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History Shows Why the US Must Leave Venezuela Alone
To fully understand Washington’s current warpath in the region, it’s necessary to revisit earlier episodes in which the US intervened, violently and anti-democratically, to shape the political destinies of countries in the hemisphere.
Dec 08, 2025
In recent months, the Trump administration has escalated a decades-long campaign against the Venezuelan government and people. The renewed, intensifying threats of regime change, justified through false or inflated claims that Nicolás Maduro, its president, is directing narco-terrorism against the United States, serve as a convenient pretext for deeper and more direct intervention.
A recent wave of extrajudicial killings at sea, the directing of the CIA to launch covert ops inside Venezuela, the surge of US troops into the Caribbean, the reopening of a long-shuttered naval base in Puerto Rico, and the deployment of the aircraft carrier the USS Gerald Ford in the region represent striking but not surprising developments. These are little more than the latest expression of an ideological project through which Washington has long sought to shape the hemisphere in ways that would entrench US power further and protect the profits of Western multinationals.
That formal project dates back to at least the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, when the US unilaterally claimed Latin America as its exclusive sphere of influence. Its revival today is unmistakable and distinctly dangerous. As Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared, echoing the language of that two-century-old policy, “The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood, and we will protect it.”
The results of that doctrine have long been clear: immense profits for the few and violence, political upheaval, social dislocation, and economic devastation for the many. While Washington’s imperial desires in the hemisphere have long been met by movements challenging US dominance, these have repeatedly been forced back into the subordinate position assigned them in a global capitalist order designed to benefit their not so “good neighbor.”
When Hugo Chávez completed the nationalization of Venezuela’s oil sector in 2007, he followed a long and perilous trajectory established by regional leaders who dared to confront US power.
It’s no accident that, by the mid-1970s, Latin America had been transformed into a hemisphere dominated by US-backed right-wing authoritarian regimes. Entire regions like the Southern Cone became laboratories for repression, as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay formed a coordinated bloc of military juntas. With direct support from Washington, those regimes oversaw what came to be known as Operation Condor, establishing a transnational network of state terror. Its consequences were catastrophic: 50,000 killed, tens of thousands “disappeared,” and hundreds of thousands tortured and imprisoned for the so-called crime of harboring real or perceived leftist sympathies.
During that earlier period, Venezuela had been largely spared the brutal excesses of direct US interventionism in the region (due in part to the repressive rule of successive US-supported strongmen Juan Vicente Gómez and Marcos Pérez Jiménez). That changed in 1998, when Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s far more popular predecessor, became president and pursued policies of popular sovereignty and resource nationalism aimed at ensuring the nation’s vast oil reserves (the largest in the world) served Venezuelans rather than being siphoned off to enrich foreign corporations. From then on, Venezuela became the latest target of Washington’s efforts to undermine, discipline, and ultimately neutralize “troublesome” progressive governments across Latin America.
To fully understand Washington’s current warpath in the region, it’s necessary to revisit earlier episodes in which the US intervened, violently and anti-democratically, to shape the political destinies of countries in the hemisphere. Three cases are especially instructive: Cuba, Guatemala, and Chile. Together, they illuminate the long arc of US imperialism in Latin America and clarify the dangers of the present confrontation.
The Rise of Plattismo in Cuba
Cuba had long been a crown jewel in Washington’s imperial imagination. By 1823, American political elites were already casting the island as essential to the future of the United States. President John Quincy Adams, for instance, described Cuba, then a Spanish colony, as “indispensable” to the country’s “political and commercial interests.” He noted ominously that, should the island be “forcibly disjointed from its own unnatural connection with Spain and incapable of self-support,” it could “gravitate only towards the North American Union.” Thomas Jefferson similarly maintained that the possession of Cuba was “exactly what is wanting to round out our power as a nation.” In that spirit, during the 1840s and 1850s, Presidents James Polk and Franklin Pierce sought to purchase Cuba from Spain, overtures that were repeatedly rejected.
