Labeling Kidnapping a ‘Capture,’ Media Legitimizes Violation of International Law

By Gregory Shupak  –  Jan 20, 2026

Corporate media have deployed a lexicon of legitimation in their coverage of the deadly US invasion of Venezuela and the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro, along with his wife and fellow politician Cilia Flores. Major news outlets have routinely described these events using words like “capture” (New York Times, 1/3/26) or “arrest” (BBC, 1/3/26), which presents them as a matter of enforcing the law against fugitives or criminals, and carries the built-in but false assumption that the US had the right or even duty to conduct its operation in the first place.

The ludicrous premise is that any time an arrest warrant is issued somewhere in the United States, the US has the right to do anything, anywhere in the world, in pursuit of the subject—including bombing another country, invading it, killing its citizens, and spiriting away its president and first lady. Cornell Law School professor Maggie Gardner (Transnational Litigation Blog, 1/5/26) rebuked the idea that the US merely enforced the law in Venezuela, pointing out (emphasis in original):

Under customary international law, a sovereign can only exercise enforcement jurisdiction in the territory of another sovereign if it has that sovereign’s consent. This hard line limiting enforcement powers to a sovereign’s own territory is clear and well-established.

Venezuela, of course, didn’t consent to being bombed, or to having Maduro and Flores taken from the country at gunpoint. Accordingly, what happened in Caracas is best understood not as the US enforcing the law, but as the US breaking international law. It’s misleading, therefore, to use language like “capture” and “arrest,” which evoke the US upholding the law, to describe blowtorch-wielding, heavily armed US forces taking Maduro and Flores prisoner in the middle of the night (BBC, 1/4/26).

‘Abducted, so to speak’

I used the news aggregator Factiva to examine New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post coverage from January 3 through January 5, the day of the US’s attack on Venezuela and the first two days after these developments. The papers published a combined 223 pieces that featured Maduro’s name, and 166 of these (74%) used the term “capture” or a form of it, such as “captured” or “capturing.” Sixty of these pieces, or 27%, included the word “arrest” or variations on the term, like “arrested” or “arresting.”

“Abduction” or “kidnapping”—synonyms that mean to take someone away unlawfully and by force—are far more suitable words for what the US did to Maduro and Flores. Only two pieces in the Post and one in the Journal used any form of “abduct” (such as “abduction”) in any of the articles that refer to Maduro—1% of the combined total articles. In each case, the term appears in quotation marks. The Times ran no pieces in which the word appeared.

The Post (1/3/26) shared a perplexing perspective from Geoffrey Corn—head of the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech University, and a former top legal adviser to the US Army—who said that the US Supreme Court has been clear since the late 19th century that “you can’t claim that you were abducted and therefore the court should not be allowed to assert authority over you.” The article went on:

“Maduro is not going to be able to avoid being brought to trial because he was abducted, so to speak, even if he can establish it violated international law,” Corn said, adding that in his view, the administration’s overnight military operation lacked any “plausible legal basis.”

So, despite Corn’s view that the US attack was illegal, he couldn’t bring himself to present Maduro’s abduction as literal rather than figurative.

That article, as well another in the Post (1/3/26) and one in the Wall Street Journal (1/5/26), quoted Democratic Senator Mark R. Warner:

If the United States asserts the right to use military force to invade and capture foreign leaders it accuses of criminal conduct, what prevents China from claiming the same authority over Taiwan’s leadership? What stops Vladimir Putin from asserting a similar justification to abduct Ukraine’s president?

Even as Warner is skeptical about the US’s actions in Venezuela, he still uses the language of “capture” for Maduro, while using “abduct” for a hypothetical scenario in which the official enemy Putin carries out a parallel crime. None of the articles that included Warner’s quote  commented on this linguistic inconsistency.

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. They’re not the only ones. On Democracy Now! (1/3/26), Venezuelan journalist Andreína Chávez and US-based Venezuelan historian Miguel Tinker Salas both used that word to characterize what the US did to Maduro and Flores.

Canada’s national broadcaster, the CBC (1/5/26), regarded the idea that Maduro was “kidnapped” as at least meriting serious discussion. Co-anchor Andrew Chang asked:

Did the US military just kidnap Nicholas Maduro?… “Kidnap” is a loaded word because it implies illegality. Maybe a more neutral way of describing Maduro’s capture is as an “abduction,” but the US government calls it an “arrest.”…

This isn’t some nerdy question about semantics. It’s a question about law, and whether the US has the legal right to extract world leaders from their homes, and maybe even whether other countries might have that right, too.

Notably, when Trump was told that Venezuela’s acting President Delcy Rodríguez said it was a “kidnapping,” he didn’t push back, saying, “It’s not a bad term.”

However, the only times “kidnap” appeared in the Times, Journal or Post in relation to Maduro and Flores—in 10 pieces, or 4% of the coverage—came when that term was attributed to representatives of the Venezuelan state. Suggesting to readers that a government that has been demonized in US media for decades is the only source that regards Maduro and Flores as having been “kidnapped” is tantamount to suggesting that no credible sources take that position.

The three papers combined to run zero articles treating as an objective fact the view that America “abducted” or “kidnapped” a sitting head of state in defiance of international law, while they regularly used “captured” and “arrested” outside of quotation marks, as if those word choices are merely flat descriptions of reality.

ICE also ‘arrests’

These linguistic choices matter. “Capture” and “arrest” paint Trump, Delta Force and the CIA as righteous heroes protecting their country—as well as Venezuela and the rest of the world—from the villainous Maduros. “Abduct” and “kidnap” morally invert the good guy and bad guy roles, and would portray US actors as the wrongdoers.

This particular form of word play is part of a pattern for corporate media under this Trump administration. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) round-ups of migrants in the United States have featured what can most accurately be described as abductions or kidnappings of people—off the streets, at courts, in workplaces and elsewhere—by armed, masked and unaccountable agents, into unmarked vehicles. 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.

And describing ICE’s practices as “kidnappings” isn’t some fringe view. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia (D-Ill.) uses the word (Independent, 12/5/25), as does Rolling Stone editor Tim Dickinson (7/2/25), and the academic and author Natasha Lennard of the New School for Social Research in New York (Intercept, 7/1/25). ICE’s victims (Mother Jones, 7/18/27; NPR, 7/27/25) and their families (Guardian, 4/15/25, 6/10/25, 6/26/25) frequently describe their ordeal in such terms.

Yet corporate media eschew such language for the same sanitized “arrest” or “capture” language they employed for Maduro and Flores. When I used Factiva to pair “ICE” with the words “abduct” or “kidnap,” just two articles turned up that included the perspective that ICE “abducts” people (New York Times, 7/13/25; Washington Post, 12/3/25), both attributed to critical sources. Five (2%) included a version of the word “kidnap,” all in quotation marks.

Fight The Guardian’s Lies About Venezuela

Three of these quotes were from the much-maligned Venezuelan government (New York Times, 3/18/25, 11/25/25; Washington Post, 5/4/25), one came from a man whose father and daughter-in-law had been detained by ICE (Washington Post, 3/21/25), and another from a member of the Chicago Board of Education (New York Times, 10/22/25).

The language is freighted in the same way, whether it is migrants under attack from US jackboots, or those same forces unleashed against socialist politicians in Global South countries seeking to escape imperial domination.

(FAIR)

Gregory Shupak

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Gregory Shupak teaches media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto. His book, The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, is published by OR Books.

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