Rick Morain is the former publisher and owner of the Jefferson Herald, for which he writes a regular column. This essay first appeared on Substack.

A few days ago a team effort by U.S. military, intelligence, and law enforcement personnel seized Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, and took them into American custody. The move has overwhelmed the news cycle across America, and much of the world as well.

The couple, now arraigned and in federal detention in Brooklyn, New York, will be tried in federal court on charges involving narcoterrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation, high-powered weapons possession, bribery, and fomenting kidnappings and murders.

There’s way too much involved here to unpack fully in a column like this one. The challenge is to drill down to the incident’s essential significance: Why did it happen? What important events led up to it? And what is it likely to mean for the people of Venezuela and their resources?

Xavier Carrigan is a Democratic candidate in Iowa’s third Congressional district.

For many Americans, foreign policy feels distant. Something that happens elsewhere, debated by experts and pundits, far removed from daily life.

But what the United States has done in Venezuela, and what it is now demanding in the aftermath, should concern anyone who believes power ought to have limits.

By launching a military strike in Caracas and forcibly removing Venezuela’s head of state, the U.S. crossed more than a geopolitical line. It established a precedent. One that says sovereignty is conditional, international law is negotiable, and accountability depends less on principle than on alignment.

Gerald Ott of Ankeny was a high school English teacher and for 30 years a school improvement consultant for the Iowa State Education Association.

I’ve been waiting for the 2024 election in Venezuela. In my head, I was planning an essay. A turnaround in the fortunes of Venezuela is critical to abating of out-of-control migration in the Western Hemisphere.

Between 2014 and 2023, an estimated 7.7 million left Venezuela as migrants. That’s 20 percent of the country’s population, or about 2,000 per day on average. Of these, 6.5 million have found temporary relocation in Latin America and the Caribbean, mainly Columbia and Peru.

The root causes of this unprecedented flow of migrants and refugees include democratic breakdown, repression, and a lack of basic human rights. These remain unchanged in Venezuela. There is also a deep economic crisis driven by devastating policies and a kleptocracy that has characterized the political landscape during the last 20 years. Nineteen million Venezuelan citizens are experiencing food and medical insecurity. It’s a boiling pot ready to explode.