AMHERST — The capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro at the beginning of the month has, in many ways, raised more questions than answers, according to local experts on the region who recently gathered at a University of Massachusetts Amherst-sponsored webinar to discuss the legalities of the action, among other consequences.
It’s clear that in the early morning hours of Jan. 3, the United States launched a military operation into Venezuela to abduct and arrest Maduro. Since 2015, the U.S. has not recognized Maduro as the country’s sitting head of state, and has had a warrant for his arrest for charges of narco-terrorism. Now, Maduro and his wife sit in a cell in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Correctional Center awaiting trial.
But was the abduction legal? How are the people reacting on the ground? What is the future of Venezuela? And what was President Donald Trump’s primary motivation? These and many other questions were aired out by UMass experts last week in the webinar hosted by the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Legality
In American law, both foreign and domestic, there is the case that Trump’s actions were justified. But the abduction and military operation blatantly attack “bedrock” principles of the United Nations charter for legal warfare, the experts agreed.
Jamie Rowen, a UMass political science professor who specializes in law and vulnerable groups, said American law could justify Trump’s actions given past precedent.
“The excuse of the Trump administration to enter Venezuela is that there was a valid arrest warrant and that the United States has the authority to use force to execute,” said Rowen, explaining the U.S. Department of Justice issued a warrant for Maduro’s arrest in 2020. “There actually is a case from 1890 that says that this is true.”
In 1888, Deputy U.S. Marshal David Neagle killed former California Supreme Court Chief Justice David S. Terry while defending Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field from assault. Neagle was found guilty of murder, a decision that was later overturned by the Supreme Court in a landmark ruling. The justices agreed with arguments that Neagle used force to protect an executive officer and was helping effectuate an arrest warrant.
“The executive can use force to support the judicial functions,” Rowen summarized.
The second precedent came a century later, in the 1990s.
“There’s a case out of Mexico where a man was accused of helping murder a Drug Enforcement Agency agent. Mexico refused to extradite him,” she said. “And so the DEA secretly paid $50,000 to five bounty hunters in Mexico to drug him, arrest him and fly him to the United States.”
The man, Humberto Alvarez, was later found not guilty of murder, and he went to sue the U.S. for abducting him. But the Supreme Court didn’t rule in his favor.
“The Supreme Court said that you actually aren’t entitled to any remedy, because being forcibly abducted for a day doesn’t entitle you to a remedy,” said Rowen.
But the situation in Venezuela is more complex given that Maduro is a head of state. It is unlikely Maduro will have immunity as head of state and will not be considered a prisoner of war, according to precedent set in the 1980s when Manuel Noriega, the de facto ruler of Panama for most of the 1980s, was arrested by the U.S. Noriega claimed to have both immunity as a head of state and to be a prisoner of war after his arrest on charges of racketeering, drug smuggling and money laundering.
“The 1989 invasion of Panama is really the precedent here, and the case law that came out of that is very interesting in explaining how the United States could have jurisdiction over someone who claims that he’s a prisoner of war,” Rowen said. “That case said, even if he’s a prisoner of war, even if there’s a conflict, the United States can prosecute for crimes that we have jurisdiction over — in this case, narco-trafficking.”
“So claiming that Maduro is the head of drug trafficking or has profited from drug trafficking, we have jurisdiction over that,” she said. “And so the Noriega precedent said we can prosecute. Noriega was found guilty, and interestingly in his sentencing the judge in that case said he was entitled to prisoner of war status. What’s interesting about that is it didn’t change the sentence. It did change where he was kept after he was found guilty. So he was kept in a quite nice facility until he was extradited to France and then later to Panama where he died.”
International law
Domestically, law enforcement officials are barred from using illegally obtained evidence, which disincentivizes the use of illegal means to make arrests. However, this standard is not the same for executive officials who are acting outside the country, said Rowen.
“The courts have not created a similar deterrent to engaging in unlawful activity to bring a defendant to the United States,” she said.
But by the standards of international law, the abduction seems illegal, said Charli Carpenter, a professor of political science at UMass.
“Just about everybody agrees that the UN Charter, if this was an armed attack, it was an illegal one,” Carpenter said. “And that is because the bedrock rule in the UN Charter is the prohibition of armed forces by one state against the territorial integrity or political independence of another state.”
There are two conditions for an armed attack: self-defense against an armed attack by that other state or authorization by the UN Security Council.
“Neither of these conditions hold here,” Carpenter said.
For one, there is no evidence of the invasion being in self-defense, and the U.S. did not seek the opinion of the Security Council, said Carpenter.
