Venezuela, Narco-Trafficking Narratives, Crimes Against Humanity, and the Rome Statute: Keeping Accountability on Track

[Thairi Moya Sánchez (PhD) is a full-time professor of public international law at Complutense University of Madrid]

Over recent months, the Venezuela file has moved into an accelerated escalation: international airlines suspended or curtailed operations amid official safety advisories and mounting regional military risk; Washington announced coercive maritime measures against sanctioned oil shipments; and, on 3 January 2026, U.S. forces conducted an operation in Caracas that resulted in the capture of Nicolás Maduro and his transfer to U.S. custody. Beyond the debate about “prohibitions”, these developments raise acute questions about the (il)legality of the use of force under the UN Charter’s prohibition on the threat or use of force (see here, here, here and here).  While the question of any immunities that might attach to Maduro is significant, it lies beyond the scope of this post. The focus here is on a different problem: the way narcotrafficking narratives can displace crimes against humanity and distort accountability frameworks.

Alongside these questions, the Venezuela file also includes reports on illicit economies and their purported links to state institutions. Relatedly, civil-society reporting and anti-corruption monitoring have drawn attention to organized crime within the state and illicit economies (drug trafficking, illegal gold extraction) that are described as intertwined with sectors of state power.

Crucially, the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela (UNIFFMV) flagged that one dimension of the crisis warrants deeper scrutiny: the link between corruption/illicit economies and serious human rights violations, with clear implications for international-crimes analysis. Drawing on interviews with current and former Government officials and military personnel, the Mission reported that personal financial gains derived from the capture of State institutions were described as a motivating factor behind violations documented in its findings – creating a strong incentive for State actors to retain power and secure impunity ( para. 116).  

In that sense, the moment is not wholly unprecedented: the Panama/Noriega episode remains a cautionary reference point – and UN  and Inter-American human-rights bodies have previously characterized the Panama intervention as violating international law and the regional legal order. The present crisis again underscores how thin and politically contingent international controls can be when powerful states move against an entrenched governing apparatus outside genuinely multilateral legal frameworks.

Although independent investigations remain indispensable – as the UNIFFMV has underscored, including by pointing to the nexus between corruption/illicit economies, and international crimes – the public narrative has increasingly been reorganized around an “operational” narcotrafficking lens. That lens may be tactically useful for certain domestic enforcement agendas, but it can also be analytically distorting: it redirects attention toward routes, networks, and proceeds, while sidelining the central subject of international criminal accountability in Venezuela – victims of state repression and patterns of detention, torture, persecution, sexual violence, and other abuses that may amount to crimes against humanity. 

From a personal standpoint, I have not been fully persuaded by approaches that frame the Venezuela situation primarily through the lens of political persecution alone. Repression has not only targeted those labelled as political opponents; it has also reached broadly across society, with the heaviest burdens falling on the poorest communities. Civil-society documentation helps illustrate the scale of physical abuse beyond the political sphere: PROVEA reports more than 32,000 cases of violations of the right to personal integrity between 2013 and 2018 – a category that includes torture and ill-treatment. Likewise, Human Rights Watch, drawing on official data on killings recorded as “resistance to authority,” reports more than 19,000 such deaths between 2016 and 2019 and notes that evidence indicates many were extrajudicial executions. UN reporting further indicates that these lethal security operations have disproportionately affected young men in low-income neighborhoods – making extrajudicial executions not only a question of repression, but also one of class-based vulnerability.

These figures are not presented as a nationwide total of all violations, but they are concrete indicators of scale and pattern – precisely the kind of material that should keep the accountability conversation anchored in victimization, rather than in whichever enforcement narrative is most politically convenient.

The Baseline: Why the ICC Does Not “Do” Drug Trafficking or Corruption as Standalone Crimes

The ICC has no standalone crimes of narcotrafficking or corruption because the Rome Statute’s subject-matter jurisdiction was limited to a set of “core crimes”. During the 1998 Rome Conference, “treaty crimes” such as terrorism and illicit drug trafficking were explicitly debated. Some delegations urged inclusion (notably Trinidad and Tobago/CARICOM), while others argued these offences should remain primarily within national jurisdiction and existing treaty frameworks. 

The official record reflects both pro- and anti-inclusion positions and includes warnings – most notably from the United States – that adding terrorism and drug crimes would distract and overburden the Court. The compromise was the Final Act’s Resolution E, which deferred terrorism and drug crimes for possible future consideration rather than incorporating them in 1998 (see here and here). Corruption followed a different institutional path: it became the object of a dedicated global treaty and cooperation regime – UNCAC (2003) – built around domestic criminalization, mutual legal assistance, and asset recovery rather than ICC prosecution.

