Forrest Hylton
5 January 2026
Donald Trump did not inform, much less seek consent from, the US Congress before launching military strikes on Caracas, Miranda and La Guaira in the early hours of Saturday morning, and abducting the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro. Like the attacks on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific that have killed more than 110 people since September, the strikes of 3 January, which left more than eighty dead, including 24 civilians and 32 Cuban nationals, are unconstitutional and violate international law.
US foreign policy in South America used to differ from its approach to Central America and the Caribbean. In the 20th century, aside from Mexico, the US intervened directly in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nicaragua and Panama. In South America, by contrast, during the Cold War the US funded gargantuan military and police bureaucracies that it relied on to do the dirty work of torturing, murdering and disappearing tens of thousands of suspected leftists. ‘National security’ throughout the Western hemisphere meant a stable business climate for US investors and corporations.
The Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine effectively extends the Central American and Caribbean realm to South America. Venezuela’s oil, gas, gold, iron and rare earth minerals make it a singular prize: nowhere else in South America comes close. Stephen Miller apparently came up with the idea, which Trump echoes, that by nationalising its oil under Carlos Andrés Pérez in 1976, Venezuela ‘stole it’ from the US. Such casuistry is unlikely to convince many besides Pete Hegseth.
As Maduro emphasised in his interview with Ignacio Ramonet on 1 January, Trump and US corporations could have had almost everything they wanted without military intervention.
On 2 January, China’s special envoy was in Caracas to discuss the future of Beijing’s energy interests and investments. Two Russian vessels lie anchored off the coast of Venezuela. Unless the US attacks those, Russia is unlikely to pose a challenge to US designs. Should China wish to make the US pay for its actions, dumping US treasuries would be a safer path than arming Venezuela.
Maduro was reportedly willing to leave Venezuela as long as he was granted amnesty but that didn’t satisfy Trump and his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who determined a course of military action months ago. Maduro is on trial in New York’s Southern District on drugs and weapons charges. About 8 per cent of cocaine shipments from South America pass through Venezuela. There’s stronger evidence of more serious involvement in narco-trafficking by the president of Ecuador, Daniel Noboa – but then he’s a Trump ally. And last month Trump pardoned the former president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández, who rose to power after a coup in 2009 and was long backed by the US but found guilty of drug trafficking in a New York federal court in 2024.
Under George W. Bush, the US tried and failed to effect regime change in Venezuela in 2002 with the attempted overthrow of Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, but his life was saved by the rapid response of the citizenry of Caracas.
Trump wanted to overthrow Maduro during his first term but complained that the US military prevented him from invading so that he could take Venezuela’s oil. He can now claim ‘mission accomplished’. Though he has rolled back initial claims that the US would ‘run’ Venezuela, he still says it is ‘in charge’. Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, now acting president, has called for ‘co-operation’ with the US. The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that a group of asset management and hedge fund CEOs, along with leaders of the defence and energy sectors, are planning to travel to Caracas in March.
Kidnapping, murdering or deposing the president of a sovereign country is one thing; military occupation and administration is quite another, as the US found in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the occupation did not, as Donald Rumsfeld had promised it would, pay for itself. Some people got rich, though, as untold billions went missing and unaccounted for.
The US occupation of Iraq happened in part because no one learned the lessons of Vietnam, and it seems that whatever happens in Venezuela, no one has learned the lessons of Iraq or Afghanistan – forever wars against which Trump campaigned. If Trump and Rubio ignite a forever war in Venezuela – supposedly off the cards, though fifteen thousand US troops remain in the Caribbean to exert ‘leverage’ over the country – they may find facts to be stubborn things, and anti-imperial nationalism a powerful force.
Around the world on 3 January, in Barcelona, Rome, New York, Paris, Bogotá, Buenos Aires and elsewhere, mass demonstrations took place condemning the US intervention, though as we have seen with Gaza, international protest is symbolic. (The widespread protests in Venezuela itself are a different matter.) When the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, demanded a UN Security Council meeting to condemn US actions, Trump said Petro was a ‘sick man’ and Colombia could be next. When the Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, repudiated the assault in no uncertain terms, Trump suggested he might consider military action in Mexico. He has also threatened Cuba.
After leaving office, Lyndon Johnson said that when he became president the US had been running a ‘Murder Inc.’ in the Caribbean. He halted the assassination programmes in Cuba but in 1965 – at the same time as deploying tens of thousands of ground troops in Vietnam – he invaded the Dominican Republic. The covert gangsterism of Eisenhower and Kennedy was revamped under Nixon – Pinochet carried out his CIA-enabled coup in Chile eight months after Johnson’s death – and continued under Ford, Reagan and George H.W. Bush, who invaded Panama in December 1989 to capture President Manuel Noriega. The invasion was codenamed Operation Just Cause. Hundreds of civilians were killed. Cloaked in the rhetoric of justice, Murder Inc. is once again official US policy in Latin America.
Forrest Hylton (Ph.D., New York University) is an ethnohistorian of Latin America and the Caribbean and Visiting Professor of History in the graduate school at the Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA). He has also taught at the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá), Harvard University, Northwestern University, and the Universidad Nacional de Colombia-Medellín. He has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at New York University’s Tamiment Library, a Faculty Fellow at the Charles Warren Center for American History at Harvard University, and a Guest Researcher at Linnaeus University (Växjö, Sweden).
