The Donald Trump administration is waging war on Venezuela, but this is part of a larger political war on Latin America.
In the first year of Trump’s second term as president, the US government has:
- killed dozens of people without charges and trial in US military strikes on boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, executing humble fishermen from not only Venezuela but also Colombia and Trinidad and Tobago;
- imposed sanctions on the democratically elected left-wing president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro;
- hit Brazil with 50% tariffs, one of the highest rates on Earth, to try to destabilize democratically elected left-wing President Lula da Silva;
- threatened to forcibly “take over” and colonize the Panama Canal, in violation of the Central American nation’s sovereignty;
- tightened the illegal, six-decade blockade of Cuba; and
- waged a regime-change war aimed at overthrowing the government of Venezuela, and ordered the CIA to kidnap or even assassinate its President Nicolás Maduro.
Those are the sticks of Trump’s new Big Stick Policy, aimed at Latin America’s left-wing leaders.
As for the carrots, Trump has pledged to economically bail out right-wing US allies in the region.
For instance, the Trump administration offered $40 billion to try to save Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei, a close Trump ally who has overseen a severe economic crisis.
The US empire’s goals in Latin America
The US government has always meddled in Latin America’s internal affairs. This is far from new.
The United States overthrew at least 41 governments in Latin America from 1898 to 1994, according to research by Columbia University historian John Coatsworth.
In the past three decades, Washington has backed dozens more coups, coup attempts, regime-change operations, and “color revolutions” in the region.
The US military has intervened in every single country in Latin America, according to data from the Congressional Research Service. (The only exception is French Guiana, which is a colony of France.)
US imperialism has always been bipartisan in Washington, and has continued under both Republican and Democratic presidents.
However, Donald Trump has brought back the most overt, aggressive form of interventionism.
In its flagrant attacks on the sovereignty of Latin America, the US empire has three main goals.
Exploit the region’s resources
One, the US wants to exploit Latin America’s plentiful natural resources, including oil and natural gas; gold, iron ore, and other minerals; agriculture; and fresh water. (As the climate crisis worsens, water will become increasingly important.)
Trump has been very open about the fact that he wants US corporations to take over and profit from the region’s natural resources.
At a 2023 rally, Trump boasted said he wanted to “take over” Venezuela, and “we would have gotten all that oil”.
Cut off relations with China
The second goal of the US empire is to prevent all governments in Latin America from having close ties with China. Washington would like to cut off regional relations with Russia and Iran as well, but China is the top priority.
China is already the number one trading partner of South America, and economic exchange is growing more and more by the year.
The United States is waging a Second Cold War, or Cold War Two, which seeks to isolate China. US strategists want to turn not only Latin America but all of the western hemisphere into an imperial “sphere of influence”.
It is not a coincidence that, in the first trip that Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio took abroad, he went to Panama, where he successfully pressured the country to withdraw from China’s global infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
The number one trading partner of countries in Latin America
Install right-wing regimes that keep workers’ wages low, so US corporations can “friendshore” manufacturing
Finally, the third goal of the US empire, which is closely related to the first two, is to topple all independent left-wing governments in Latin America and replace them with right-wing, oligarch-run regimes that obediently serve the interests of Washington and US corporations.
These right-wing governments would also keep wages of workers low, so US corporations can reshore or “friendshore” manufacturing production out of Asia and into Latin America, which is a major priority for Trump.
US imperial strategists recognize that it is not realistic for the US itself to re-industrialize and bring back manufacturing jobs, especially in labor-intensive industries that are prone to unionization — so they instead plan to exploit low-paid Latin American workers.
Argentina’s libertarian leader Javier Milei is the poster child of the kind of leader Washington would like running every country in Latin America. His extreme neoliberal policies, which are being designed by longtime employees of Wall Street megabank JPMorgan, are rapidly de-industrializing Argentina, turning the South American nation into a resource colony and destroying any local manufacturers that could possibly compete with US corporations.
Another model for the kind of leader the US empire would like to run all of Latin America is Ecuador’s right-wing President Daniel Noboa, who is a dual US citizen and the son of the country’s richest oligarch. Noboa is pushing through measures that allow the US military to re-open bases in Ecuador and enter the country at any time, for any reason, without oversight by the local government.
Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei and his sister and chief of staff Karina meet with their boss, US President Donald Trump (Credit: White House photo)
Trump turns the colonial Monroe Doctrine into the Donroe Doctrine
Donald Trump has proudly revived the colonial Monroe Doctrine, a 202-year-old policy that essentially states that Latin America is the imperial “backyard” of the US empire.
