RCG Statement on Abduction of Venezuelan President & First Lady

The RCG condemns in the strongest terms the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores.

As Emperor Haile Selassie warned, such acts reflect a recurring pattern in which hegemonic power, driven by narrow self-interest, undermines the security of others while presuming its own immunity. Peace, Selassie insisted, is indivisible: when coercion is normalized against one nation, the entire international order is put at risk.

The pretexts are familiar - claims of illegitimacy or threats to economic and political interests. Africans recall the kidnapping of Toussaint Louverture by Napoleon’s France in 1802 and the removal of Haiti’s President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. The abduction of Venezuela’s leadership which has been condemned by South Africa at the UN Security Council, by Ghana, and by the African Union belongs to this same lineage, as does the renewed normalization of territorial ambition, from speculative claims over Canada to persistent strategic designs on Greenland.

Selassie consistently warned that selective legality and impunity allow insecurity to spread beyond its initial targets. Europe once assumed that the violence it tolerated elsewhere would never return to it, until Hitler proved otherwise. Today’s geopolitical maneuvering confirms again that no region is insulated from the precedents it helps establish.

The RCG therefore calls for a meaningful shift in political thinking and the construction of a genuine international community that refuses the comfort of helplessness. If the harm hegemony inflicts on others is allowed to accumulate unchecked, it will ultimately consume all - including hegemony itself. Apart from the sovereignty of the Almighty, as His Imperial Majesty says, no nation stands above another.