Whatever its virtues at the time, the decision to confine ICC jurisdiction to “core crimes” could prove vulnerable to strategic use – Venezuela illustrates how this dynamic can unfold in practice. When narcotrafficking and corruption sit outside the Statute, the accountability conversation can be redirected toward headline-friendly enforcement logics, even in situations where the central legal question is whether state repression amounts to crimes against humanity. The risk is not that illicit economies are legally irrelevant, but that they become the story. Given the Statute’s design, those facts could only do their proper legal work indirectly: as contextual and evidentiary material to establish the attack, the policy, and individual responsibility for crimes against humanity. 

This is also where the Court’s actual work in the Venezuela I situation matters. The ICC Prosecutor opened an investigation in 2021; judges later authorized its resumption under Article 18(2), and the Appeals Chamber rejected Venezuela’s attempt to halt the probe – largely through a complementarity lens. Against that procedural backdrop, the public debate can either (i) track what the ICC is legally equipped to assess – Rome Statute elements and responsibility – or (ii) drift into a parallel universe where “narco” enforcement becomes a proxy for accountability. In practice, prosecutorial strategies may choose to foreground political persecution and repression dynamics, while treating corruption and illicit-economy evidence as supporting context rather than as the central organizing frame.

Why the “Narco” Frame Can Derail Accountability

In general, narcotrafficking prosecutions tend to prioritize a different architecture of proof: movement of commodities, financial flows, distribution networks, conspiracies, and proceeds. That can be important for transnational enforcement. But it is not the same project as proving crimes against humanity under Article 7 of the Rome Statute. When the accountability conversation is dominated by “narco-state” language, three shifts often follow:

1. Victims disappear from the center. The harm becomes trafficking and corruption rather than detention, torture, persecution, sexual violence, and other patterns of repression that international criminal law exists to address.
2. Legal standards change. Conspiracy-style narratives can start to substitute for the Rome Statute’s requirements about an “attack,” a “civilian population,” and a State or organizational “policy.”
3. Political incentives shift. Drug cases can be resolved through narrow evidentiary packages, cooperation bargains, and plea dynamics; crimes against humanity demand systemic proof, institutional mapping, and a clearer record of individual responsibility within chains of command.

The result can be a form of “surrogate justice”: powerful in headlines, thinner in truth-finding, and less responsive to the kind of wrongdoing that international criminal law was built to address.

At This Point: What the Rome Statute Can Do (and How iIlicit Economies Fit)

Crimes against humanity under Article 7 require more than isolated abuse. Article 7 requires multiple acts committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population, pursuant to or in furtherance of a State or organizational policy. Within that legal frame, illicit economies and corruption can matter – not as charges, but as evidence that helps explain how repression operates and endures.

Used carefully, illicit-economy evidence can help establish:

• Capacity and sustainability: how coercive institutions are financed, staffed, and maintained over time.
• Institutional capture and impunity: why domestic investigations are performative, selective, or structurally blocked (and why witnesses and evidence face heightened risk).
• Territorial control and selective violence: how illicit governance and repression reinforce one another, including coercion in strategic zones (e.g., mining areas) and retaliation against perceived opponents or those who threaten revenue streams.

This is precisely the kind of linkage the UNIFFMV placed on the table when it emphasized personal economic gain from institutional capture as an incentive structure for abuses and when it mapped patterns of violence and control in mining regions. In other words: the disciplined approach is to keep the legal north star anchored in Article 7 – attack, policy, civilian population, responsibility – while using illicit-economy facts as connective tissue that can illuminate coordination, motive, opportunity, and the mechanics of impunity.

Withdrawal Politics and the Accountability Timeline

Because key actors around Maduro remain in control of state institutions, it is important to recall that a withdrawal from the Rome Statute cannot function as an “accountability eraser” – especially because the withdrawal track was initiated under the Maduro administration. Under Article 127, however, withdrawal is formal and takes effect only after a one-year delay, and it does not affect the Court’s jurisdiction over crimes committed while the Statute was in force for that State. The jurisdictional logic is designed precisely to prevent strategic exits from wiping out responsibility for past conduct – yet the fact that the Maduro government has begun to move in that direction makes the risk of an attempted accountability “reset” part of the current landscape.

Conclusion

Venezuela sits at the intersection of two legal universes: transnational organized crime enforcement and international criminal accountability. The temptation is to let the “narco” story absorb everything. The better approach is disciplined: keep the case theory anchored in crimes against humanity, while treating illicit economies as part of the evidentiary architecture that explains how repression operates, endures, and evades domestic accountability.

However, while the ICC lacks jurisdiction over corruption and narcotrafficking as standalone crimes under the Rome Statute, a future transitional justice process in Venezuela could provide the institutional space to address those dimensions more directly – integrating grand corruption and illicit-economy incentives into a fuller account of how repression was financed, sustained, and shielded by impunity.

If the goal is a credible rule-of-law outcome, the international community should resist “narco-theater” as a substitute for international criminal law. The Rome Statute’s vocabulary is not rhetorical – it is operational: attack, policy, civilian population, responsibility. Keeping that vocabulary at the center is the most concrete way to ensure that accountability in Venezuela is not redirected away from victims and toward whatever narrative happens to be most geopolitically convenient.