Those efforts unfolded during a period of rapid US territorial expansionism, marking a time when Washington regarded continental conquest as both a “providential destiny” and a political and economic imperative. When ostensibly legal mechanisms like land purchases could be invoked, they were embraced. When military force offered a more expedient path to territorial acquisition, as with the war of aggression that stripped Mexico of half its territory and delivered what became the American Southwest to US control in 1848, it was undertaken with little hesitation.
The opportunity to pursue longstanding ambitions in Cuba and inaugurate the US as an overseas empire arrived with the Spanish-American War of 1898. In that conflict, Washington intervened in anti-colonial uprisings from Puerto Rico to the Philippines, not to champion genuine liberation but to ensure that any subsequent “independence” would be subordinated to US strategic and economic interests. What emerged was a political order deliberately engineered to keep Cuba firmly tethered to the priorities and power of the United States.
That would be codified in the 1901 Platt Amendment, which effectively nullified Washington’s earlier assurances of Cuban sovereignty and granted Washington the right to establish military bases (including Guantánamo), substantial control over the Cuban treasury, and the ability to intervene whenever the US deemed it necessary to safeguard its arbitrarily defined notion of what constituted “Cuban independence” or to defend “life, property, and individual liberty.”
In practice, Cuba emerged from the war as a dependent protectorate, not a sovereign nation. That model was soon codified for the entire hemisphere with the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine issued in 1904, which granted the United States a self-appointed mandate to police the region to maintain “order.”
In Cuba, that arrangement would serve Washington’s interests for decades. By 1959, on the eve of the Cuban Revolution, US corporations controlled 90% of the island’s trade, 90% of its public services, 75% of its arable land, and 40% of its sugar industry. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Cubans remained landless, disenfranchised, and mired in poverty.
By breeding staggering inequality, Washington’s imperialism rendered Cuba ripe for revolution. In 1959, following years in exile, Fidel Castro returned to the island to overwhelmingly popular support, having launched an armed struggle after attempting to run in the 1952 elections that the Washington-backed Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista cancelled. Rather than confront the policies that had produced the revolution, US officials moved to make an example of Castro, waging an obsessive campaign to undermine his revolutionary government and punish the population whose support had made his ascent possible.
Washington pursued everything from ill-fated invasions to assassinations, plots that, in October 1962, brought the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust. It also imposed a punishing economic blockade designed to choke the island’s economy, render socialism a stillbirth, and deter other nations from challenging US hegemony. Those efforts foreclosed the possibility of constructive engagement, which Castro had initially signaled he was open to, pushing Cuba decisively into the Soviet orbit, and creating the very outcome Washington claimed it had sought to avoid.
The Fall of Guatemala
Castro did not return to Cuba alone. He arrived alongside the Argentinian Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who would become a key ideologue of the revolution, bringing with him a commitment to constructing a global, anti-imperialist movement. The two first met in 1955 in Mexico City, where Castro was organizing in exile and Guevara had resettled after working as a doctor in Guatemala, a country he had entered to support the democratic spring of President Jacobo Árbenz.
The democratic experiment in Guatemala was abruptly and violently extinguished in 1954, when a US-backed coup toppled Árbenz. From that experience, Guevara carried with him an indelible lesson about the reach of US power and Washington’s willingness to deploy force in defense of corporate interests, along with the profoundly antidemocratic and destabilizing consequences of US intervention across the hemisphere.
That coup in Guatemala was carried out in service to that country’s real center of authority, the Boston-based United Fruit Company. Founded in 1899, United Fruit consolidated its foothold there through a series of preferential corporate arrangements, as successive strongmen ceded vast tracts of land and critical infrastructure to the company in exchange for personal enrichment. In the process, Guatemala was transformed into the archetypal “banana republic.”
If Guatemala exposed Washington’s readiness to destroy a modest social democracy in the name of communism and in defense of corporate power, Chile demonstrated the full, violent maturation of unrepentant Cold War interventionism.
