Accordingly, what happened in Caracas is best understood not as the US enforcing the law, but as the US breaking international law. The word “abduct” was never used in the voice of a reporter from any of these papers to describe what the US had done. ‘It’s not a bad term’Venezuelan officials, including Maduro himself (New York Times, 1/5/26), say that he was “kidnapped” by the US. It’s little surprise, then, that immigration lawyers, members of Congress, and law professors (LA Times, 10/21/25), among others, routinely use the word “abduct” to describe these events. Yet corporate media eschew such language for the same sanitized “arrest” or “capture” language they employed for Maduro and Flores.

Source: International New York Times January 20, 2026 21:24 UTC