On January 3, 2026, in less than three hours, American special forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in Caracas, before transferring them to a federal prison in New York. Never before had a sitting head of State been removed from his palace to be incarcerated and tried by the justice system of another country.

The so-called Donroe Doctrine, established with the reappointment of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency in 2024, set aside a posture based on caution and a certain distance from the internal politics of the countries of the Latin American region and began to act based on the so-called principle of exceptionalism, an element previously observed in U.S. foreign policy in the context of the Monroe Doctrine (formalized in 1823)