United Fruit came to dominate Guatemala’s agricultural and industrial sectors, transforming itself into one of the most profitable corporations in the world. It secured extraordinary returns through its monopoly power, wage suppression, and the criminalization of labor organizing. Its influence extended into the highest levels of Washington. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had represented United Fruit as a senior partner at the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, and his brother, CIA director Allen Dulles, had previously served on that company’s board.
Árbenz regarded United Fruit not just as a threat to Guatemala’s sovereignty but also as an engine of injustice. In a country where 2% of the landholders controlled 72% of all arable land (more than half controlled by United Fruit), much of it left deliberately fallow, he sought to challenge a system that denied millions of peasants access to the land on which their survival depended. His land reform program applied only to uncultivated land. The government proposed purchasing idle tracts at their declared tax value (based on the company’s own assessments). Yet because United Fruit had systematically undervalued its vast land holdings to evade taxes, the company refused.
Árbenz’s policies, driven by the fact that he was a nationalist (not a communist), were committed to dismantling Guatemala’s imperial dependency. His objective was to transform, as he put it, “Guatemala from a country bound by a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist state, and to make this transformation in a way that will raise the standard of living of the great mass of our people to the highest level.” Yet, in the ideologically charged climate of the early Cold War years, such New Deal-style reforms were recast by Washington as incontrovertible proof that a “Soviet beachhead” was taking root in Central America.
By 1954, US officials insisted that they had “no choice” but to intervene to prevent the country from “falling” to communism. The subsequent coup relied on an orchestrated propaganda campaign, the financing of a mercenary army, and the aerial bombardment of Guatemala City. The combined pressure of all of that coerced Árbenz into resigning. In his final address, he condemned the attacks “as an act of vengeance by the United Fruit Company” and stepped down in the hope, quickly dashed, that his departure might preserve his reforms.
Power would soon be transferred to the military regime of Carlos Castillo Armas, while US President Dwight D. Eisenhower triumphantly proclaimed that “the people of Guatemala, in a magnificent effort, have liberated themselves from the shackles of international Communist direction.” In reality, United Fruit had expanded its influence, while the country descended into decades of state terror. The civil war that followed claimed more than 200,000 lives, including a genocidal campaign against the Indigenous Ixil Maya people, carried out with direct US support.
The Crushing of Chilean Socialism
If Guatemala exposed Washington’s readiness to destroy a modest social democracy in the name of communism and in defense of corporate power, Chile demonstrated the full, violent maturation of unrepentant Cold War interventionism. When the socialist physician Salvador Allende won the presidency in 1970 in a democratic election, Washington immediately went on the warpath, launching a covert, sustained campaign to strangle his government before it could succeed.
Allende sought to expand social welfare and democratize the economy. His program called for the nationalization of strategic industries, the expansion of healthcare and education, the strengthening of organized labor, and the dismantling of entrenched monopolistic landholdings. Those initiatives drew support from a broad, multiparty alliance rooted in Chile’s peasants as well as its working and middle classes. Above all, Allende’s agenda aimed to reclaim the nation’s mineral wealth from foreign capital, especially the US-based copper giant Anaconda, whose staggering profits bore few meaningful returns for the Chilean population.
President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger found that intolerable and quickly came to regard Allende not just as a symbolic but a real threat to US power in the region. After all, a successful socialist state achieved through the ballot box risked demonstrating that another political and economic path was indeed possible.
What followed was a coordinated campaign of economic, social, and political destabilization. The CIA funneled millions to Chile’s opposition parties, business associations, and media outlets. It financed strikes and disruptions designed to create and weaponize scarcity, to (in Nixon’s words) “make the economy scream” and erode confidence in Allende’s Popular Unity government. US officials also cultivated ties with reactionary factions in the Chilean military, encouraging coup plots and ultimately directly supporting the overthrow of Allende on September 11, 1973.
