Trump channels past Latin American interventions in new crusade

MEXICO CITY — They explosion boats on the open sea, threatening tariffs from Brazil to Mexico and punish anyone deemed hostile while lavishing help And praise to all allies participating in the White House program.

Welcome to Monroe Doctrine 2.0, the Trump administration's bellicose “you're with us or against us” approach to Latin America.

Less than a year into his presidency, President Trump appears more intent on leaving his mark on America's backyard than any recent predecessor. He came into office threatening to take back the Panama Canal, and now it looks like ready to launch a military attack about Venezuela and maybe even drone strikes about the cartel's goals in Mexico. He has vowed to withhold aid to Argentina if legislative elections this week do not go his way. They did it.

“Every president comes with promises to focus on Latin America, but the Trump administration is actually doing that,” said James Bosworth, whose firm conducts regional risk analysis. “There is not a single country in the region that does not wonder how the United States is playing in Latin America now.”

Fearing a return to an era when U.S. intervention was the norm – from direct invasions to CIA covert operations and economic intervention – many Latin American leaders are trying to develop a “Please Trump” strategy, with mixed success. But Trump's penchant for deals, violent outbursts and bullying personality make him an unstable negotiating partner.

“This whole thing has brought Latin America to the brink,” said Michael Schifter, former president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based think tank. “It's confusing, it's dizzying and I think it's disorienting for everyone. People don't know what's going to happen next.”

In this dramatic update of American gunboat diplomacy, critics say laws are being ignored, norms circumvented and protocols ignored. The combative approach is based on some old standards: the tactics of the war on drugs, the rationale for the war on terrorism, and the sabre-rattling of the Cold War.

All this is facilitated by the first official recognition of the cartels as terrorist groups by the Trump administration. This shift provided rhetorical firepower, as well as dubious legal justification, for the deadly “narco-terrorist” boat strikes, now numbering 14, in both the Caribbean and Pacific regions.

“Al-Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere” is what Pete Hegseth, Trump's defense secretary, called the cartels, when he posts video game-style footage of boats and their crews being blown to pieces.

An important distinction is lost: cartels, while deadly, are driven by profit. Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups typically claim ideological motivations.

Another departure: Trump sees no need to seek congressional approval for military action in Venezuela.

“I don't think we're necessarily going to ask for a declaration of war,” Trump said. “I think we're just going to kill the people who bring drugs into our country. We're going to kill them. They'll be, like, dead.”

Trump's unpredictability has scared many in the region. One of the few leaders resisting this is Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who, like Trump, has a habit of fiery, off-the-cuff comments and social media posts.

The former left-wing guerrilla, who has already accused Trump of inciting genocide in the Gaza Strip, said at least one Colombian fisherman was killed in the Washington boat bombings. Peter called the operation part of a plan to overthrow the leftist government in neighboring Venezuela.

Trump quickly tried to make an example of Peter, calling him “the leader of illegal drugs” and threatening to cut aid to Colombia, while his administration imposed sanctions on Petro, his wife, son and first deputy. Like the recent deployment of thousands of American troops, battleships and fighter jets to the Caribbean, Trump's response was a calculated show of force—a show of force designed to intimidate doubters into submission.

Amid the tumultuous turns in US-Latin American relations, the rapid deterioration of relations between the US and Colombia is particularly striking. For decades, Colombia has been the linchpin of Washington's anti-drug efforts in South America, as well as a major trading partner.

Unlike Colombia and Mexico, Venezuela is a relatively minor player in the U.S. drug trade, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. Yet the White House has portrayed Venezuela's socialist President Nicolas Maduro as an all-powerful kingpin, “poisoning” American streets with crime and drugs. A $50 million bounty was placed on Maduro's head, and the armada was concentrated off the coast of Venezuela, where the world's largest oil reserves are located.

A strong proponent of the “shoot first, ask no questions later” approach is Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has for years advocated the overthrow of leftist governments in Havana and Caracas. During a recent visit to the region, Rubio advocated a stronger interdiction strategy.

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

This kind of thinking is “frighteningly 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.”

US involvement in Latin America began more than 200 years ago when President James Monroe declared that the United States would rule as the hegemon of the hemisphere.

In the centuries that followed, the United States invaded Mexico and annexed half its territory, sent Marines to Nicaragua and Haiti, and promoted coups from Chile to Brazil to Guatemala. He imposed a ten-year embargo on communist Cuba, launched a failed invasion of the island and attempted to assassinate its leader, and imposed economic sanctions on leftist opponents in Nicaragua and Venezuela.

The motivations for these interventions ranged from fighting communism to protecting U.S. business interests to waging the War on Drugs. The last full-scale US attack on a Latin American country, the 1989 invasion of Panama, was also framed as an anti-drug crusade. President George H. W. Bush called the country's authoritarian leader, General Manuel Noriega, a “drug-dealing dictator,” language almost identical to current descriptions of Maduro in the White House.

But the US military intervention in Venezuela poses a problem on a different scale.

Venezuela is 10 times the size of Panama, and its population of 28 million is more than ten times the population of Panama in 1989. Many predict that a potential US attack will be met with stiff resistance.

And if reducing drug use is truly a goal of Trump's policies, say leaders from Venezuela to Colombia to Mexico, perhaps Trump should focus on reducing drug addiction in the United States, the world's largest consumer of drugs.

For many, the build-up to a potential intervention in Venezuela reflects the era before the 2003 Iraq War, when the White House touted not the drug trade but weapons of mass destruction – which turned out to not exist – as a casus belli.

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

Further complicating U.S.-Latin American relations is Trump's personal style: his unabashed affection for some leaders and contempt for others.

While Venezuela's Maduro and Colombia's Petro are at the top of the list of bad men, Argentine President Javier Miley and El Salvador's Nayib Bukele – the latter the self-proclaimed “world's toughest dictator” – are the darlings of the moment.

Trump has pledged billions of dollars to help the right-wing Miley, a staunch Trump supporter and free-market ideologue. The administration paid Bukele's administration millions to house deportees while maintaining the protected status of more than 170,000 Salvadoran immigrants in the United States.

“It’s a carrot-and-stick approach,” said Sergio Berenstein, an Argentine political scientist. “Argentina was lucky to get the carrot. But Venezuela and Colombia got the stick.”

Trump has sent mixed signals regarding Mexico's Claudia Sheinbaum and Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Two leftists lead the largest countries in the region.

Trump has wielded the tariff cudgel against both countries: Mexico, allegedly over drug trafficking; Brazil because of what Trump calls a “witch hunt” against former President Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing Trump favorite convicted of attempting a coup after he, like Trump, lost his re-election bid.

Paradoxically, Trump expressed affection for both Lula and Sheinbaum, calling Lula on his 80th birthday “a very energetic guy” (Trump is 79) and calling Sheinbaum a “wonderful woman” but adding: “She's so afraid of the cartels that she can't even think straight.”

Sheinbaum, trapped by changing political dictates in Washington, has so far been able to fend off Trump's most sweeping tariff threats. Mexico's dependence on the US market underscores a fundamental truth: Even as China expands its influence, the US remains the economic and military superpower in the region.

Sheinbaum has avoided the kind of harsh retaliation that typically draws Trump's ire, even as the U.S. strikes suspected drug ships approaching Mexican shores. At least publicly, she rarely shows frustration or irritation, once musing: “President Trump has his own, very special way of communicating.”

Special correspondents Cecilia Sanchez Vidal in Mexico City and Andres D'Alessandro in Buenos Aires contributed to this report..