Late last year, following Donald Trump’s reelection, a piece in Foreign Affairs predicted an end to decades of US “benign neglect” vis-à-vis Latin America.
That short essay was optimistic where it could be, but admitted of more than a little caution. “Trump’s second presidency seems destined to focus more attention on Latin America than any US administration in perhaps 30 years,” Brian Winter, a lifelong chronicler of Latin American politics, wrote. “As the adage goes, be careful what you wish for.”
Yes, “be careful” indeed. As Winter predicted nearly a year ago, Trump’s engaged in a pressure campaign to cajole and co-opt Latin American governments through “punitive measures including tariffs, sanctions and limited military action” against perceived antagonists and recusants.
At the same time, the administration’s gone out of its way to bail out and bolster allies including Javier Milei (Argentina’s self-styled “anarcho-capitalist,” whose shock treatment for the country’s perpetually bedeviled economy is proving less popular over time), Nayib Bukele (El Salvador’s social media-savvy strongman who parlayed his domestic crime-fighting credentials into a paid gig as Trump’s personal jailer) and, of course, Jair Bolsonaro, whose half-hearted attempt to reestablish military dictatorship in Brazil fell flat following a lost election three years ago, leading eventually to his prosecution.
Nothing about Trump’s Latin America policy is especially surprising — not the goals, not the methods and not the morbid nostalgia for mid-20th century American interventionism in support of right-wing authoritarians. What is surprising — and it strikes me writing this that it probably shouldn’t be — is Trump’s increasingly brazen wielding of American military power not to curb the activities of Mexican narcotics cartels, but rather to menace the region with the implicit threat of regime change.
From a modus operandi perspective, regime change isn’t new for the US in the context of Latin America, it’s just passé — an anachronistic callback to the above-mentioned interventionism. Trump, though, is alluding in word and deed to a demonstrably overt approach as opposed to covert CIA operations (although he’s authorized the latter too).
Late last week, after a succession of legally questionable strikes on what The Pentagon swears were drug boats in the Caribbean, Trump publicly floated the idea of bombing the Venezuelan mainland to the chagrin of several US senators, some of whom are maneuvering to block the administration from carrying out ground strikes in the country.
Then, on Sunday, an apparently irate Trump branded Colombia’s Gustavo Petro a drug lord in the course of unilaterally terminating all US aid to the country. Earlier, Petro accused the US military of murdering a local fisherman in one of the Pentagon’s attacks on ostensible drug vessels.
Petro’s a former leftist guerrilla having belonged, as a young man, to M-19, at one point the second-largest guerrilla group in Colombia behind only FARC itself. Elected in 2022, he endeavored to negotiate peace with the country’s remaining armed political elements, a fraught process to put it mildly.
If you missed it (or skipped it), this would be an opportune time to read “Dope,” the May Monthly Letter. In addition to being wildly entertaining, it offers a comprehensive account of the current state of the Latin American cocaine trade, which is far more important as a revenue generator for the cartels than fentanyl.
In “Dope,” I warned that one way or another, Petro would “likely draw the ire of the Trump administration, particularly given the upsurge in coca growing and cocaine production” in his country, illustrated above.
Fast forward five months, and here we are. With Trump calling Petro a drug lord, which he most assuredly is not.
It’s hard to know where Trump’s going with his Latin America strategy and it’s a good bet he doesn’t really have one — a strategy, I mean. Rather, he has “concepts of a plan,” to employ the second-most famous quote from his one and only debate with Kamala Harris. One of those concepts involves overthrowing Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela where, on at least some accounts, they actually are “eating the dogs.”
Better men that Trump 2.0 have tried to oust Maduro, including Trump 1.0. And the CIA’s going to have a difficult time creating incremental disaffection in Venezuela. Everyone’s about as miserable there as they can get. No one needs convincing that Maduro’s a failure. The problem is that for all his buffoonery (Maduro’s a living, breathing macro meme), he’s vexingly adept at the only thing which matters for regimes like his: Keeping the military-police apparatus free of coup plotters.
Recall that first-term Trump attempted to orchestrate Maduro’s ouster, to no avail. Over the past decade or so, the regime’s survived at least a dozen would-be uprisings and that’s just the ones observers of the region know about. Importantly, everyone in Caracas who matters is pot committed. There are bounties on several of them, and it’s not out of the question that the top brass would be tried for crimes against humanity in the event the government unravels and they’re captured.
Paradoxically, then, dialing up the pressure only serves to entrench the regime by making a collapse personally existential for Maduro and his inner-circle. I’m not suggesting they should be offered amnesty, nor would I ever downplay the unfathomable scope of the human suffering in Venezuela, but treating the regime like they’re the Nazis isn’t especially helpful. Rather, it’s counterproductive. Distasteful as this most assuredly is, you have to give them an off-ramp that leads somewhere other than an international tribunal.
Personally, I think that’s the answer if we’re determined the Venezuela question is America’s to adjudicate. Give them an off-ramp, which is to say a one-way ticket on a plane to a beach somewhere and enough US dollars to last them.
Invading Venezuela isn’t an option, or at least I certainly hope it isn’t. It’s not clear what bombing Maduro’s military assets (under the guise of targeting drug shipments before they’re loaded onto boats) would accomplish, other than killing civilians. And using the CIA to foment more coup attempts is just going to get more well-meaning Venezuelans tortured and killed. (To say nothing of the farcical retro vibe it’d create by pitting the CIA against Maduro’s collection of paid-for Cuban spies. I’m not sure we want to make Operation Mongoose “great” again, although I’ll confess that “Operation Crazy Weasel” has a certain ring to it.)