The US government first declared the Monroe Doctrine when it was beginning to expand its territorial empire to both the west and the south.
From 1846-48, for instance, the US waged a colonial war of aggression against Mexico and stole the northern half of its territory, which became the modern-day US states of Arizona, California, Nevada, Texas, Utah, and New Mexico (that is why it is called New Mexico, because it was seized from “Old Mexico”).
Note that these natural resource-rich territories that were stolen from Mexico were cash cows for the US empire: California is the third-largest US state by land and has the single biggest economy ($4.1 trillion in GDP), while Texas has both the second-largest territory and economy ($2.7 trillion in GDP).
With the original Monroe Doctrine, Washington was sending a message to European colonial empires, warning them that Latin America would be part of the US empire’s sphere of influence, and that it would not tolerate European intervention in the region. It was cynically framed as a kind of colonial anti-imperialism.
Today, the Monroe Doctrine 2.0 uses the same kind of cynical framing, except now the US empire is telling China that it cannot have relations with the countries of Latin America.
In fact, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump administration officials have casually referred to their neocolonial strategy as the “Donroe Doctrine”.
According to this neocolonial Donroe Doctrine, the Wall Street Journal wrote, Trump is “treating the hemisphere as an extension of the U.S. homeland, where Washington will act unilaterally to root out perceived enemies. Loyalty is rewarded, and defiance can carry a price”.
A more straightforward description was put forward by Pete Hegseth, Trump’s extremist self-declared secretary of war: “the Americas first”.
The Trump administration has quietly expanded its ultra-nationalist “America first” slogan into the neocolonial principle of “the Americas first”, with the US on top and in control — or, as left-wing critics in Latin America put it, “the Americas for the North Americans”.
The idea is for the US government to control everything in the western hemisphere, from Canada (which Trump wants to make “the 51st US state”) and Greenland (which Trump also wants to colonize) at the top of North America, down to the southern tip of South America, in the Argentina run by loyal US asset Javier Milei.
This is precisely why Donald Trump chose lifelong neoconservative war hawk Marco Rubio to serve as both his secretary of state (head of the State Department) and national security advisor (chief of the National Security Council).
Rubio is just the second official in US history to simultaneously serve in both positions, after notorious war criminal Henry Kissinger.
A former Florida senator, Rubio is the veritable king of the right-wing Miami golpistas (coup-plotters). He has dedicated his entire career to trying to overthrow the leftist governments in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
MAGA’s neocolonial slogan for Latin America: Monroe 2.0
The Wall Street Journal described the US government’s neocolonial attacks on Latin America as “Trump’s new war on terror”.
The newspaper interviewed Steve Bannon, who was the CEO of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and served as the US president’s chief strategist during his first term.
Bannon proudly described Trump’s neocolonial foreign policy as “Monroe 2.0”.
“This is much more sellable to the America First base than the stuff in the Middle East”, Bannon added, indirectly referring to the US-sponsored genocide in Palestine and its nonstop wars in West Asia.
The Wall Street Journal noted that “‘Monroe 2.0’ has become a popular rallying cry across the conservative ecosystem”.
What this demonstrates is that Trump’s far-right, so-called “MAGA” (Make America Great Again) movement is not actually anti-war or anti-interventionist. MAGA Republicans happily support US imperialism in Latin America. They don’t see Latin Americans are equal human beings; they consider them to be inferior, and treat them all as criminals.
The aggressive attacks on Latin America are by no means a new feature of Trump’s second term.
Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and National Security Advisor John Bolton in April 2019
In the first Trump administration, the US president voluntarily surrounded himself with neoconservative war hawks like his National Security Advisor John Bolton, who was one of the architects of the Iraq War in the George W. Bush administration.
Bolton admitted in a CNN interview that the first Trump White House carried out a coup attempt in Venezuela.
During that coup attempt in 2019, Bolton “proudly” stated that the Monroe Doctrine is “alive and well”. In his 2020 memoir “The Room Where It Happened”, Bolton declared that “it was time to resurrect” the Monroe Doctrine, claiming that Venezuela “was a threat due to its Cuba connection and the openings it afforded Russia, China, and Iran”.
In his first administration, Trump also appointed the neoconservative war hawk Mike Pompeo as CIA director, then secretary of state. Pompeo, too, cited the colonial Monroe Doctrine as he oversaw US-backed coup attempts in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba.
