—Ingrid Dantas, Doctor in Law from the University of Brasília (UnB); researcher at UnB’s Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies (CECC)
Introduction
With 2026 barely underway and a new wave of shared optimism spreading, reality struck with the weight of bombs, without resorting to hyperbole. Before dawn on 3 January, the United States launched a military operation in Venezuela and forcibly removed President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, transferring them to the United States. American President Donald Trump celebrated the action, while numerous governments and segments of public opinion worldwide reacted with shock and alarm.
Hours later, Trump’s remarks appeared to confirm what the intervention already suggested, namely that it was driven by regional dominance and oil extraction. Yet the episode also distills key features of contemporary illiberal politics, notably the abandonment of constraints grounded in the rule of law and international law, further sharpened by an imperial logic apparent in both the strike and its justification.
In several respects, the episode gives rise to issues of legal and political significance. These range from criminal jurisdiction and the precedent such action sets to the likelihood of regime change in Venezuela and the scope for coordinated responses. This post focuses on its implications for democratic resilience in Latin America, as executive aggrandizement in the United States now seems to extend beyond constitutional erosion, taking the form of military coercion outside its borders, in disregard of state sovereignty.
Illiberal Governance in Defiance of International and Constitutional Law
Foundational principles of international law protect state sovereignty and entrench the peaceful settlement of disputes. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter requires United Nations members to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. The Charter permits resort to armed force only on narrow grounds, centered on self-defense and action authorized by the Security Council. Against that baseline, Trump’s official statement after the operation suggested that these constraints were treated as optional, if considered at all.
Within the US constitutional order, the same stance translated into a familiar illiberal move: executive unilateralism untethered from legal and institutional constraints. The action proceeded without prior congressional authorization, implicating Congress’s constitutional war powers role. Trump justified that absence by citing an alleged risk of leaks from the legislature.
It is well established in the scholarship that narratives of institutional suspicion and delegitimation function as a recurrent mechanism of twenty-first century democratic backsliding, converting accountability into obstruction and law into inconvenience. The same is true of the distortion of legitimate ends—such as resisting dictatorship—into a rhetorical cover for illegitimate incursions of power.
What is distinctive is the scale. Having consolidated effective dominance over domestic inter-branch checks through constitutional hardball maneuvers, Trump now appears willing to export the same playbook beyond US borders.
Beyond Venezuela: Regional Reverberations in Latin America
While scholarship will, and should, examine the drivers of the intervention and its consequences for Venezuela’s political trajectory, including how Venezuelans navigate the abrupt shift between the language of ‘liberation’ and uncertainty about what comes next, this post turns to the regional reverberations. That focus is not incidental. In justifying the operation, Trump threatened to replicate the same modus operandi elsewhere in the hemisphere.
Among those singled out, Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro was portrayed by Trump as linked to drug trafficking, in rhetoric that echoes allegations levelled at Maduro. Cuba was invoked as well. By contrast, Argentina, led by President Javier Milei, an ideological ally, was publicly congratulated. After the attack, Milei praised the United States and sought to associate Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva with Maduro, circulating edited footage that culminates in an image of the two embracing.
Read against these targets, the sequence is difficult to treat as ideologically neutral. The modalities differ: Venezuela was met with force, whereas other leaders were targeted through verbal threats and defamatory allegations. Even so, the pattern is consistent. Those placed in its crosshairs sit outside the current US administration’s preferred regional alignment, even though their democratic credentials vary markedly.
Against this backdrop, the operation in Venezuela and the subsequent warnings to other countries in the region point to more than a resource-driven incursion, even if extractive incentives remain central. They indicate an effort to discipline the wider neighborhood through selective coercion or the sustained promise of it, after a conspicuous demonstration. For democratic resilience, the consequences are significant. In contexts of high-stakes electoral competition, such escalation can amplify domestic polarization and render institutions more susceptible to external influence and autocratizing pressures from within.
