The long, and often sinister, history of US intervention in Latin America appears to be about to enter a new chapter. After a 20th century of active interference, sometimes overt, such as the 1989 invasion of Panama—and other times, supposedly covert, such as the sponsorship of the 1973 coup d'état in Chile against Salvador Allende—the Donald Trump administration has authorized covert CIA operations in Venezuela. Add to that the five attacks on alleged drug boats and a small submarine in the Caribbean, and the strange withdrawal of the head of the Southern Command, in charge of military operations in the region, two years ahead of schedule, and the pressure on Nicolás Maduro becomes even more direct.

Many Latin American dictatorships were built thanks to the support of the United States both to the autocrats and to the power apparatus on which they were based: the memory of the sinister School of the Americas, which trained more than 45,000 Latin American officers and instructed them in dirty war tactics, has not yet been erased, although it closed its doors in 1984.

But the CIA was the direct perpetrator of coup plots, assassination plots, and the Contra insurgency in Sandinista Nicaragua in the 1980s. Therefore, its explicit mention, when Trump admitted its operations against Chavismo, constitutes not only a novelty, but also, and above all, a warning.

During the 20th century, Washington's interventionism in the region served to preserve strategic (the Panama Canal), economic (the United Fruit Company's monopoly in Guatemala), and political interests, all of which can be summed up in one: the fight against communism, especially during the Cold War. In recent decades, these objectives have been superimposed on the powerful DEA's war on drugs.

That is precisely the argument Trump uses to pressure Venezuela and try to force Maduro out, subjecting the Chavista leadership to a regime of psychological terror. The six extrajudicial operations carried out in Caribbean waters since September 2 have left at least 27 dead and two survivors, a Colombian and an Ecuadorian, who were detained and will be repatriated. The Republican tycoon announced a second phase of the offensive, suggesting the beginning of ground incursions. The fundamental difference from the past is that, in a world determined by an uninterrupted flow of communication and public interactions on social media, the White House and the State Department are now toying with the idea of announcing the next step.

This strategy has contributed to sowing unrest throughout much of the region. The military campaign in the Caribbean is being closely and with concern followed by the embassies in Washington of Latin American countries that host organizations involved in drug trafficking, for example, Mexico and Colombia. They are also watching with the hope that Trump's interventionist ambitions will not continue beyond Venezuela. Mexico alone has six criminal gangs included last February by the State Department on the list of"foreign terrorist organizations": the Sinaloa, Jalisco New Generation, Northeast, and New Michoacan Family cartels, as well as the Gulf Cartel and the"United Cartels."

“There's a fear of who might be next,” explains a Latin American diplomatic source in the US capital. “And also a certain confidence that countries that maintain a good relationship [with Washington] will be spared. Although with this administration, you never know.” In both Colombia and Mexico, Trump has already used the war on drugs and his zero-tolerance policy toward migration to justify a tariff onslaught. However, aside from the clashes with President Gustavo Petro, the most recent over his support for Gaza during the United Nations General Assembly, the perception in Bogotá and Mexico City is that, for the moment, Venezuela is Washington's chosen target. At least for its escalating warlike rhetoric.

“It would be very naive to think that the CIA began operating after Trump said so. All of this has a performative dimension. What happens is that before, we knew the United States had that capability, and now we know it also has the intention,” says Sergio Guzmán, director of Colombia Risk Analysis, a consulting firm dedicated to measuring political risks in the region and their economic impact. A clear trigger for an acceleration of events could, in his opinion, be a military response from Maduro. In any case, applying the same Washington recipe to other countries would have deeper consequences. “The case of Mexico is even more sensitive because interdependence is even greater. Any gesture would have an economic impact on the United States, and Trump wants to avoid that,” he reasons.

The Monroe Doctrine

The fears, in any case, have a historical basis. The Monroe Doctrine's idea of"America for Americans" fueled a kind of unity of destiny on the continent: Latin American countries became, despite themselves, the US's backyard. As the sole superpower in the Western Hemisphere, the White House felt entitled to intervene politically and militarily, although the deployment of the Army and the CIA, in some cases, has been concealed in recent decades by DEA agents.

Thanks to the Monroe Doctrine and its corollary, due to President Theodore Roosevelt (1904), and which explicitly authorized the use of military force, Washington assumed the power to adopt the necessary measures - that is, any measure - to"stabilize" a country or, under the action of the IMF and the World Bank, to straighten it when it failed to meet its financial obligations.