US officials have made it as clear as day that they support blatant colonialism in Latin America.
In a Fox News segment in October 2025, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, and pro-Trump host Sean Hannity proposed colonizing Venezuela and turning it into the 51st US state.
Trump’s new “war on drugs” is an imperial war based on lies: It is WMDs 2.0
US spy agencies have long had close ties to drug traffickers in Latin America.
In the 1980s, the CIA used drugs to fund its terror wars against leftist groups in Central America. In his influential book Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, journalist Gary Webb documented the role of the US spy agency in trafficking cocaine to finance the Contra (Counterrevolutionary) death squads that unleashed terrorism against civilians to try to overthrow Nicaragua’s socialist Sandinista government.
In his bombshell book The Big White Lie: The Deep Cover Operation That Exposed the CIA Sabotage of the Drug War, a former agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Michael Levine, showed how US intelligence operatives used drugs and cartels to advance Washington’s imperial interests in Latin America and around the world.
To try to justify his neocolonial attacks on Latin America, Donald Trump has claimed that he is supposedly fighting “drug trafficking”.
This is completely false. It is a lie that is reminiscent of the George W. Bush administration’s false allegation that Iraq supposedly had “weapons of mass destruction”, or WMDs.
First of all, it is not cocaine but rather synthetic opioids like fentanyl that are responsible for the vast majority of drug-related deaths in the US.
Venezuela already is not a major producer of cocaine, but it has practically nothing to do with fentanyl.
Journalists at the independent publication Drop Site News spoke with a senior US government official, and reported the following (emphasis added):
U.S. intelligence has assessed that little to none of the fentanyl trafficked to the United States is being produced in Venezuela, despite recent claims from the Trump administration, a senior U.S. official directly familiar with the matter tells Drop Site.
The official noted that many of the boats targeted for strikes by the Trump administration do not even have the requisite gasoline or motor capacity to reach U.S. waters, dramatically undercutting claims by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. The claim is backed up by recent comments made by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who similarly noted that zero fentanyl is produced in Venezuela.
Even some mainstream Western media outlets, such as the Financial Times (FT), have admitted that Trump’s war on Venezuela is not actually about stopping the flow of drugs.
“The priority now is to force the departure of top Venezuelan government figures”, the FT wrote. It added that the Trump administration is making “the clear threat that if Maduro and his inner circle cling to power, the Americans may use targeted military force to capture or kill them”.
This is not surprising, given that, during Trump’s first term, Marco Rubio lobbied the president to launch a US invasion of Venezuela.
Today, Rubio is the second-most powerful person in the US government, and he is now overseeing this neocolonial war.
The FT made it clear that the US has three main goals: overthrowing Venezuela’s independent leftist government; exploiting the country’s plentiful natural resources; and cutting off its ties with China, Russia, and Iran.
“At stake in Venezuela are the world’s largest proven oil reserves and valuable deposits of gold, diamonds and coltan”, the newspaper stressed.
The FT quoted a wealthy US-backed Venezuelan opposition figure, who revealed, “The plan now is a capture of Nicolás Maduro. Capture-kill or capture-arrest and take him out, one way or another”.
So the US empire has two war scenarios for Venezuela: the Panama option, or the Libya option.
The US invaded Panama in 1989, killed many civilians, overthrew its government, and arrested its leader Manuel Noriega (who, ironically, was a longtime CIA asset, who had spent years trafficking drugs with the backing of US spy agencies).
US-led NATO forces waged a regime-change war in Libya in 2011, killing anti-colonial leader Muammar Gaddafi, and collapsing the state. Still today, 14 years later, Libya is a failed state that has been plagued by endless civil war, and open-air slave markets where African refugees are bought and sold like cattle.
Either scenario would be catastrophic for the people of Venezuela, but they are never considered in the war plans made by Washington’s imperial strategists.
The US government is allied with the worst drug-traffickers in Latin America
The US military killed dozens of people in attacks on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific in September and October 2025. None of the victims were formally charged or given a trial.
The Trump administration did not present a shred of evidence proving that the people it executed were “drug traffickers”.
Among the victims were fishermen from Venezuela, Colombia, and Trinidad and Tobago.
One of the few leaders in the region who was brave enough to stand up to the US empire and speak out against its extrajudicial executions was Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro, the country’s first ever left-wing leader.
Petro has been particularly outspoken against Trump. In his 2025 speech at the UN General Assembly, the Colombian president compared the US government to Nazi Germany and called Trump the “new Hitler”.
Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro with China’s President Xi Jinping in October 2023
Colombia has historically been the closest US ally in Latin America. The country has been governed for decades by corrupt right-wing oligarchs.
Petro is the first modern leader of the country to pursue an independent, non-aligned foreign policy. He took a historic trip to Beijing in May, where he signed an agreement for Colombia to join the Belt and Road Initiative. This infuriated China hawks in Washington.
To punish Petro for resisting the US empire and defending his country’s sovereignty, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on the democratically elected Colombian president and his family members.
In an angry post on his website Truth Social, Trump viciously attacked Petro and repeatedly misspelled the name of the country, confusing Colombia the nation with the US university, Columbia.
In his social media publication, Trump claimed, without any evidence, that supposedly Petro is an “illegal drug leader”.
This is completely false, and it represented a flagrant attack on the democratically elected leader of a sovereign, independent country.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a billionaire hedge fund manager from Wall Street, also echoed Trump’s lies. He incorrectly wrote on Twitter that, “Since President Gustavo Petro came to power, cocaine production in Colombia has exploded to record high rates”. This is a lie.
Independent experts have shown that cocaine production has fallen under President Petro.
In fact, the opposite is true: cocaine production significantly increased under Colombia’s previous right-wing leader, Iván Duque, who was a close US ally and friend of Trump.
During Trump’s first term, Duque’s ultra-conservative government in Colombia played a key role in the US-led coup attempt in neighboring Venezuela.
Duque’s political mentor was the most powerful figure in Colombian politics, the right-wing oligarch Álvaro Uribe.
Uribe served as president of Colombia from 2002 to 2010. During this time, the US-backed Colombian military murdered more than 6,400 innocent civilians and dressed them up in the uniforms of revolutionary socialist groups, falsely claiming they had been guerrillas, in what was known as the infamous “false positives” scandal.
Uribe was the closest US ally in Latin America. He obediently did everything Washington wanted.
Colombia’s drug-trafficking President Álvaro Uribe with US President George W Bush
Uribe also happens to be one of the most powerful drug traffickers in the modern history of Latin America.
The US government has known for decades that Uribe is a drug lord, yet it has happily supported him, because he has always loyally served US interests in the region.
A 1991 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report described Uribe as one of “the more important Colombian narco-traffickers”, identifying him as a “close personal friend of Pablo Escobar” who was “dedicated to collaboration with the Medellín [drug] cartel at high government levels”.
There is a mountain of evidence substantiating this. The Associated Press reported in 2018, “As Alvaro Uribe, Colombia’s most powerful politician, was making his rise to the presidency more than two decades ago, U.S. officials were repeatedly told that the up-and-coming politician had ties to the nation’s drug cartels, according to newly declassified State Department cables”.
Despite Uribe’s well-documented history of drug trafficking, the Trump administration has continued to publicly defend him to this day.
While the Trump administration falsely claims that its war on Venezuela is about stopping the flow of drugs, Rubio has heaped praise on the drug-trafficker Uribe.
“Colombia’s justice has prevailed as former President Uribe is absolved after years of the political witch hunt against him and his family”, Marco Rubio tweeted on 21 October, adding the hashtag “Uribe is innocent”.
Back at the beginning of the US war on Venezuela, in July, Rubio tweeted, “Former Colombian President Uribe’s only crime has been to tirelessly fight and defend his homeland”.
This is demonstrably false.
In addition to Uribe’s work with drug cartels, it has been known for decades that Uribe and his family collaborate closely with right-wing death squads, which kill left-wing activists, labor organizers, land defenders, and indigenous leaders in Colombia, on behalf of large corporations, landlords, and oligarchs.
In fact, a right-wing paramilitary group in Colombia used a ranch belonging to the Uribe family as its base of operations.
What all of this demonstrates is that the US government’s policy in Latin America is fundamentally based on lies.
The United States has for decades supported the worst drug-traffickers in the region, to destabilize independent, left-wing governments and promote the interests of US corporations.
Trump’s neocolonial war on Latin America today is certainly not new. Every US president has committed imperial crimes in the region.
However, the difference with Trump is that he is proud of the fact that he is a colonialist. He doesn’t hide it. He doesn’t regurgitate cynical propaganda about “democracy” and “human rights”.
Trump says the quiet part loud. He has taken the mask off of the US empire and shown its true face: an ugly visage based on lies, exploitation, and war.