That repertoire, however, did not begin in January 2026. In 2025, Trump explicitly tied political and economic pressure on Brazil to the prosecution of his ideological ally, former President Jair Bolsonaro, for an attempted coup d’état, a sequence that bears notable parallels to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. By mid-year, his administration announced steep tariffs on imports from Brazil and imposed Global Magnitsky sanctions on Justice Alexandre de Moraes of the Supreme Federal Court (STF). Those measures were widely perceived as an attempt to undermine judicial independence and weaken legal accountability for former presidents, drawing active endorsement from Bolsonaro-aligned far-right parties. Even so, the STF continued the proceedings, sentencing him to more than 27 years.
Illiberal Alignment, Elections and Democratic Resilience
Further developments merit attention. Chile’s December 2025 presidential election marked an ideological inflection in South America with the victory of José Antonio Kast, generally viewed as aligned with the current administrations in the United States and Argentina. Once Kast assumes the presidency in March 2026, South America will appear more evenly split between right- and left-leaning governments.
In the wake of Maduro’s abduction, if Trump’s stated intention to ‘run’ Venezuela consolidates into a governing reality, that balance may tilt further rightward. With consequential presidential elections scheduled in Colombia and Brazil in 2026, the contest for geopolitical leverage sharpens, and those races acquire heightened salience for democratic resilience across the region.
This is where recent pressures become especially fraught. Is Trump playing a game of geopolitical poker, testing the limits of intimidation under international scrutiny and US domestic legal constraints? Or do these maneuvers point to a more deliberate project of illiberal imperialism, reinforced through multiple channels, including the use of force, abduction of political opponents, economic exploitation and influence over electoral contests?
Brazil may not be an immediate target. Still, in a polarized environment, and given that Lula has already condemned the intervention, that possibility should not be dismissed. Although Jair Bolsonaro is imprisoned, his son, Flávio Bolsonaro, has already declared his intention to run for the presidency. In light of the well-documented proximity between Bolsonarismo and Trumpism and earlier signals of coordination between far-right actors in Brazil and the current US administration, the prospect of external involvement is likely to loom over the electoral cycle, increasing the risk of renewed democratic backsliding in Brazil. That risk is especially acute in a country that, after a long history of coups, has only recently begun to treat accountability as the appropriate response to attempts to subvert democracy.
While the issues raised above remain far from yielding a definitive answer, they add to a broader set of concerns. Some relate to the intervention’s international reverberations, including the precedent it may set for other major powers such as China. Others concern Venezuela’s near-term democratic trajectory. The country may be on the cusp of emerging from dictatorship, but that outcome is not yet assured. Maduro’s forcible removal, on its own, does not constitute regime change, since the governing apparatus he led remains in place at the time of writing. A separate, and equally unsettling, concern is what may follow if external control is consolidated, a form of subordination that carries colonial resonances.
Conclusion
The episode examined here underscores that the pressures now bearing on democratic resilience in Latin America are not confined to the internal dynamics of domestic institutions. They are transnational in reach, episodic in form but cumulative in effect, and they acquire force through alignment, coercion and imitation.
Complexity, therefore, is not an analytical afterthought but a point of departure for analyzing what appears to be a new escalation in the crisis of democracy. It shapes how we interpret not only the intervention itself but the patterns it can set in motion and the forms of response it requires. New Year’s optimism matters. In the present geopolitical context, however, broadly conceived networks of partnership and internationally coordinated responses are likely to prove more consequential.
Suggested citation: Ingrid Dantas, Illiberal Imperialism or Geopolitical Poker? Prospects for Democratic Resilience in Latin America after the US Intervention in Venezuela, Int’l J. Const. L. Blog, Jan. 22, 2026, at: http://www.iconnectblog.com/illiberal-imperialism-or-geopolitical-poker-prospects-for-democratic-resilience-in-latin-america-after-the-us-intervention-in-venezuela/