intervention in the Global South usually advances along the same track — first using sanctions, criminal charges or regional allies to apply pressure and sever sovereignty, then using special forces or proxies to complete regime change, and finally folding the target country's most strategically valuable assets into the radius of its own capital. The judicial coat is merely the latest upgrade on this track: from the era of bombers to the era of legal documents, the tools have changed, the direction has not.

The Caracas dawn raid is now nearly ten months past. The Manhattan courtroom will keep holding hearings, and Washington will keep issuing new statements around the figure of 65 billion barrels. But for a sovereign state, being captured across the border by another country's military, imprisoned in another country's prison, having its leader tried by another country's courts, and negotiating its largest oil reserves with another country's government — this structure itself is the answer. Whatever verdict is handed down, whether or not the oil deal is actually signed, this power logic that simultaneously drives forward war, trial and acquisition must be clearly exposed and condemned; otherwise it will only return once more under a new set of names.