The recent U.S. attack on Venezuela and rendition of President Nicolas Maduro to New York, where he will be tried on long-standing drug-trafficking charges, was decried by member states of the United Nations Security Council as a violation of the U.N. Charter’s protections of national sovereignty and prohibition on wars of aggression. But President Donald Trump’s administration has justified it as a “law enforcement operation” rather than an act of war. In addressing the Security Council, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Mike Waltz, affirmed, “There is no war against Venezuela or its people. We are not occupying a country.”
The Trump administration’s actions and justifications for them raise obvious legal concerns under the U.N. Charter, as well as under older norms of sovereign immunity, which among other things protect sitting heads of state from arrest and prosecution. But the wider question of howlethal force against third parties was used to capture Maduro also requires careful attention. One reason this matters is because international law on the use of lethal force distinguishes between armed conflict and law enforcement, and the bar for collateral harm to civilian bystanders is much higher for the latter than for the former.
At this time, it is not truly known how many civilians were harmed by the operation. Two direct deaths have been confirmed, alongside 75-80 Venezuelan and Cuban security personnel, but the casualty recording NGO Airwars has identified twice that many and its investigations are ongoing. SOUTHCOM is also conducting a battle damage assessment, but Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has gutted the Pentagon unit responsible for tracking civilian casualties, complicating verification of cases. And even where skilled staff and resources are available, casualties are typically undercounted in the early days after a conflict event, depending on how they are measured. Even if deaths remain low, civilian harm also includes injuries and extensive property damage: According to the online investigate outlet Bellingcat, several residential buildings were destroyed.*