Everything indicates that in the coming weeks the United States government, chaired by Donald Trump, will promote an intervention in Venezuela to overthrow the government of Nicolás Maduro. This is indicated by the increase in the escalation of attacks on vessels in the Caribbean and the Pacific that were supposedly transporting drugs to the northern country and in which 80 people have been illegally murdered. Added to this is the sending of the aircraft carrier Gerald Ford, the largest warship in the world, to the waters of the Caribbean, specifically to the Venezuelan coast. Beyond these actions and the deployment of US military vessels in Caribbean waters, senior US officials have openly threatened to intervene in Venezuela or other parts of Latin America, claiming ownership of the entire continent, under the pretext of protecting their security.
In a rhetoric generated in the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century, the second administration of Donald Trump once again dusts off the old imperialist rhetoric of the Monroe Doctrine or the Big Stick that claims ownership of all of America under the American imperial hand.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio expressly said this last Wednesday at a meeting of G7 foreign ministers in the Canadian city of Niagara-on-the-Lake. Asked whether European G7 ministers questioned US attacks on vessels in the Caribbean, Marco Rubio responded: “I don’t think the European Union can determine what international law is. They certainly can’t determine how the United States defends its national security. The United States is being attacked by criminal terrorist organizations in our hemisphere (my emphasis) and the president (Donald Trump) is responding in defense of our country,” he added.
“Our hemisphere,” Marco Rubio said without any embarrassment and without respecting that each of the nations of the Western Hemisphere, that is, America, is sovereign and independent and is not property of the United States or any other country.
But that does not matter to the administration of the president of the United States, as reiterated by the Secretary of War (formerly of Defense) Pete Hegseth announced on Thursday the deployment of an operation in the Caribbean and that is interpreted as a prior action to a possible territorial invasion in Venezuela.
This was published by the United States Secretary of War on his social networks: “President Trump ordered action and the War Department complies with the order. Today I am announcing Operation Southern Spear led by Joint Task Force Southern Spear and Southern Command whose mission is to defend our national security, remove narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere and keep our country safe from the drugs that are killing our people. The Western Hemisphere is a neighbor of the United States and we are to protect,” Hegseth wrote.
Once again, imperialist rhetoric appears when talking about “our Hemisphere,” attributing the property or power to act, attack or intervene in the countries of Latin America as if they were their property.
Throughout history, the United States has invented supposed enemies to justify its imperialist interventions in Latin America. In the 19th century, when the Monroe Doctrine was decreed, the enemy were European nations that sought to intervene in this hemisphere and that the nascent imperialist class proclaimed that America was for the Americans, but not for the Mexicans, Argentines or Colombians, but for the Americans.
In the 20th century, the supposed threat was communism, the Soviet Union or the Guevara guerrillas, which justified open or covert interventions and led to a long series of coups d’état and counterinsurgency policies that sowed the region with military dictatorships with a brutal toll of persecuted, detained, tortured, disappeared and extrajudicially executed.
Now the supposed justification for the interventions are the threats from criminal drug trafficking organizations that stalk, according to Trumpist rhetoric, American society. As Pentagon hawk Pete Hegseth said, operations are being launched to “remove narcoterrorists from our Hemisphere.”
All of this is illegal in light of international law, as already declared by the United Nations (UN) in the voice of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, who pointed out that the United States Government violates “international law” with its air attacks against vessels in the Caribbean and the Pacific. “The United States must put an end to such attacks and take all necessary measures to prevent the extrajudicial executions of the people aboard these vessels, regardless of the alleged criminal behavior attributed to them,” Türk added.
Unfortunately, the requests of UN officials to respect international law are a call to mass that are completely ignored by the Trump government, just as the criminal Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu did, in his genocide against the population of Gaza, which is why the escalation in Latin America is expected to increase.
What was previously discussed in private meetings of the military, intelligence and foreign relations cabinets is now shamelessly discussed in public forums. The CBS television network announced that high-ranking United States officials presented different options for a war intervention against Venezuela to President Donald Trump last Wednesday, but that a final decision has not yet been made on which option to take. At the same time, the options for military intervention in Venezuela were discussed this week at a public forum organized by the Atlantic Council in Washington, once again showing the imperialist arrogance of the ruling and academic class of the United States.
You can be for or against the government of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and whether his government is legitimate or not, as considered by an important part of Venezuelan society. But the right to maintain or change the regime corresponds to the Venezuelan people, not to an imperialist country like the United States that believes that the entire hemisphere is its property.
What is happening on a broader level in the field of geopolitics is that in the face of the decline of the United States as the dominant power of global capitalism and the emergence of other nations as emerging powers, such as China, the Trump government intends to maintain control and dominance of what it considers its “backyard” at the expense of whatever it takes, including armed interventions. We must not allow imperialist arrogance to interfere again in the affairs that correspond to each country in Latin America.