Trump channels past Latin American interventions in new crusade

MEXICO CITY — They blow up boats on the high seas, threaten to impose tariffs from Brazil to Mexico, and punish anyone deemed an enemy; they also lavish aid and praise on all their allies in the White House program.

Welcome to Monroe Doctrine 2.0, the Trump administration’s bellicose, with-or-against-us approach to Latin America.

With barely a year left in his term, President Trump seems determined to leave a larger footprint on “America’s backyard” than any of his recent predecessors. He came into office threatening to take back the Panama Canal and now appears ready to launch a military assault on Venezuela and even launch drone strikes on cartel targets in Mexico. He has promised to cut off aid from Argentina if this week’s parliamentary elections don’t go his way. They did.

“Every president promises a new focus on Latin America, but the Trump administration is actually delivering,” said James Bosworth, whose firm provides regional risk analysis. “There is no country in the region right now that does not question how the United States is playing with Latin America.”

Fearing a return to an era in which U.S. intervention, from direct invasions to covert CIA operations to economic intervention, is the norm, many Latin American leaders are trying to craft strategies to please Trump, with mixed success. But Trump’s transactional tendencies, volatile outbursts and bullying nature make him an unstable negotiating partner.

“All of this puts Latin America on edge,” said Michael Shifter, former president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based research group. “It’s surprising, it’s dizzying, and I think it’s confusing for everyone. People don’t know what’s going to happen next.”

In this overloaded update of U.S. gunboat diplomacy, critics say laws are ignored, norms ignored and protocol tossed aside. The combative approach draws on some old standards: War on Drugs tactics, War on Terrorism justifications, and Cold War gunfire.

What makes all of this easier is that the Trump administration has officially designated the cartels as terrorist groups; This is a first. This shift provided verbal firepower as well as a controversial legal justification for the deadly “narco-terrorist” boat attacks, which numbered 14 in both the Caribbean and the Pacific.

Trump’s defense secretary Pete Hegseth labels cartels “Al Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere”, while broadcasting video game-like images of boats and their crews being blown to bits.

The loss is an important distinction: While cartels may be homicidal, they are profit-oriented. Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups often cite ideological motivations.

Another heresy: Trump sees no need for congressional approval for military action against Venezuela.

“I don’t think we’re going to want a declaration of war,” Trump said. “I think we’re going to kill people who bring drugs into our country. We’re going to kill them. They’re going to die and stuff.”

A supporter of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro attended a rally in Caracas on Thursday against US military activities in the Caribbean, wearing a T-shirt depicting President Trump and bearing the slogan “Yankee go home.”

(Federico Parra/AFP via Getty Images)

Trump’s unpredictability has intimidated many in the region. One of the few leaders to back down is Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who, like Trump, has a habit of making provocative, thoughtless comments and social media posts.

The former leftist guerrilla, who has already accused Trump of abetting genocide in Gaza, said Washington’s boat bombing spree killed at least one Colombian fisherman. Petro described the operation as part of a plan to overthrow the left-wing government in neighboring Venezuela.

Trump quickly sought to emulate Petro, He labeled him an “illegal drug leader” and threatened to cut off aid to Colombia, while his administration imposed sanctions on Petro, his wife, his son and a senior lawmaker. Like the recent deployment of thousands of US troops, warships, and fighter jets to the Caribbean, Trump’s response was a calculated show of force; a show of force designed to detain and subdue skeptics.

At a rally in support of Colombian President Gustavo Petro in Bogota on October 24, a demonstrator holds a sign demanding respect for Colombia and declares that, contrary to Trump’s claims, Petro is not a drug trafficker.

(Juancho Torres/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Amid the tumultuous turns in U.S.-Latin American relations, the rapid disintegration of U.S.-Colombian relations was particularly surprising. For decades, Colombia has been a cornerstone of Washington’s counternarcotics efforts in South America as well as an important trading partner.

Unlike Colombia and Mexico, Venezuela is a relatively minor player in the U.S. narcotics trade, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. But the White House portrays Venezuela’s socialist president, Nicolás Maduro, as a very powerful ringleader who is “poisoning” American streets with crime and drugs. He put a $50 million bounty on Maduro’s head and deployed a navy on the coast of Venezuela, home to the world’s largest oil reserves.

President Trump speaks during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on October 9. The others, from left, are Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

(Washington Post via Sarah L. Voisin/Getty Images)

One enthusiastic cheerleader for the shoot-first-don’t-question-later stance is Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has been advocating for years the overthrow of left-wing governments in Havana and Caracas. In a recent move in the region, Rubio advocated for a stronger prohibition strategy.

