The United States’ attack on Venezuela and the kidnapping of dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife are a direct affront to all Latin Americans. It was a violent, unilateral, interventionist, arrogant and, above all, illegal act. By ordering the incursion of U.S. troops into Venezuela, President Donald Trump has effectively committed an act of war.
It will be easy for some to justify this act if they focus on the regime that was attacked.
Maduro has headed a repressive, corrupt, and inefficient military regime that has caused a fourth of the population to flee. He and his accomplices should have departed the Venezuelan government long before their blatant theft of the 2024 elections. The decadeslong desperation of the majority of the Venezuelan population is understandable, as is their frustration at the apparent lack of pathways to remove the dictatorship from power. Their country, which has enough natural resources to bring prosperity to all, has decayed and collapsed. It is natural, then, that many are celebrating today.
But if we turn our gaze to the attacker, all Latin Americans should be outraged and alarmed. Trump has built this incursion on lies: He began by ordering attacks on small boats that he said were transporting drugs to the United States, although he never presented any evidence and everything seems to indicate that many innocent people died in those attacks.
Hours after Maduro’s removal, we still do not know if civilians died in the bombing of Caracas.
Lessons on Sovereignty, from Guantánamo to El Salvador
Trump and his spokespeople accuse Maduro of heading a drug cartel, and the Venezuelan regime of narco-terrorism. They repeated this today, weeks after granting a presidential pardon to former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was found guilty by a U.S. court of trafficking thousands of tons of cocaine to that country. Even worse, they threatened the Honduran people with economic punishment if they did not elect Tito Asfura, Trump’s anointed candidate.
There is no legal justification for the military incursion into Venezuela. This is probably the greatest damage: finishing off the international order of coexistence among nations established after World War II. There are no longer any rules or civilized commitments to respect them; there are only interests imposed by economic and military might. The utopias of a transnational system guaranteeing equal rights to all human beings are being buried. We have returned to the law of the strongest. The law of Donald Trump.
The president of the United States did not even hide his plan for Venezuela: the big U.S. oil companies will go to “recover what they stole from us” in Venezuela years ago, and extract much wealth from the Venezuelan subsoil and natural resources. Venezuela’s natural resources will now benefit U.S. oil companies. To ensure this, he said, the United States will govern Venezuela for an indefinite period of time, with the people who accompany him in his cabinet: his Secretaries of State and Defense, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth. Apparently absent from his agenda is the notion that Venezuelans should be the architects of post-Maduro Venezuela, the protagonists of their own history.
Trump has not liberated Venezuela; he has seized it.
He also repeated what was already written in his National Security Strategy published just a few weeks ago: the return of the Monroe Doctrine with a “Trump corollary,” doubling down on U.S. dominance in the hemisphere.
Trump is once again turning our continent into the backyard of the United States. With military and economic force, he has placed our rights, our destinies, our national possibilities all at the service of the interests of a single country.
We thought we had left behind that brutal, banana-republic attitude of the United States on our continent at the turn of the century. Trump is not only reviving the Monroe Doctrine, but also the bloody abuses of Roosevelt, the Dulles brothers, Kissinger, Reagan, and Bush Sr. Donald Trump now adds his name alongside others who remain fresh in our collective memory. All of us Latin Americans are at risk.
Donald Trump Returns at the Helm of an Incendiary, Dangerous Project
The invasion of Venezuela comes at a time when the continent is shifting ideologically toward the extreme right that he represents: He already has his candidate in Tegucigalpa; in San Salvador, a like-minded and compliant dictator; in Buenos Aires, a fanatic more Trumpist than himself; and he is now touching down in Santiago with Kast. These are those who obey the United States to maintain their privileges.
There’s opposition leader María Corina Machado, the Nobel Peace Prize winner whose first reaction was to say that Trump deserved the prize, and who called for this military incursion. It did not occur to the newly minted Nobel laureate to appeal to the international community, the Security Council, or international organizations. No. Today, Trump responded to her aspirations and disqualified her from governing his new territory.
We Latin Americans cannot accept that we exist only in function of the economic or political interests of another country. We did not elect Mr. Trump. We should never again allow a return to the days when our lives were decided in Washington without even taking us into account. Never again should we allow them to take away our right to self-determination.
Our future is now more uncertain. Trump has threatened to invade Panama again if they did not terminate Canal operation contracts awarded to a Chinese company. This same Trump threatened to annex Greenland, arguing that his country needs those natural resources and that geographical position. He forced the Ukrainian president to hand over rare minerals in exchange for continued military support; he forced the Chinese to sell the U.S. branch of TikTok to a company from his country. Secretary Rubio said it at the press conference on Venezuela: When Trump talks, he means business. It is high time for the rest of the world to react.