What emerged was one of the bloodiest dictatorships in the hemisphere in the 20th century. General Augusto Pinochet’s regime would carry out widespread torture, disappearances, and extrajudicial killings, while US-trained economists imposed radical neoliberal policies (similar to the failed ones now being implemented by Javier Milei in Argentina with the help of a Donald Trump bailout) that dismantled social protections and opened Chile’s economy to foreign capital.
Hands Off Venezuela
In every instance where the United States intervened in Latin America, leaving tens of thousands dead and entire societies destabilized, it was never really communism that Washington feared. What alarmed policymakers and the corporate interests they served was the prospect that nations in the hemisphere might escape the economic architecture of US dominance.
When Hugo Chávez completed the nationalization of Venezuela’s oil sector in 2007, he followed a long and perilous trajectory established by regional leaders who dared to confront US power. In doing so, they committed what Washington considered the “cardinal sin” of asserting sovereign control over national resources within a hemisphere it had long treated as its strategic preserve. These leaders demonstrated, however briefly, that it was possible to stand up to the United States, but that such defiance would ultimately be met with overwhelming force.
Independent powers in this hemisphere going their own way were the threat that Washington and Wall Street could never tolerate. It’s the same reason the United States is once again maneuvering toward open conflict in Venezuela. To proceed down such a path will, of course, mean reenacting some of the most catastrophic chapters of US foreign policy. The lesson of such imperial adventurism in Latin America is unmistakable. When Washington interferes in other nations, the outcome is never stability or democracy but their absolute negation.
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At Least 146 Killed or Disappeared for 'Defending Life Itself' Last Year
"It is critical that governments and companies turn the tide to uphold defenders’ rights and protect them rather than persecute them," said the lead author of the new Global Witness report.
Sep 17, 2025
At least 142 people were killed and four were confirmed missing last year for "bravely speaking out or taking action to defend their rights to land and a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment," according to an annual Global Witness report published Wednesday.
"Year after year, land and environmental defenders—those protecting our forests, rivers, and lands across the world—continue to be met with unspeakable violence," said Laura Furones, the report's lead author, in a statement. "They are being hunted, harassed, and killed—not for breaking laws, but for defending life itself."
"Standing up to injustice should never be a death sentence," Furones declared. "It is critical that governments and companies turn the tide to uphold defenders' rights and protect them rather than persecute them. We desperately need defenders to keep our planet safe. If we turn our backs on them, we forfeit our future."
The report, Roots of Resistance, begins by listing the activists who were murdered or disappeared for six months or more in 2024. It also says: "We acknowledge that the names of many defenders who were killed or disappeared last year may be missing, and we may never know how many more gave their lives to protect our planet. We honor their work too."
The most dangerous country for environmental defenders, by far, was Colombia, with 48 deaths. Jani Silva, a defender there living under state protection, said that "as this report shows, the vast majority of defenders under attack are not defenders by choice—including myself. We are defenders because our homes, land, communities, and lives are under threat. So much more must be done to ensure communities have rights and that those who stand up for them are protected."
Colombia was followed by Guatemala (20), Mexico (18), Brazil (12), the Philippines (7), Honduras (5), Indonesia (5), Nicaragua (4), Peru (4), the Democratic Republic of Congo (4), Ecuador (3), and Liberia (3). There was one confirmed killing each in Russia, India, Venezuela, Argentina, Madagascar, Turkey, Cameroon, Cambodia, and the Dominican Republic. The four disappearances were in Chile, Honduras, Mexico, and the Philippines.
"This brings the total figure to 2,253 since we started reporting on attacks in 2012. This appalling statistic illustrates the persistent nature of violence against defenders," the report states. It stresses that while the new figure is lower than the 196 cases in 2023, "this does not indicate that the situation for defenders is improving."
The report notes that "120 (82%) of all the cases we documented in 2024 took place in Latin America," while 16 killings occurred in Asia and nine were in Africa. It emphasizes that "underreporting remains an issue globally, particularly across Asia and Africa. Obstacles to verify suspected violations also present a problem, particularly documenting cases in active conflict zones."
