Trump channels past Latin American interventions in new crusade

MEXICO CITY — They’re blowing up boats in the high seas, threatening tariffs from Brazil to Mexico and punishing anyone deemed hostile — while lavishing aid and praise on allies all aboard with the White House program.

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

Not yet a year into his term, President Trump seems intent on putting his footprint in “America’s backyard” more than any recent predecessor. He came to office threatening to take back the Panama Canal, and now seems poised to launch a military attack on Venezuela and perhaps even drone strikes on cartel targets in Mexico. He vowed to withhold aid from Argentina if this week’s legislative elections didn’t go the way he wanted. They did.

The Navy’s USS Stockdale docks at the Frigate Captain Noel Antonio Rodriguez Justavino Naval Base, near entrance to the Panama Canal in Panama City, Panama, on Sept. 21.

(Enea Lebrun/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

“Every president comes in promising a new focus on Latin America, but the Trump administration is actually doing it,” said James Bosworth, whose firm provides regional risk analysis. “There is no country in the region that is not questioning how the U.S. is playing Latin America right now.”

Fearing a return to an era when U.S. intervention was the norm — from outright invasions to covert CIA operations to economic meddling — many Latin American leaders are trying to craft please-Trump strategies, with mixed success. But Trump’s transactional proclivities, mercurial outbursts and bullying nature make him a volatile negotiating partner.

“It’s all put Latin America on edge,” said Michael Shifter, past president of Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based research group. “It’s bewildering and dizzying and, I think, disorienting for everyone. People don’t know what’s coming next.”

In this super-charged update of U.S. gunboat diplomacy, critics say laws are being ignored, norms sidestepped and protocol set aside. The combative approach draws from some old standards: War on Drugs tactics, War on Terrorism rationales and Cold War saber-rattling.

Facilitating it all is the Trump administration’s formal designation of cartels as terrorist groups, a first. The shift has provided oratorical firepower, along with a questionable legal rationale, for the deadly “narco-terrorist” boat strikes, now numbering 14, in both the Caribbean and Pacific.

“The Al Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere,” is how Pete Hegseth, Trump’s defense secretary, has labeled cartels, as he posts video game-esque footage of boats and their crews being blown to bits.

Lost is an essential distinction: Cartels, while homicidal, are driven by profits. Al Qaeda and other terror groups typically proclaim ideological motives.

Another aberration: Trump doesn’t see the 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 gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. We’re going to kill them. They’re going to be, like, dead.”

A supporter of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro wearing a T-shirt depicting President Trump and the slogan “Yankee go home” takes part in a rally on Thursday in Caracas against U.S. military activity in the Caribbean.

(Federico Parra/AFP via Getty Images)

Trump’s unpredictability has cowed many in the region. One of the few leaders pushing back is Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who, like Trump, has a habit of incendiary, off-the-cuff comments and social media posts.

The former leftist guerrilla — who already accused Trump of abetting genocide in Gaza — said Washington’s boat-bombing spree killed at least one Colombian fisherman. Petro called the operation part of a scheme to topple the leftist government in neighboring Venezuela.

Trump quickly sought to make an example of Petro, labeling him “an illegal drug leader” and threatening to slash aid to Colombia, while his administration imposed sanctions on Petro, his wife, son and a top deputy. Like the recent deployment of thousands of U.S. troops, battleships and fighter jets in the Caribbean, Trump’s response was a calculated display of power — a show of force designed to brow-beat doubters into submission.

At a rally in support of Colombian President Gustavo Petro in Bogota on Oct. 24, a demonstrator carries a sign that demands 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 whirlwind turns in U.S.-Latin American relations, the rapid unraveling of U.S.-Colombia relations has been especially startling. For decades Colombia has been the linchpin of Washington’s anti-drug efforts in South America as well as a major trade partner.