Ultimately, Trump risks stumbling into an unnecessary foreign policy debacle in Latin America. A debacle motivated by his domestic agenda and penchant for pursuing personal vendettas, yes, but also (and at a higher level) by his determination that the US needs to shore up its sphere of influence.
In itself, that latter goal’s not necessarily ignoble, even if the implicit paternalism feels uncomfortably like a white man’s burden argument. But if micromanaging Latin America entails the revival of a mercenary, “at any cost” approach to undercutting leftist governments and supporting right-wing strongmen, it runs the considerable risk of creating more suffering than it alleviates.
“Benign neglect” may be suboptimal, but if history’s any guide, it’s infinitely preferable to imperious interventionism, particularly when the latter’s carried out at gunpoint.
Thanks for that. I wonder if t and cronies simply are looking for an easy win for the military for the purpose of assuring followers that they are ” making America great again”. As you said, no strategy. Likely just another transaction in the brainwashing effort.
Yeah, this article was long overdue, but the problem is that for any individual action Trump takes, it’s hard to tell whether he’s just shooting from the hip or whether there’s a larger story to tell. There’s only so much time in a day, and I’m trying to avoid the black hole I got into during his first term, when every other article was a Trump article. You (i.e., me) have to figure out some kind of happy editorial medium where readers get a bigger-picture narrative they can wrap their minds around, as opposed to what you get from the mainstream media which too often is just a live blog of his every word. It’s to the point now where if you read the Times (for example) at the end of any given day, you don’t know where to start. There are usually dozens of articles chronicling just that one day’s Trump “news.” I don’t think that’s especially helpful for people.
I appreciate the trade-off between you covering Trump establishing a new policy on something vs. Trump making noise. I find too many editorial sources simply cover Trump and his administration having done something horrible today. It is overwhelming, depressing, and repetative. Thank you for making the effort to (try to) put Trump’s actions into a meaningful context.
Yes. Your analysts helps to keep me from falling into the reactionary, non evaluative mode of followers that makes me angry and frustrated. My first comment was in that mode. I’m working at avoiding going there.
Some of the drug problems are from Latin American but I think a route cause analysis would point toward the demand side of the problem.
Remember, Trump doesn’t care what he stumbles into. After all, he’s up to date on his protection payments at SCOTUS and he’s fully immunized. Does he ever sleep?
The fact that the USN is willing to go along with this blow up personal watercraft with ship to ship missiles thing is very concerning. This is clearly the Coast Guard’s domain. The watercraft in question are of no threat to either the ship’s themselves nor our border. If the Coast Guard was executing this mission they would search the craft and the people aboard before making a determination about use of force. It seems implausible based on a. the 2 survivors being repatriated and b. that one of the victims was reportedly a fisherman returning to his home country, that these boats are actually running drugs.
Given all of that, what you end up with is just plain old murder, using some of the most advanced and expensive weapons on the planet as your tool. If the Navy can be convinced to do this, what else might they be convinced to do?
This is not a defense, I still think it’s murder, but this last one was a ‘semi submersible’. They aren’t out there fishing on submersibles. That still didn’t stop Trump from blatantly lying and saying that they were bringing fentanyl to America, when everyone knows they were taking cocaine to Europe.
Yes, these guys are fishermen, because who do you want running your boats across the sea with drugs, unemployed farmers? I’m sure the Navy have surprisingly good intelligence before blowing a boat and its occupants out of the water. I know from firsthand experience many decades ago that a fast attack submarine is an amazingly effective espionage tool that fishermen and dock workers aren’t prepared for. We’ve been deploying advanced assets to find drug smugglers since the Reagan years, it’s only the blatant murder and seemingly bragging about it that is new.
The problem here is the assumption side of the argument. We are expected to assume people are doing their jobs diligently. But everything in this administration has communicated an absence of diligence or even planning. It’s been closer to “the boss says he wants it done” and people going and trying to execute. This of course is well described in “On Tyranny” by Timothy Snyder.
Regardless, this remains not the Navy’s domain. We are not at war, no declaration has been made. These exercises are designed for the Coast Guard, they have the expertise. The Navy is built to fight a military not deal with drug runners. Extrajudicial killings are certainly not new but we also have never seen them broadcast in effectively real time before. At what point do we all just acknowledge that the Constitution had a good run but this is no longer a nation of laws? Because what is happening on an almost daily basis violates the very fiber of that document and nobody even seems to be able to call attention to that fact.
Is Marco Rubio playing any role in this?
Argentina. Many unknowns about Bessent’s tactics and strategy. Unsure potential for Bessent to fight off a target on peso. Of course, probably inconsequential for trump no mater what happens given his luck to date.
On the other hand, the president can be quite loyal to his friends in the region – even to his own political detriment. My eye fell on this related snippet in an article about how the US administration’s efforts to support the Argentine was not being welcomed by American cattlemen and soybean farmers.
Seems the Monroe Doctrine 2.0 plan is toss China out, shift Santa’s Workshop from China to Central/South America (put the Latin elves on ICE, marked return to sender) and get the hedge fund boyz their money back from Argentina and Venezuela
One could easily envision a policy designed to improve our relations with Latin America based on improved trade relations, coordinated drug policy, goodwill missions, and pledges of humanitarian aid and support. Homie don’t play that. Using the U.S. Navy to destroy small craft that may be carrying small amounts of drugs (or not), an impulsive bailout of Argentina, increased tariffs, and the potential bombing of Venezuela. I mean, what are our expected outcomes from this course?