South Africa’s carefully calibrated response needs to balance its critical ties with the US with its long-held opposition to the type of unilateral action by powerful states that the latter’s Venezuela operation represents. South Africa faces a defining foreign policy test in responding to the 3 January US military operation that extracted Nicolás Maduro from Caracas. The action presents Pretoria with an uncomfortable choice: Defend international law against a superpower whose investment it desperately needs, or remain silent on a violation that undermines the multilateral order it claims to champion.
The facts are stark. US Delta Force operatives seized Venezuela’s sitting president from sovereign territory without UN Security Council authorisation. This is a clear breach of article 2(4) of the UN Charter.
Yet Maduro is no innocent victim. His government oversaw Venezuela’s GDP collapse from $375-billion in 2012 to $40-billion by 2020 – an 80% contraction. Roughly eight million Venezuelans fled political persecution and economic collapse as hyperinflation peaked above 1,000,000% in 2018.
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Maduro’s democratic and human rights record is shocking. Following July 2024’s stolen election, where opposition candidate Edmundo González secured 67% (which excludes the eight million Venezuelan refugees abroad), Maduro’s forces killed at least 24 protesters and detained more than 2,000 people, bringing political prisoners to a 21st-century high. South Africa’s foreign policy predicament stems from its foundational principles.
The government positions itself as a defender of international law, sovereignty and human rights – values forged in its own liberation struggle. Yet Venezuela under Maduro represents everything South Africa claims to oppose: electoral fraud, economic mismanagement and systematic repression that UN investigators determined constitutes crimes against humanity. While countries across the western hemisphere and Europe recognised González’s victory in July 2024, Pretoria did not formally recognise him as Venezuela’s legitimate president, despite credible evidence that he won by a significant margin.
This tacit acceptance of Maduro’s fraudulent mandate sits uneasily alongside South Africa’s professed commitment to democracy. If South Africa acknowledges Maduro stole the election, then US charges that he lacks legitimate authority gain credibility, complicating condemnation of his capture. Yet silence carries its own costs.
South Africa hands over the G20 presidency having positioned itself as a voice for the Global South and champion of reformed multilateralism. The Venezuela operation represents precisely the kind of unilateral action by powerful states that middle powers like South Africa have long protested against. And what of the immediate future of Venezuela?
Experts have referenced a “similar” operation of extraction in Panama in 1989, when US forces captured General Manuel Noriega, the de facto military dictator at the time, on drug trafficking and money laundering charges. Yet the Noriega precedent merits examination but not emulation. That 1989 operation, like this one, violated international law despite Noriega’s criminality. The subsequent chaos in Panama, while ultimately transitioning to democracy and one of the best-performing economies in the region, demonstrated that military intervention without comprehensive planning creates dangerous power vacuums.
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