[music] PATRICIA GÓMEZ: Dr.

Berlin, thank you for joining us in Adelante.

DR.

MARK BERLIN: It's my pleasure.

Thanks for having me.

PATRICIA GÓMEZ: Was the capture of Maduro legal enforcement action, or was this a violation of national autonomy?

DR.

MARK BERLIN: Well, so the Trump administration can call it a legal enforcement action, you know, the same way that Russia calls their war in Ukraine a special military operation.

But just like that, it's an act of war.

Under international law, the only basis for using armed force against another state, in the absence of a UN Security Council resolution, which doesn't apply in this situation, the only basis, legal basis for using force under international law is in response to an armed attack, is in self-defense in response to an ongoing armed attack.

Venezuela did not attack the United States.

United States attacked Venezuela by using armed force to invade and abduct the head of state.

Generally, when the United States is acting in ways that appear to violate international law, and certainly it's crossed the line many times in history, it at least tries to make a case for why.

In this case, the Trump administration hasn't even tried to make a legal argumentation they've provided to Congress is basically we can set aside international law because this is a law enforcement action based on U.S.

law, and actually justifies Venezuela to act in self-defense, to use armed force in self-defense in response to the attack by the United States.

PATRICIA GÓMEZ: What about the significance of having Maduro in front of a New York court instead of an international tribunal?

DR.

MARK BERLIN: We know from a lot of information and testimony and evidence collected by international human rights organizations like Amnesty International that Maduro and his government has directed or overseen widescale, widespread, large-scale human rights violations and atrocities, things like killings, torture, political imprisonment, enforced disappearances, sexual violence.

The charges against Maduro, they focus on allegations about importation of cocaine into the United States and conspiracy to do that and possession of machine guns.

It's possible those are valid allegations and they will be proven in a court of law.

You know, it's not for me to speak for what justice should mean for Venezuelans, but I would also imagine that for many Venezuelans it would be a denial of justice to not have the particular crimes that his government has committed against them heard in a court and be prosecuted for those.

It denies them the opportunity to have those abuses officially recognized in a court of law.

It denies the opportunity to have evidence presented about them, to have witnesses testify and to have survivors tell their stories and to have those validated by a court of law.

It denies them the opportunity to have an authoritative record, authoritative kind of accounting of the truth of the full scale and scope of these atrocities committed by the government.

The Trump administration hasn't shown any interest in that aspect of justice, of those particular crimes.

It's just focused on these narrow issues about alleged cocaine trafficking.

PATRICIA GÓMEZ: What about the sinking of the boats?

Do you see any justification or is also a total violation of due process?

DR.

MARK BERLIN: Yeah, again, it's not really a close call in that regard from the perspective of international law at least.

The killings of the suspected drug traffickers on the high seas violates perhaps the most fundamental principle of international human rights law, which is the right to life, the right to not be killed arbitrarily by a government, especially without a due process of law.

The Trump administration claims that they have the legal right under international law to kill these suspects because they say that they are in a war, an armed conflict with these suspected drug traffickers or the gangs, the drug organizations that they represent.

From the perspective of international law, there's really no difference between what the Trump administration is doing and say going up to a suspected drug dealer on the corner, on the street corner, and summarily executing them.

I think that argument further kind of falls apart when you look at the larger picture and the other pieces of the puzzle.

Number one, the Trump administration has identified fentanyl as the major threat that kind of justifies this kind of extreme action, but experts point out that Venezuela basically has no role in the international fentanyl trade and the indictment against Maduro is about cocaine, not about fentanyl.

Second, just a month ago amidst these boat strikes, the Trump administration pardoned the former president of Honduras, Orlando Hernandez, who was extradited from Honduras to the United States and prosecuted in federal court for drug trafficking.

And their justification, the only argument they really made in response was that, well, for why they did that, it was because he was prosecuted by the Biden administration and that meant there was something wrong about the prosecution, which obviously is an embarrassing argument.

If the Trump administration cares so much about protecting Americans from drugs that they're willing to kill people on the high seas, then why are they defunding drug treatment programs across the country?

So programs that we know help people, protect people from drugs, it's really hard to square the Trump administration's argument that this is all about protecting Americans from drugs when all of their other actions seem counter to that.

PATRICIA GÓMEZ: They are removing the head of a regime.//Yeah.//Does it work if you leave the entire system?

DR.

MARK BERLIN: Time will tell about that.

It's hard to predict how something like that is going to play out, but you don't have to be a political scientist to kind of look around and look at recent cases like Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, where a regime change went very badly and ended up being very costly to the United States and its allies in many, many different ways.

In that on the one hand they are saying that they're going to, "run the country."

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.

DR.

MARK BERLIN: Remains to be seen how we can square the United States government, we'll square those two things, forcing the Venezuelan government to do what it wants and not using military personnel or not putting Americans at risk in some way.

PATRICIA GÓMEZ: What about the oil blockade?

What does it mean in the whole process of this capturing of Maduro?

DR.

MARK BERLIN: United States based sanctions and the United States has the legal right to impose economic sanctions under U.S.

law against Venezuela.

But it doesn't have the right under international law to use force in other countries' territory, other countries' waters to enforce those laws, those sanctions against that country's will.

None of that is really lawful from the perspective of international law.

PATRICIA GÓMEZ: Does the operation absolute resolve represent a new era law enforcement or a return to an old-fashioned force?

DR.

MARK BERLIN: As you know, the United States has a long history of engaging in those kinds of tactics in Latin America.

Those tactics were outlawed in 1945 under the UN Charter, which prohibits states from using force or even the threat of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of other states.

Great powers like Russia and China have been engaging in these kinds of tactics already for a long time, or analogous tactics.

So the fact that the United States is showing that it's willing to do so also just kind... is a benefit to Russia and China because it legitimizes their bullying of their neighbors.

But I wouldn't be surprised if we do see more of this kind of thing going forward.

PATRICIA GÓMEZ: What is your vision or what can happen here?

DR.

MARK BERLIN: Well, I'm not sure if I'm in a position to predict how things are going to go from here, especially with such an unpredictable regime that tends to act kind of on whims that can change from day to day, week to week.

Congress is, under the Constitution, is the body that's supposed to declare war.

I would also look to the European Union and Canada in terms of what kinds of actions they're willing to take.

A lot of it might depend on kind of their own constituents and what their own constituents are willing to accept or not.

But we've seen that a large majority of Republicans generally support Trump's actions.

Even if they didn't support them before he decided to do them, once he decides to do them, they decided to support his actions.

I don't know if hope is the right word about Congress, but it's at least a possibility.

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