A few days ago, US President Donald Trump’s administration kidnapped the sitting president of a sovereign nation after weeks of unilateral military assaults on Caribbean waters.
The actions of the Trump administration are not only in violation of international law but also of domestic law that requires congressional agreement to wage war in any country.
Nicolas Maduro, one of the remaining leftist leaders in a Latin America increasingly led by right-wing governments, was kidnapped with his wife, Cilia Adela Flores de Maduro, and flown to the US, where he has since appeared before a New York court on charges of “narco-terrorism conspiracy and cocaine importation conspiracy”.
The charges were manufactured by the Trump administration to justify an invasion of Venezuela, which was clear from the beginning but became crystallised by Trump’s actions after Maduro’s kidnapping.
Hours after Maduro’s capture, which followed the bombing of the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, and the murder of 40 Venezuelan people, including military personnel and civilians, Trump addressed the media from Mar-a-Lago, his Miami resort used by convicted paedophile and sex trafficker Jeffery Epstein.
Trump said the US would effectively “run Venezuela” and would immediately “take a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground”, in reference to Venezuela’s oil.
Venezuela has the world’s largest reserves of oil and has rare earth minerals. Trump was unequivocal in his statement that the US would send in its own oil companies to facilitate the plunder.
Most chillingly, Trump has said if the Venezuelan government does not cooperate with this blatant colonial agenda, he’d permit a second wave of attacks far worse than the one that led to Maduro’s capture. He also repeated his calls for the US annexation of Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark.
This has sent shockwaves across Europe. By kidnapping Maduro, Trump has demonstrated his willingness to use force to get his way.
One would think the US bombing and inevitable invasion of Venezuela would be condemned and reported as the imperial, colonial, and criminal action it is. Unfortunately, a lot of media across the world, including in South Africa, is using euphemistic language and refraining from calling things by their proper names.
Rather than speak to the blatant criminality of Trump’s actions, we’re being subjected to narratives about how Maduro is a dictator who has destroyed the Venezuelan economy.
Analysts are falling all over themselves trying to intellectualise the situation in a way that obfuscates facts, manufacturing nuance that does not exist.
One South African journalist even went as far as to frame a narrative of how the South African government should say nothing about the assault on international law due to its own domestic weaknesses.
To call this unconscionable is insufficient.
The dominant media narratives around Maduro’s kidnapping (which is being called anything but a kidnapping) are not surprising. For years, we’ve been watching a genocide in Palestine unfolding in real time. Global media has used all manner of explanations to minimise the actions of the apartheid state of Israel, referring to the slaughter of Palestinians as “the Israeli-Palestine conflict”, as though the two sides are equal, when in fact one is an oppressor and the other the oppressed; one an occupier and the other the occupied.
In 2026, we need a more courageous and honest media. We need a media that does not pander to the interests of warmongers and billionaires who control massive media empires. We need a South African media that is more invested in the truth than in sensationalism.
Above all, we need a media that is accountable to the people. We can no longer afford to have media that is complacent and complicit in the reporting of injustices. There is far too much at stake.
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