Unlike Colombia and Mexico, Venezuela is a relatively minor player in the U.S.-bound narcotics trade, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. And yet the White House has cast Venezuela’s socialist president, Nicolás Maduro, as an all-powerful kingpin “poisoning” American streets with crime and drugs. It put a $50-million bounty on Maduro’s head and massed an armada off the coast of Venezuela, home to the world’s largest petroleum reserves.

President Trump talks during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Oct. 9. Others, from left to right are, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

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

An exuberant cheerleader for the shoot-first-and-ask-no-questions-later posture is Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has for years advocated for the ouster of left-wing governments in Havana and Caracas. In a recent swing through the region, Rubio argued for a more muscular interdiction strategy.

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

That mindset is “chillingly familiar for many people in Latin America,” said David Adler, of the think tank Progressive International. “Again, you’re doing extrajudicial killings in the name of a war on drugs.”

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

In ensuing centuries, the U.S. invaded Mexico and annexed half its territory, dispatched Marines to Nicaragua and Haiti and abetted coups from Chile to Brazil to Guatemala. It enforced a decades-long embargo against communist Cuba — while also launching a botched invasion of the island and trying to assassinate its leader —and imposed economic sanctions on left-wing adversaries in Nicaragua and Venezuela.

Motivations for these interventions varied from fighting communism to protecting U.S. business interests to waging a war on drugs. The most recent full-on U.S. assault against a Latin American nation — the 1989 invasion of Panama — also was framed as an anti-drug crusade. President George H.W. Bush described the country’s authoritarian leader, Gen. Manuel Noriega, as a “drug-running dictator,” language that is nearly identical to current White House descriptions of Maduro.

American Army troops arrive in Panama to depose former ally Manuel Noriega in 1989.

(Jason Bleibtreu/Sygma via Getty Images)

But a U.S. military invasion of Venezuela presents a challenge of a different magnitude.

Venezuela is 10 times larger than Panama, and its population of 28 million is also more than tenfold that of Panama’s in 1989. Many predict that a potential U.S. attack would face stiff resistance.

And if curtailing drug use is really the aim of Trump’s policy, leaders from Venezuela to Colombia to Mexico say, perhaps Trump should focus on curtailing addiction in the U.S., which is the world’s largest consumer of drugs.

To many, the buildup to a potential intervention in Venezuela mirrors the era preceding the 2003 Iraq war, when the White House touted not drug trafficking but weapons of mass destruction — which turned out to be nonexistent — as a casus belli.

Iraqi officers surrender to U.S. troops on a road near Safwan, Iraq, in March, 2003.

(Gilles Bassignac/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

“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 regime change narrative,” Adler said.

Further confounding U.S.-Latin American relations is Trump’s personality-driven style: his unabashed affection for certain leaders and disdain for others.

While Venezuela’s Maduro and Colombia’s Petro sit atop the bad-hombre list, Argentine President Javier Milei and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele — the latter the self-described “world’s coolest dictator” — are the darlings of the moment.

President Trump greets Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele as he arrives at the White House on April 14.

(Al Drago/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Trump has given billions of dollars in aid to bail out the right-wing Milei, a die-hard Trump loyalist and free-market ideologue. The administration has paid Bukele’s administration millions to house deportees, while maintaining the protected status of more than 170,000 Salvadoran immigrants in the U.S.

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

Trump has given mixed signals on Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum and Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The two leftists lead the region’s largest nations.

Trump has wielded the tariff cudgel against both countries: Mexico ostensibly because of 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 a bid for reelection.

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

Sheinbaum, caught in the crosswinds of shifting policy dictates from Washington, has so far been able to fight off Trump’s most drastic tariff threats. Mexico’s reliance on the U.S. market highlights a fundamental truth: Even with China expanding its influence, the U.S. still reigns as the region’s economic and military superpower.

Sheinbaum has avoided the kind of barbed ripostes that tend to trigger Trump’s rage, even as U.S. strikes on alleged drug boats creep closer to Mexico’s shores. Publicly at least, she seldom shows frustration or exasperation, once musing: “President Trump has his own, very special way of communicating.”

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