“The thing that will stop them is if you blow them up,” Rubio told reporters in Mexico City. “You will get rid of them.”

This mentality is “chillingly familiar to many people in Latin America,” said David Adler of the think tank Progressive International. “Again, you are committing extrajudicial killings in the name of the war on drugs.”

U.S. involvement in Latin America dates back more than 200 years, when President James Monroe declared that the United States would reign as the hemisphere hegemon.

In the centuries that followed, the United States invaded Mexico and annexed half of its territory, sent marines to Nicaragua and Haiti, and abetted coups from Chile to Brazil to Guatemala. While he imposed a decades-long embargo on communist Cuba, he also launched an unsuccessful invasion of the island and attempted to assassinate its leader and imposed economic sanctions on leftist foes in Nicaragua and Venezuela.

The motivations for these interventions varied from fighting communism to protecting U.S. commercial interests to waging a war on drugs. The last major US offensive against a Latin American country (the invasion of Panama in 1989) was also framed as an anti-drug crusade. President George HW Bush described the country’s authoritarian leader, General Manuel Noriega, as a “drug-trafficking dictator”; This was nearly identical to the White House’s current descriptions of Maduro.

U.S. Army troops arrived in Panama in 1989 to depose former ally Manuel Noriega.

(Jason Bleibtreu/Sygma via Getty Images)

But the US military intervention in Venezuela poses a challenge of a different magnitude.

Venezuela is 10 times larger than Panama, and its population of 28 million is more than ten times Panama’s population in 1989. Many predict that a possible US attack would be met with stiff resistance.

Leaders from Venezuela to Colombia to Mexico say that if the goal of Trump’s policy is truly to reduce drug use, perhaps Trump should focus on reducing addiction in the United States, the world’s largest consumer of drugs.

For many, the escalation of possible intervention in Venezuela echoes the period before the 2003 Iraq war, when the White House cited weapons of mass destruction (which turned out not to exist) as an act of war, not drug trafficking.

Iraqi officers surrendered to US troops on a road near Safwan, Iraq, in March 2003.

(Gilles Basignac/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

“Somehow the United States has found a way to combine two of its greatest foreign policy failures — the Iraq War and the War on Drugs — into a single narrative of regime change,” Adler said.

What further complicates US-Latin American relations is Trump’s personality-driven style: his unabashed affection for some leaders and his disdain for others.

Venezuela’s Maduro and Colombia’s Petro top the list of villains, while Argentine President Javier Milei and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele – the self-described “coolest dictator in the world” – are the current favorites.

President Trump greets Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele upon his arrival at the White House on April 14.

(Washington Post via Al Drago/Getty Images)

Trump poured billions of dollars into bailing out Milei, a right-wing Trump loyalist and free-market ideologue. The administration paid the Bukele administration millions to house deportees while maintaining the protected status of more than 170,000 Salvadoran immigrants in the United States

“This is the carrot and stick approach,” said Argentinian political analyst Sergio Berensztein. “It’s fortunate for Argentina that it gets the carrot. But Venezuela and Colombia get the stick.”

Trump sent mixed signals about Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum and Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Two leftists lead the region’s largest countries.

Trump used his tariff stick against both countries: Mexico, ostensibly for drug trafficking; Brazil for what Trump calls a “witch hunt” against former president Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing Trump favorite who, like Trump, was convicted of attempting a coup after losing his re-election bid.

Paradoxically, Trump has expressed his affection for both Lula and Sheinbaum, calling Lula “a very energetic man” on his 80th birthday (Trump is 79) and hailing Sheinbaum as a “lovely woman”, adding: “He’s so scared of the cartels he can’t even think straight.”

Caught in the headwinds of changing policy mandates from Washington, Sheinbaum has so far been able to combat Trump’s harshest tariff threats. Mexico’s dependence on the US market underscores a fundamental truth: Even as China expands its influence, the US remains the region’s economic and military superpower.

Sheinbaum avoided the kind of barbed attacks that could trigger Trump’s ire, even as U.S. attacks on drug boats neared Mexican shores. He rarely shows frustration or exasperation, at least publicly, once musing: “President Trump has his own, very specific way of communicating.”

Special correspondents Cecilia Sánchez Vidal in Mexico City and Andrés D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires contributed to this report.