An Illegal Action Against an Illegitimate Government: Still, In Dubio pro Law

“What separates war from murder is the law.”— Former attorney of the United States Army

By Glênio S Guedes ( Brazilian Attorney-at-Law)

There are illegitimate governments. There are authoritarian regimes. There are stolen elections, systematic repression, forced exiles, and States captured by forms of power no longer aligned with the public good. None of this, however, authorizes the suspension of law as the standard by which state action is judged—especially when the State that acts claims to be a guardian of constitutional order and international legality.

Here lies the central dilemma of our time: can an action that is manifestly illegal become acceptable merely because it is directed against an illegitimate government? If we still think within the domain of law, the answer must be no. The illegitimacy of the target does not cleanse the illegality of the method.

The capture of Nicolás Maduro, announced as the outcome of a large-scale military operation, reopens an old wound in the international order: the temptation to replace law with force whenever the adversary appears morally indefensible. It is a dangerous temptation precisely because it is effective, swift, and dramatic—but also because, over time, it corrodes the legal foundations that make coexistence among states possible.

There is little doubt about the authoritarian nature of the Venezuelan regime, nor about the institutional, economic, and humanitarian collapse that accompanied it. Acknowledging these facts, however, does not amount to granting a license to remove a government by means that violate the very legal architecture meant to protect all political communities. International law was not designed to shield tyrants; it was built to restrain the arbitrary power of the strong.

The intervention was justified through the language of counterterrorism and anti-narcotics enforcement—an old rhetorical device that recasts political conflict as a form of global policing. The problem lies not only in the empirical weakness of these justifications, but in the conceptual shift they produce. When everything is framed as policing, war disguises itself; when everything becomes war, legal responsibility dissolves. The boundaries between lawful use of force, armed intervention, and extrajudicial execution begin to erode.

Before force was elevated to the status of method, there existed a broad repertoire of legitimate legal instruments that could—and should—have been exhausted. Sustained multilateral diplomatic pressure, international mechanisms of individual accountability for grave human rights violations, targeted and intelligent sanctions, mediation processes with verifiable institutional guarantees, and effective support for a transition led by internal actors are all part of the ordinary grammar of contemporary international law. Even the extreme hypothesis of using force, if ever contemplated, would require multilateral deliberation, a clear legal basis, strict temporal and material limits, and, above all, an explicit institutional plan for the day after. Ignoring these stages is not an oversight; it is a choice. It is the substitution of law’s demanding deliberation with the immediate efficiency of coercion. At that point, exception ceases to be extraordinary response and becomes method.

Even under domestic constitutional standards, legality is in doubt. The United States Constitution establishes clear limits on unilateral executive military action. To bypass those constraints is not a mere procedural irregularity; it is to shift the center of constitutional gravity from principle to personal will, turning law from a standard into an obstacle.

Recent history reinforces the warning. Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya demonstrate that removing detestable regimes does not ensure democracy or stability. More often, it inaugurates cycles of institutional fragmentation, diffuse violence, and prolonged civilian suffering. The failure lies not only in the moral diagnosis of the enemy, but in the belief that force, detached from legality, can generate order.

The revival of a logic of regional preeminence, echoing older doctrines of hemispheric tutelage, deepens the problem. When a State claims the right to intervene without international legitimacy or valid authorization, the precedent is not regional—it is global. Norms relativized in one country today may be invoked tomorrow by other powers, in other territories, against other peoples.

Law is not naïve. It recognizes injustice and the existence of oppressive regimes. But it also knows—perhaps better than any other institutional practice—that what separates war from murder is the law. When that line is erased, justice is not strengthened; the very criterion by which justice is recognized disappears.

In the end, the decisive question is not whether the fall of a tyrant was desirable, but whether the chosen method increases or diminishes the possibility of transforming power into legitimate order. Without shared rules, recognized institutions, and a constitutionally oriented transition, the force that topples an illegitimate government risks corroding the very idea of legality it claims to defend. As long as that answer remains uncertain, the only intellectually honest position is this: in dubio pro iure!

And so the uncomfortable question inevitably arises: what, then, prevents Brazil and Colombia from being next?