Maduro’s capture by US mirrors Iraq playbook not Noriega manhunt, says Brahma Chellaney

The 1989 US seizure of Panama’s strongman Manuel Noriega has once again entered global discourse, this time as analysts search for historical parallels to Washington’s dramatic operation in Venezuela that led to the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. But for geopolitical expert Brahma Chellaney, the Noriega comparison, while superficially appealing, obscures more than it reveals. 

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Chellaney argued that although Maduro’s capture carries familiar legal framing — centred on drug trafficking charges and criminal indictment — the resemblance to Noriega largely ends there. “Maduro’s capture looks superficially like the 1989 US seizure of Manuel Noriega because of the familiar legal framing,” he wrote, “but the resemblance largely ends there.” 

According to Chellaney, the closer and more instructive parallel is the 2003 capture of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. The US logic driving Maduro’s seizure, he noted, was rooted not in battlefield defeat but in delegitimization and pursuit. As with Saddam, Washington reframed the target from an objectionable ruler into an existential security threat, branding Maduro’s regime a “narco-terrorist” enterprise in much the same way Saddam was portrayed as a global menace linked to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. 

This narrative shift, Chellaney emphasised, was critical. By recasting a geopolitical confrontation as a security imperative, the United States laid the groundwork for extraordinary military intervention. “In both cases, this narrative shift was essential,” he observed. “It converted a geopolitical struggle into a security imperative.” 

Chellaney also highlighted the striking similarity in the manhunt dynamic. Like Saddam after the fall of Baghdad, Maduro was not defeated in open combat. Instead, he became a fugitive on his own soil, pursued through deep intelligence penetration, informant networks and massive financial bounties. Years of economic strangulation through sanctions, Chellaney argued, weakened internal loyalties and sharply narrowed Maduro’s room for manoeuvre. 

This prolonged pressure campaign ultimately set the stage for a final, surgical operation — echoing Saddam’s capture in his “spider hole” — rather than a conventional military overthrow. “The defining similarity, then, is not the chargesheet but the method,” Chellaney wrote, pointing to a long campaign of isolation and pursuit culminating in capture. 

Chellaney’s analysis situates the Maduro operation within a broader US intervention playbook, one that blends legal narratives, economic coercion and intelligence-driven manhunts. While the long-term geopolitical fallout from Venezuela remains uncertain, his comparison underscores how past interventions continue to shape Washington’s approach to confronting adversarial regimes.