US attacks on Venezuela: The world becomes an even more dangerous place

I am writing this article on Saturday morning, just hours after the most serious aggression committed by a United States government against Latin America since 1989. At that time, it involved the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, who was a friend of the United States — and its intelligence agencies — until he was no longer. Noriega was accused of drug trafficking. He annulled elections that had declared the opposition candidate the winner, and then declared war on the government of George Bush Sr. Within 40 days, Panama was invaded, the dictator captured, and a new president, the one who had won those annulled elections, was installed in his place.

The general circumstances of that invasion are similar to Saturday’s aggression: an illegitimate president who stole an election, accusations of drug trafficking that seem plausible, and the ghosts of the Cold War lingering in the background. But let’s not be mistaken: what has happened in Venezuela is fundamentally very different. It is far more serious (because even such events have degrees of severity) and deserves the unequivocal condemnation of every genuine democrat. It also warrants deep concern for the immediate fate of Venezuela, a country that has suffered enormously under the dictatorship.

What began yesterday will not end with Maduro’s imprisonment in a U.S. Prison and a new government in Venezuela. It is an openly imperialist aggression that seeks neither justice nor democracy, and certainly does not aim to protect American consumers from the drugs they consume with relish. Instead, it aims to be a show of force by a government that only understands the language of violence. Of course, it also wants to control the r egion’s largest oil reserves, while simultaneously distracting attention from a scandal — the Epstein case — that the public has not let go of, nor intends to.

And the discussion doesn’t end there either. The matter has a thousand other facets, and the main one will perhaps be the recurring guise of U.S. Aggression in Latin America: the fight against socialism. The same guise justified the unconditional support that the United States gave to General Anastasio Somoza, first by occupying Nicaragua and then by protecting his dictatorship and that of his subsequent puppets until 1979. The same guise justified U.S. Intervention in Guatemala and the overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz, whose humble agrarian reforms had threatened the interests of the United Fruit Company.

These are just some of the instances in the long record of U.S. Aggressions against Latin America: the very ghosts of the Cold War I mentioned earlier, which we have never fully locked away in the attic of the past. They remain as alive as ever, serving both the most anachronistic revolutionary left and the paranoid anti-communism of the fascist right. The Cold War of the past, like the drug issue of today, serves every purpose.

And there is something deeply hypocritical about the role drug trafficking has played in Trump’s aggression, in the accusations against the Maduro regime (while the Honduran president is pardoned), and in the use of drugs to justify the extrajudicial killings of hundreds of Latin Americans. What has recently occurred in the Caribbean — the violation of international law, human rights, and basic decency — was nothing more than the prelude to this aggression: the pretext for bringing aircraft carriers closer to the Venezuelan coast. The necessary rhetorical warm-up to make the aggression more palatable. And one must remember that drug trafficking is a crime invented by the United States, which in the early 1970s turned what was nothing more than a vice into a criminal offense. The U.S. Has kept it that way because legalizing drugs would have destroyed the cartels and mafias — just as happened when alcohol was legalized in the 1920s — and would have deprived successive U.S. Governments the political and economic influence they hold over Latin America. That influence allows them, for example, to do what they did yesterday.

I have been as critical as anyone of so-called Bolivarian socialism, even back in the years when it was defended in many corners of Latin American intellectual circles and European politics — circles so adept at proposing for Latin America the very regimes they would never accept in Europe. Chavismo was guilty not only of having destroyed a country and driven seven million Venezuelans into exile through its decisions, nor only of anti-democratic turns and endemic corruption, but of having become an increasingly repressive dictatorship, with hundreds of political prisoners, a regime that kidnapped, tortured, and murdered opponents, and one complicit with other regimes without freedom: Ortega in Nicaragua and Díaz-Canel in Cuba, not to mention the political and economic support it has received from Putin’s Russia.

But one must keep a clear perspective. In today’s sad Latin American reality, this “fight against socialism” will justify, for many, Trump’s attack and Maduro’s removal. That is a mistake. As I wrote a week ago about another issue, Trump’s government and its thugs may help remove the Maduro dictatorship, but it will exact a very high price in sovereignty.

And that question of sovereignty, despite what all the cheap rhetoric — which has also survived the fall of the Berlin Wall — might suggest, is not just a platitude for populist speeches: it is a necessary condition for the survival of democracy, and tolerating its violation or erosion can have disastrous consequences, even if we do not see them. What we will see, however, are the cheerleaders of Milei and Bolsonaro (and I have the Colombian equivalents in mind as well) celebrating this aggression disguised as a victory against socialism. The question is whether we will also see — because things are always more complex than the sectarianism, tribalism, and Manichaean thinking of the moment allow — the relief of those who have suffered the violence of Maduro’s regime, those who hope to reclaim the lives the dictatorship took from them. But we would do well to remember that in no case can regime change by force be legitimized. That has never ended well, and there are more than enough examples.

Now, enormous challenges lie ahead for Venezuelans. No one can ignore the fact that the end of a dictatorship is being dictated, in turn, by a government like Trump’s, whose president is a fascist and a traitor, and whose ministers are thugs and warmongers who feel nothing but contempt for the people of Latin America. The aggression against Venezuela is part of a strategy stemming from the Monroe Doctrine; although its immediate result may be one less dictatorship, its objective is the imposition of an ideological order that extends far beyond Venezuela. I say “an order” but that’s being generous: Trump is primarily seeking the breakdown of an order, the international order. Chaos is his forte.

There is little we can offer from the outside. Let us ensure that our response takes the form of solidarity with Venezuela, international condemnation, containment of this new imperialism, and a clear-sighted understanding that the world has just become, thanks to this aggression and its backers, an even more dangerous place.

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