During the Cold War, the US successfully engaged in around 50 coups d'état under the so-called doctrine of containing communism. On other occasions, it unsuccessfully promoted actions such as the failed Bay of Pigs invasion or the numerous assassination attempts on Fidel Castro.

One of the first countries it intervened in was Haiti, which Washington coveted as a potential regional naval base. After a turbulent first decade of the 20th century, with seven presidents in just five years and the assassination of the last, the US sent the Navy in 1915 and occupied the country until 1934. The supposed stabilization allowed it to assume economic control and amend its Constitution to authorize foreign ownership of its fertile lands. A century later, US contractors—some close to President Donald Trump—provide private security in this failed state.

Since the beginning of the century, it has also intervened in one way or another in Honduras, Cuba, Nicaragua, Panama, and Guatemala, as well as Colombia and Mexico. Its sinister interference extended to the countries of the Southern Cone in the 1960s and 1970s.

But the Cold War was the perfect setting, straight out of a Graham Greene or Le Carré novel, for the prominence of an undisguisedly imperialist United States. The domino doctrine—the potential contagion effect in the region of a country falling into the USSR's orbit—sparked Washington's paranoia about any government that spoke of nationalizing land or expropriating businesses, or of social justice.

The clearest case was Guatemala in 1954, against the sweeping agrarian reform of President Jacobo Árbenz, which threatened the interests of the US-based United Fruit Company, owner of 40% of the country's land. The US intervention was known as Operation PBSuccess and was a full-blown coup, chronicled by Mario Vargas Llosa in one of his last novels, Hard Times.

Between 1964 and 1965, the US also encouraged the coup that overthrew the government of Social Democrat Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic and occupied the country for 17 months. On the island of Grenada, it ended the first and only Marxist government in the English-speaking Caribbean in 1983.

The most sinister example of US interventionism in Latin America was Operation Condor: a coordinated campaign of repression between South American dictatorships and Washington in the 1970s and 1980s to disappear the left through a systematic plan of torture, murder and death flights in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil, Ecuador and Peru.

In 1973, Chilean General Augusto Pinochet staged a coup against the legitimate government of socialist Salvador Allende, in which the then Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize that same year, played a significant role. The United States also contributed to the establishment of Brazil's military dictatorship by supporting the coup against leftist Joao Goulart in 1964. The military remained in power until the 1980s, while today Donald Trump openly supports the coup leader Jair Bolsonaro.

The case of Panama, one of the last US invasions and perhaps the first broadcast almost live, ousted from power"Pineapple Face," as Manuel Antonio Noriega, a former CIA informant turned tyrant, was known. Washington used the leader's ties to drug trafficking as a shield to overthrow him. In December 1989, 24,000 soldiers were sent to Panama to capture him, and after several weeks of fighting, the general finally surrendered on January 3, 1990. The Spanish photojournalist Juantxu Rodríguez died in Panama City, shot down by the invaders.

Along with Haiti, the US intervention in Panama is one of the oldest on the continent: as early as 1903, it sent warships to support separatist groups seeking independence from Colombia, which led to the country's independence and, subsequently, to Washington's control of the Canal. The Trump administration is now promising to"recover" the canal from Chinese influence.

Worthy of special mention is the feverish activity of Washington's military, intelligence agents, and plainclothes envoys in Central America during the bloody period of the civil wars in Guatemala (between 1960 and 1996, the longest on the continent, which began after the coup against Árbenz) and El Salvador. From the School of the Americas, which taught entire generations of Latin American military personnel to torture and murder, Washington supported the death squads, paramilitary groups responsible for, among other atrocities, massacres of indigenous people, peasants, and opponents, as well as the murder of the Jesuits of the UCA and Monsignor Óscar Arnulfo Romero.

Curiously, Venezuela is not included on the map of US interventions in the continent during the 20th century. Venezuela's economic interests, aligned with those of the superpower, guaranteed a smooth relationship until Hugo Chávez came to power. The closest thing to direct Washington intervention in that country can be inferred from the confession of John Bolton, former National Security Advisor in Trump's first term and indicted this Thursday for his handling of classified information. In 2022, he acknowledged that he helped organize coup attempts in other countries, but without success due to the"incompetence" of the administration he served. Bolton referred in passing, without giving details, to the 2019 crisis with Venezuela over Washington's recognition of Juan Guaidó as interim president. And although Maduro has always denounced US interference in Venezuela's domestic politics, the consequences of the hostilities have never been so far-reaching.