A third of all land and environmental defenders killed or disappeared last year were Indigenous. The deadliest industry was mining and extractives, at 29, followed by logging (8), agribusiness (4), roads and infrastructure (2), hydropower (1), and poaching.
In addition to detailing who was killed or disappeared, what they fought for, and how "the current system is failing defenders," the report offers recommendations for "how states and businesses can better protect defenders."
Currently, said Global Witness project lead Rachel Cox, "states across the world are weaponizing their legal systems to silence those speaking out in defense of our planet."
"Amid rampant resource use, escalating environmental pressure, and a rapidly closing window to limit warming to 1.5°C, they are treating land and environmental defenders like they are a major inconvenience instead of canaries in a coal mine about to explode," she continued.
"Meanwhile, governments are failing to hold those responsible for defender attacks to account—spurring the cycle of killings with little consequence," she added. "World leaders must acknowledge the role they must play in ending this once and for all."
The recommendation section specifically points to the upcoming United Nations climate summit, COP30, in Belém, Brazil, "a city amid one of the world's most biodiverse regions—and one of the most dangerous countries to be a land and the environment defender."
"The protection and meaningful participation of land and environmental defenders at COP30 and beyond is an essential element of the fight against climate change," the document says. "It must become a core principle of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Convention on Biological Diversity process."
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Trump Just Tried to Illegally Deport 600+ Guatemalan Kids on Holiday Weekend
"It is a dark and dangerous moment for this country when our government chooses to target orphaned 10-year-olds and denies them their most basic legal right to present their case before an immigration judge," a lawyer said.
Aug 31, 2025
In an effort reminiscent of US President Donald Trump using the Alien Enemies Act to send hundreds of migrants to a Salvadoran prison, his administration just tried to deport more than 600 unaccompanied children to Guatemala over Labor Day weekend—though for now, a federal judge's order appears to have halted the plan, unlike last time.
CNN exclusively reported Friday morning that the Trump administration was "moving to repatriate hundreds of Guatemalan children" who arrived in the United States alone and were placed in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Subsequent reporting confirmed plans to deport the kids, who are ages 10-17.
Fearing their imminent removal after the administration reportedly reached an agreement with the Guatemalan government, the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) launched a class action lawsuit around 1:00 am Sunday, seeking an emergency order that was granted just hours later by a federal judge in Washington, D.C.
"Plaintiffs have active proceedings before immigration courts across the country, yet defendants plan to remove them in violation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the Constitution," NILC's complaint explains.
Efrén C. Olivares, vice president of litigation and legal strategy at the NILC, said that "it is a dark and dangerous moment for this country when our government chooses to target orphaned 10-year-olds and denies them their most basic legal right to present their case before an immigration judge."
"The Constitution and federal laws provide robust protections to unaccompanied minors specifically because of the unique risks they face," Olivares noted. "We are determined to use every legal tool at our disposal to force the administration to respect the law and not send any child to danger."
Politico's Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein reported on the judge's moves:
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan issued the order just after 4:00 am Sunday, finding that the "exigent circumstances" described in the lawsuit warranted immediate action "to maintain the status quo until a hearing can be set."
The judge, a Biden appointee, initially scheduled a virtual hearing on the matter for 3:00 pm Sunday, but later moved up the hearing to 12:30 pm after being notified that some minors covered by the suit were "in the process of being removed from the United States."
Sharing updates from the hearing on social media, Cheney reported that Sooknanan took a five-minute recess so that US Department of Justice attorney Drew Ensign could ensure that the details of her order reached the Trump administration—which is pursuing mass deportations. Ensign confirmed to the judge that while it's possible one plane took off and then returned, all the children are still in the United States.
Following the judge's intervention, NILC's Olivares said in a statement that "in the dead of night on a holiday weekend, the Trump administration ripped vulnerable, frightened children from their beds and attempted to return them to danger in Guatemala."
"We are heartened the court prevented this injustice from occurring before hundreds of children suffered irreparable harm," he added. "We are determined to continue fighting to protect the interest of our plaintiffs and all class members until the effort is enjoined permanently."
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