Feels like Popper's Paradox of Tolerance is more relevant than ever. You can be tolerant, but if you tolerate intolerance, tolerance is gone. So you must not tolerate intolerance.
When people complain (and I have in the past) about El Salvador almost certainly violating rights (even gang members are innocent until proven guilty), you get to a contradiction: if the tolerant system wherein everyone gets full due process under the law has been destroyed and abused beyond recognition, then you might have to use supra-constitutional force. If a neighboring country is actively harming and undermining your own, you might have to use force that violates its sovereignty.
Whether El Salvador was really in such a situation (I’ve never been there), I don’t know for sure. I can only go by what I read online. And whether Maduro was really doing everything he’s alleged to have done and it had a material impact on the security of our votes or the health of our citizens, I don’t know.
Governments who want to use these extra-legal powers to achieve desired ends are notoriously deceitful and self-serving in the justifications for their actions.
But it’s naive and misguided IMO not to acknowledge the principle in itself: namely, that if circumstances are such that the institutions themselves are no longer capable of delivering justice and/or protecting the liberty of the people, then you cannot restrict your actions to what’s legal within their own rules. You must make an exception and be intolerant to this intolerance.
It cannot be correct that one should rely on the courts to ensure due process or comply with international law if those institutions are coopted and broken.
The question as to whether Bukele in ES or Trump in seizing Maduro were justified in doing what they did can and should be argued. That Trump says so is obviously not good enough.
But what I see now is people who believe that even if Venezuela were deliberately and materially harming the US that Trump needed to play within the rules even if the harms done were set up to circumvent them.
