Maduro’s ‘capture’ and the linguistic coup: Why I have a problem with the word

As a Libyan who has lived through forced “regime change” scripts in my country in 2011, I recognise this pattern and the role the media played in defending the undefendable while claiming the higher moral grounds of objectivity and fairness. My suspicion was not born of hindsight; in fact, I had already predicted this trajectory during an interview with a Venezuelan podcast a month before the event, warning that the “Libyan model” of narrative-building was being dusted off for Caracas.

When the news of the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro broke, I immediately checked several major Western media outlets, starting as usual with the BBC. I was not looking for facts about the event itself, but rather to see how it was being reported. To my shock, the headline glaring in my face almost literally said something like: “Donald Trump ‘captured’ Nicolas Maduro.” It was a jarring choice of words that reduced a gross violation of international law to a personal trophy for the American president. We must not forget that Donald Trump insists on being at the center of every report; otherwise, he gets upset—and it seems the Western media is more than happy to oblige him, even if it means sacrificing the very definition of a kidnapping.

The choice of the word “capture” is a masterclass in semantic manipulation. It implies that Mr Maduro was already a fugitive on the run—a man condemned by a court of law and fleeing its reach. To the common man, the meaning is unambiguous: it suggests that Maduro is a criminal wanted for justice, not only within his own borders but by a global judicial authority with rightful jurisdiction. By adopting this vocabulary, the media does more than report; it strips a sitting head of state of his inherent right to be presumed innocent, effectively rebranding a political abduction as a long-overdue arrest.

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The Western media’s insistence on the word “capture” is a masterclass in hypocrisy, especially when even Donald Trump himself seems uninterested in the linguistic cover-up. When asked by a reporter, Trump dismissed the distinction, suggesting that the term “kidnap” was not a problem for him. It is a surreal moment: the man behind the operation is being more transparent about its nature than the journalists tasked with scrutinizing him. My mind immediately went beyond the immediate event, and I found myself asking: What if Vladimir Putin had “captured” Volodymyr Zelensky? What if he had “captured” former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili? What if China “captured” the leadership in Taiwan, or the entire island itself? In those scenarios, Western headlines would overflow with words like “kidnapping,” “illegal abduction,” “gross violation of sovereignty,” and “blatant invasion,” as the Ukrainian experience still reminds us.

Yet, because it is Maduro—a leader of a UN member state—the media acts as if he were a common fugitive. They want to make us fools. They hide the truth of the kidnapping and the invasion behind a sanitised screen, refusing to use the vocabulary of international law when it doesn’t suit their geopolitical masters.

In the process of this distorted reporting, Venezuela—a sovereign state recognized by the United Nations and historically by the United States itself—is reduced to a pirated piece of land. The narrative suggests that the country was “captured” by Maduro and his “drug gangs,” creating a convenient moral vacuum. In this twisted logic, it is presented as only “right” for him to be captured in return—not by another pirate, but by the President of the most powerful nation on earth. Trump, in turn, seizes the media attention he so greedily appropriates, framing himself as the leader of the “only country” capable of such an act. It is a terrifying echo of what the late Nelson Mandela once warned: that the United States is the only country that has committed unspeakable atrocities of mass killings, citing the atomic bombings of Japan as his evidence. 

There is, however, one darkly comedic silver lining: Donald Trump himself. Unlike the usual American establishment that feeds the world a steady diet of “human rights” and “democracy” to justify aggression, Trump has spared us the traditional manure. He makes no claim of bringing liberty to Venezuela; instead, he openly admits he intends to “manage” the country and plunder its resources, from its vast oil reserves down to the gold. He is acting like a global gang leader—raw, realistic, and public. The irony is that while the aggressor is being honest about his thuggery, the Western media and political establishment are working overtime to dress it up in the “civilized” language of a lawful “capture.” UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has notably refused to describe the US action as a violation of international law, while the UN Secretary-General has carefully avoided the very terminology—invasion, violation, or illegality—that the UN Charter provides for such acts. Perhaps, being in the land of a gangster, he fears that by using the correct words, he risks being “captured” himself!

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This “semantic engineering” is a script I know by heart. In 2011, before the first NATO bomb fell on Tripoli, the Libyan army and Muammar Gaddafi were immediately framed not as a sovereign military, but as a “bunch of criminals.” The media saturated the airwaves with lurid, unproven tales of soldiers being issued Viagra for mass rapes—a narrative designed to strip them of their humanity. They were portrayed as savages who should “give up their Kalashnikovs” or face annihilation. This same template is being applied to Venezuela; by labelling the entire state apparatus as a “drug cartel,” the US justifies bypassing all laws of war. The goal is the same: to turn a political conflict into a “police action” against “thugs,” thereby making any level of violence acceptable to the Western public.

However, there is a chilling difference in the endgame. In 2011, Gaddafi was wanted dead. Why? Because a living Gaddafi, speaking in an open court, would have been a catastrophic liability for the Western “human rights defenders” who had previously dined with him and signed his oil contracts. He knew too much. Maduro, perhaps, had prepared himself for a similar martyrdom, but he did not get the chance. Instead, he was betrayed by an internal ‘agent’—a figure who reminds me of the Libyan traitors who led NATO not just to Gaddafi’s convoy, which was eventually droned, but to the private homes of every supporter. This explains the high number of civilian deaths in Libya despite NATO’s constant claims of ‘precision bombing.’ It seems the informants in Caracas have been well-trained by those in Libya; they provide the ‘keys’ to the bedroom, allowing the ‘Only Country’ to bypass the battlefield and strike at the heart of sovereignty.

Ultimately, if the world accepts the word ‘captured’ as a legal substitute for ‘abducted,’ then international law is dead. We are returning to a world where ‘might is right,’ and the UN Charter is nothing more than a scrap of paper that even its own Secretary-General is too timid to defend. In this light, Muammar Gaddafi was proven right when he famously tore up that same Charter in front of the world during his only visit to the UN in 2009—and he did so without being ‘captured.’

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.