When President Donald Trump authorized the U.S. military to carry out the first of at least twenty-one military strikes on a Venezuelan boat in international waters at the beginning of September, he claimed that the move was intended to prevent “narco-terrorists” from smuggling drugs into the country. But in the months since, his administration’s continued targeting of foreign vessels in international waters—including bombings throughout the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean that have claimed the lives of at least eighty people—suggests a broader motive: to dictate the economic policy of foreign governments in Latin America, particularly those with left-leaning leadership.
Trump’s Venezuelan drug-smuggling pretext is particularly unconvincing given that some of the boats targeted in these operations were not Venezuelan at all, but Colombian. What’s more, this is not the first time that Trump has engaged in unjustified strikes on boats, as illustrated by a September New York Times report which revealed that U.S. Navy SEALS massacred several unarmed North Korean fishermen during a 2019 Trump-authorized mission aimed at intercepting communications.
Trump’s invocation of a war on drug trafficking reads as particularly hypocritical given his decision earlier this week to pardon former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been sentenced to decades in prison for his central role in what former Attorney General Merrick Garland has called “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.”
Michael Fox, a reporter based in Latin America, tells The Progressive that the boat bombing campaign marks the first time in more than thirty-five years that the United States has waged a unilateral military attack against individuals and used direct military force in Latin America, though it has trained paramilitary groups abroad and sent naval ships into Venezuelan waters during that time. “The last time it happened was the U.S. invasion of Panama,” says Fox. “It was one month after the fall of the Cold War. And it was George W. Bush basically saying, ‘Just because the Cold War is over, that doesn’t mean we’re done messing in Latin America.’ ”
Though it has refrained from using direct force in recent decades, the United States has undermined elected leadership in Latin America—particularly in Venezuela, which holds some of the largest oil reserves in the world. In 2002, U.S.-backed opposition forces attempted to oust Venezuela’s socialist president, Hugo Chávez, resulting in Chávez’s arrest, and brief replacement by U.S.-endorsed Pedro Carmona, before he rode a wave of popular support back into office.
Still, a return to direct U.S. military action against Venezuela raises troubling implications for Latin Americans, who are no stranger to the threat that U.S. military incursions pose to their sovereignty. The justification for direct military confrontation in Venezuela has rested on unfounded claims by the Trump Administration that its current president, Nicolás Maduro, runs a “narcotrafficking state” and is therefore aiding and abetting the flow of drugs into the United States.
Trump’s illegal bombings of civilians in international waters, he says, are necessary to “combat” the Maduro regime, which he aggressively combatted with sanctions and narcoterrorism charges during his first term. Simultaneously, his administration attempted to diplomatically delegitimize Maduro, repeatedly portraying him as an “illegitimate dictator” while promoting Venezuelan opposition figures such as María Corina Machado, who supports Trump’s argument that U.S. interference in the region is necessary.
Maduro has been the subject of criticism internationally, including large swaths of the anti-interventionist left in the United States, for his authoritarian tactics and allegations that his administration has imprisoned and tortured innocent people. But U.S. interests in the region do not appear to be genuinely rooted in these concerns, nor in the alleged “narcoterrorist” drug-smuggling operation, as very little of the fentanyl in the U.S. is the product of international smuggling. Rather, the U.S. is keen on installing more politically-aligned leadership in countries like Venezuela so as to take advantage of the large natural resource value in the region.
In some sense, Trump’s actions are nothing new—his defense of the bombing campaign mirrors the United States’s previous attempts to preserve U.S. hegemony in Latin America by exerting control over its internal politics. What has changed, Fox says, is the rhetoric Trump has used to legitimize his actions. He notes that after the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy shifted away from anti-communist interventionism, toward what it called the war on drugs.
“Trump is using this idea of the drug war,” Fox explains, “saying—without any evidence, of course—that Maduro is a drug kingpin, and saying that they’re saving thousands of lives. Which is ridiculous. We know fentanyl isn’t coming from Venezuela.”
But Venezuela is far from Trump’s only target for direct military action. Hugo Rojas, a Chilean scholar of law and human rights at the Universidad Alberto Hurtado, tells The Progressive that the United States’s intrusion in Latin America is rooted in centuries-old foreign policy. The administration’s current actions, he says, “reminds [Chileans] of the activities of the Department of Defense, the armed forces, and the CIA during the Cold War with Latin American countries”—including the 1973 coup of Chile’s democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, which resulted in a brutal, seventeen-year-long military regime led by U.S.-backed dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Rojas notes the unnerving parallel between the infamous disappearances carried out by the U.S. trained military juntas across Latin America during the Cold War and the detention and deportation campaign now being waged against undocumented U.S. residents from Latin America by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Margaret Power, who studies Latin America and social movements at the Illinois Institute of Technology, similarly commented that during the Cold War, militaries across Latin America legitimized their actions by painting victims as an internal enemy. “And I think that’s what’s happened with ICE,” Power explains. “They have determined that not just immigrants but, basically, anybody who opposes them is the internal enemy. It’s this whole mass othering of people.”
Though U.S. immigration and deportation policy is often discussed as a matter of domestic politics, severed from the context of U.S. interference in Latin America, Fox and other scholars point to a different reality—that the boat bombings, ICE raids, and undermining of foreign governments function as arms of a single imperial project, targeting descendants of the violence wherever they may flee to survive. “The major reason for the huge influx of immigrants from Latin America over the last 50 years is because of U.S. intervention,” Fox explains. “There’s a clear correlation.” This phenomenon has come full circle recently with the release of accounts from some of the more than 200 Venezuelans, many asylum seekers fleeing the very Maduro government Trump so fiercely condemns, who were deported from the U.S. to El Salvador and subjected to “abuses [that] constitute torture under international human rights law.”
Power tells The Progressive that the path forward lies in building an anti-interventionist solidarity movement across nations. Fox agrees, noting that “Whenever there is a U.S. invasion, a U.S. attack, the U.S. flexing its muscles in the region, there is pushback” from both Latin America and U.S. activists. Across borders, communities have little interest in seeing the U.S. invade Latin America, even in Venezuela. U.S. policy at home and abroad may seem disconnected, but highlighting how entangled these forces are allows communities to fight for one another and defend against militarized violence everywhere.