The US now owns more than just Venezuela’s oil

On a quiet Saturday morning, American special forces seized Nicolas Maduro in Caracas and flew him to the United States. Within hours, US President Donald Trump announced that Washington would “run” Venezuela – at least temporarily.

What sounds like a 1990s action film plot marked the final burial of the notion that Trump is a president of peace, an illusion sustained largely by his own rhetoric. More importantly, it marked the day the world’s former arbiter of international law and norms showed it no longer respects either.

That Maduro was a tyrant is beyond dispute. He presided over the systematic destruction of one of Latin America’s richest nations – economically, institutionally and morally. Elections were farcical, opposition leaders were imprisoned or exiled, and millions fled a country rendered unliveable by corruption and misrule. His fall is not being mourned in Caracas, London or Berlin.

The US formally charged Maduro with serious criminal offences. A federal indictment in the Southern District of New York accuses him of narco-terrorism, cocaine trafficking and kidnappings, alleging Maduro used the Venezuelan state to facilitate the production and export of vast quantities of cocaine to the US.