Even if it were a given that the attack were legal, said Carpenter, there would still be standards of ethical warfare as laid out by the Geneva Convention, which formed the core of humanitarian laws following World War II.
On the one hand, the abduction of Maduro can be considered peaceful given that he was not killed in the process. But when the U.S. carried out the abduction, they did so by downing the electrical field of Caracas, Venezuela’s capital city.
This move could be seen as “disproportionate” for a capture since the blackout affects civilians, medical operations, and even vital infrastructure like air traffic control towers, the panelists at the webinar agreed.
Oil
In a press conference following the Jan 3. attack, Trump said the action was largely about oil. Angélica Bernal, an associate UMass professor of political science specializing in Latin America, fleshed out what this means into three parts: what’s at stake for Trump and oil executives, what it means for Venezuela and what it means for global climate change.
Bernal said before the attack, Trump briefed executives of 17 major oil companies, and asked them to invest $100 billion in Venezuela.
“So to unpack that, it’s all about the oil,” she said. “Venezuela has the largest oil reserve in the world, accounting for about 17% of the market share — above Saudi Arabia, Iran and Canada. In 2025 alone, [Venezuela] produced about 303 billion barrels. By comparison, the U.S. ranks eight in the world with 83 billion barrels.”
Bernal went on to say that, “Oil remains today the most lucrative industry and the most lucrative mode of investment for the U.S. Venezuela has always been a problem, not only because it’s holding oil reserves so close, but also because it’s refused to sell them to the U.S., especially after Obama’s 2015 sanctions when the government originally declared Venezuela a security threat.”
In the absence of trade with the United States since 2015, China filled the vacuum and became the primary trading partner not only with Venezuela, but throughout the region. Now, by Trump taking over power in Venezuela, China will be cut off from the region.
“The action on Venezuela is hugely impactful in cutting off other Latin American countries relying on Venezuela, but also cutting off Chinese power in the region,” said Bernal. “The U.S., through violence and impinging on Venezuelan sovereignty, is aggressively asserting U.S. hemispheric monopoly over oil, as recent actions also to invade Greenland also show, and we should note that Greenland is mineral rich.”
The attacks were good news for oil execs and bad news for China’s involvement in the area. But when it comes to the environment, “this move could not have come at a worse time,” said Bernal. Countries including Ecuador, Bolivia and those around the Amazon River have implemented regulations to preserve local ecosystems from pollution, including oil spills. Now these precautions are in jeopardy.
“In Ecuador and Bolivia, you’ve had ground-breaking and constitutional protections such as the Declaration of the Rights of Nature,” she said. “You’ve also had national referenda and moratoriums on oil drilling and biodiverse areas in various countries.”
Given that these restrictions may be peeled back and that Venezuelan oil is considered some of the dirtiest globally with high sulfur content, Bernal said that the U.S. going into Venezuela will reverse environmental progress that has been made.
“The U.S. attack on Venezuela is going to have chilling effects on the gains,” she said.
The social impacts
According to Martha Fuentes-Bautista, a senior lecturer at UMass who specializes in media policy in the U.S. and Latin America, Venezuelans living abroad almost unanimously support the invasion. While the majority in the country do not support the intervention, there has been a “shift” in popularity among Venezuelans.
In a Bloomberg poll taken from Jan. 5-11, 90.8% of respondents, all Venezuelans living outside the country, supported the intervention. Meanwhile, a poll taken over the same period by Venezuelans in the country show only 46.7% in favor. However, this is up from a poll taken in October in which only 34% in the country supported intervention.
Fuentes-Bautista said that despite widespread poverty, Venezuela is now facing the “collapse of national sovereignty.”
Opposition groups, who have proven to be ineffective negotiators, are now being forced to engage in “cooperation” and “pleasantries” with the Trump administration, she said. And because of the current conditions in Venezuela, people in the country are fractured about how to move forward.
“The Venezuela situation takes place in the context of the complex humanitarian crisis that the country has endured for over a decade,” said Fuentes-Bautista. “This crisis has manifested in hyperinflation, widespread shortages of food and medicine, and a dramatic rise of poverty. Nowadays, we calculated that 80% of Venezuelans live in poverty, and maybe more than half are living in situations of extreme poverty.”
These situations have attracted various waves of protests — and a diaspora ensued. In 2015, 700,000 Venezuelans lived abroad. In 2025, that number rose to 7.9 million people, or 25% of the population, said Fuentes-Bautista, adding that distrust mounted after Maduro’s fraudulent election in 2024 for another six-year term.