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Panamanian head of state (1934-2017)
Donald Trump announced he will grant a “full and complete pardon” to former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted in March 2024 of conspiring to import cocaine into the United S...
Cold War U.S. policy in Latin America centered on stopping leftist movements and often meant the CIA backed coups, dictators and proxy forces — actions that scholars link to declines in democracy and ...
The United States has long alleged that Nicolás Maduro and top Venezuelan officials led a transnational criminal enterprise responsible for large-scale drug trafficking, narco‑terrorism, money‑launder...
The weight of reporting and expert commentary indicates the U.S. capture of Nicolás Maduro likely violated international law because it involved U.S. forces operating inside Venezuela without the cons...
Foreign occupations across Latin America—from covert CIA‑backed coups in Guatemala to overt U.S. military operations in Panama and repeated early‑20th‑century occupations of Caribbean states—offer a c...
The U.S. seizure of Venezuela’s president and the accompanying military strikes have prompted sharp legal debate: many legal analysts say the operation likely violated international law and may have e...
The question of whether the Trump administration’s military operation that seized Venezuela’s president was illegal splits into two arenas: the administration’s internal legal posture, which says the ...
U.S. courts have repeatedly allowed prosecutions of foreign leaders accused of narcotics offenses to proceed, treating claims of head-of-state immunity and forcible extraterritorial capture narrowly a...
Presidents have on occasion used executive authority—military force, covert operations, indictments, designations and removals—to target foreign political figures and alleged cartel leaders, but docum...
The historical record shows that U.S. presidents from both parties have ordered military operations inside other countries without a formal congressional declaration of war, relying instead on executi...
The Panamanian National Assembly — at the urging of Manuel Noriega — passed a resolution on December 15, 1989 declaring that a “state of war” existed between Panama and the United States, an act cited...
U.S. prosecutions of foreign leaders have established evidentiary links to drug trafficking through discrete mixes of witness testimony, financial paper trails, seized assets and operational details t...
U.S. and international prosecutors have relied heavily on testimony from cooperating defendants, guilty pleas and witness statements to trace alleged narcotics conspiracies up the Venezuelan chain of ...
Across the newly unsealed U.S. indictment and contemporaneous reporting, a consistent pattern emerges in which prosecutors portray Nicolás Maduro as the linchpin of a decades‑long, state‑enabled narco...
What would make it illegal for President Trump to seize Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro hinges on two overlapping legal regimes: international law governing the use of force and sovereignty, and U.S. domes...
The president claims several domestic legal authorities to order U.S. military operations abroad without prior congressional authorization: an Article II “inherent” commander‑in‑chief power, narrow se...
The historical record shows credible evidence that the CIA formed or tolerated alliances with actors who trafficked narcotics when those actors advanced anti-communist or other U.S. strategic objectiv...
The short answer: there was no specific, public congressional authorization for the U.S. military operation that captured Nicolás Maduro, and lawmakers from both parties immediately questioned whether...