Maduro in Minneapolis
Murderous Lies
The shadow of Maduro hangs over Minneapolis.
On January 3rd, the American military extracted the murderous dictator Nicolás Maduro from Caracas. On January 7th, ICE killed a mother in her car in Minnesota. These are two glimpses of a larger story about death and lies.
The abduction of Maduro was not about naming his crimes, but about ignoring them. The worst thing that Maduro did is just what Trump is beginning to do: killing civilians and blaming them for their own deaths. After Minneapolis, Maduro’s lies are being repeated: in American English, by American authorities.
The thousands of extrajudicial killings in Maduro’s Venezuela were carried out by organized death squads. These actions were described as defensive. The Maduro regime claimed that the people they murdered were resisting government authority, and that the men who pulled the trigger had been provoked by those whom they murdered.
Minneapolis has just witnessed an extrajudicial killing, at the hands of ICE, which looks more and more like a presidential paramilitary organization. The action was, horribly, excused by the president, the vice-president, and the director of homeland security, using the same lies as those told by Maduro’s Venezuelan regime. The victim was resisting government authority, they said. The man who pulled the trigger had been provoked, they said. It was not the killer who was a terrorist. It was the mom who had just dropped off one of her six-year-old at school.
These individual lies are part of the logic of death squads. A murderer can go free because the government controls the story. And then the next murder is all the easier. And suddenly this is normal and people simply disappear.
The members of Maduro’s death squads have no concern about prosecution. In Venezuela, nothing about this has changed since the extraction of Maduro. All that has happened is the spread of this practice to the United States. The ICE agent who shot the mom in the face was spirited away, to be investigated by the same federal institution, the Department of Justice, that holds Maduro.
And in both cases, it is reasonable to fear, the essential result will be the same. The real crimes will be ignored, in the service of building up a fake narrative that enables more real crimes. Maduro used to claim that his opponents were part of a plot led by Trump. Now Trump can claim that his opponents are part of a plot led by Maduro.
Maduro, having been excused for his real atrocities, is to be be tried on the politically useful drug charges. The issue of drugs, like immigration, can be used to accuse domestic international opponents of being part of an international conspiracy. Maduro’s own death squads planted drugs on their victims. We should prepare for something like this on a much grander scale: everyone who opposes Trump is in league with the “narco-terrorists.”
That is the political sense of the arrest of Maduro. He becomes a fleshy exhibition in Trump’s current fantasy: that Americans who want freedom and democracy are somehow part of an international conspiracy that involves drugs or immigration.
We will perhaps see a kind of reverse show trial. In the show trials of the totalitarian twentieth century, people pled guilty to crimes that they did not commit. Maduro will be instead excused from the horrible crimes he did commit. But the end result will be the same: the invention of a vast imaginary conspiracy in order to justify repression.
Maduro’s regime is less of an enemy than a model for Trump (and Vance and Noem), providing examples of how to talk about political murder. Once Maduro claimed that international plots were responsible for domestic opposition. Now he is a prop as the Trump administration says the same thing.
A big liar becomes an element of someone else’s big lie. This might be poetic, but it is not justice. If Maduro is to be tried, it should be for the extrajudicial killings. By the same token, the ICE agent who shot a woman three times in the face should be tried. If he is not, then we take another step towards the kind of regime Maduro built in Venezuela. The first extrajudicial killings, if excused, become the precedent for the hundreds and then the thousands to follow.
All of us can be victims of the conspiracy story that Trump and his advisors are telling: that all evil has to do with immigrants and drugs, and that everyone who wants democracy and human rights in the United States is somehow part of a giant invisible immigration/drug/antifa conspiracy directed from abroad.
This can be halted and reversed. We can call things by their proper names as those in power lie. We can speak the names of the victims, and call out the institutions that partake in the lies. Presidential paramilitaries should not exist. Nor for that matter should concentration camps.
Having brought Maduro to America, the Trump administration is also bringing his politics. Yet the shadow over Minneapolis is not just Maduro’s, but that of all modern tyrannies. The cycle is known. The lie that justifies the violence, the violence as the excuse for repeating the lie. The truth alone will not set is free, but truth is the first step.
We need the truth about the truth about the killer, and the truth about our government. And we need to be governed by people who will not kill us and then use our deaths as part of a story that will justify killing others.
What this piece captures with real clarity is the underlying pattern, not just the events. When a state begins pairing external operations with internal killings that are immediately justified through a pre‑fabricated narrative, you’re no longer looking at isolated abuses. You’re looking at a governing logic. The script is always the same: redefine victims as threats, redefine agents of the state as the ones under attack, and use the resulting confusion to normalize violence that would once have been unthinkable.
The danger isn’t only the act itself. It’s the infrastructure of impunity that grows around it. When the same institution that carries out the killing is responsible for investigating it, when the public explanation is pre‑written before the facts are known, when the story is shaped to make accountability impossible, you are watching the slow construction of a system where truth becomes irrelevant and power becomes its own justification.
The real warning here is about precedent. If an extrajudicial killing is excused, it becomes a template. If the template is repeated, it becomes a norm. And once it becomes a norm, the line between targeted violence and systemic violence disappears.
Snyder is right about the cycle: the lie that justifies the violence, the violence that reinforces the lie. Breaking that cycle requires naming what is happening while it is still visible, before disappearance becomes the default outcome and before narrative replaces evidence entirely.
This is not just a story about Minneapolis or Caracas. It’s a story about how modern states slide into a politics where human beings become instruments, and where truth becomes an obstacle rather than a guide.
Thank you.
—Johan
Former Foreign Service Officer
From Indivisible: "Everyone on the call was clear-eyed about the huge amount of work ahead of us to confront the public menace of an increasingly lawless agency that rampages through communities, targets schools and daycare centers, and commits violence with seeming impunity.
"... Indivisible and a broad coalition of partners are banding together for the nationwide ICE Out For Good Weekend of Action this Saturday and Sunday. We hope you’ll join us."
See https://indivisible.org/ - ICE Out For GOOD Week-end Action to find an event.