Tag: south america

‘Cheap Piece of Imperialist Propaganda’: US Video Hails ‘American Dominance’ of Western Hemisphere

A congresswoman whose parents immigrated to the United States during US-backed genocidal dictatorships in Guatemala on Tuesday excoriated a State Department video hailing the Monroe Doctrine, an imperialist policy used by Washington to declare the Western Hemisphere its exclusive sphere of influence while masking aggression as protection from outside powers.

The roughly five-minute State Department video presents the Monroe Doctrine as a continuous thread in US foreign policy from 1823 to today, culminating in January’s abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. It starts with President James Monroe’s warning that the Americas were no longer open to European colonization, then moves through the Spanish-American War – launched by President William McKinley on false pretenses – the Roosevelt Corollary, the Cold War and Cuban Missile Crisis, and finally to the Trump administration.

“American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again,” the State Department said in a social media post promoting the video.

Responding to the clip, Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) said: “What a cheap piece of imperialist propaganda. The Monroe Doctrine’s legacy is political instability, deep poverty, extreme migration, and colonialism throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.”

Declared in December 1823 by Monroe as Spanish colonies in the Americas won their independence, the doctrine states that European powers should not establish new colonies or interfere politically in the independent states of the Western Hemisphere. While it was partly a response to European attempts to restore colonial rule in Latin America, the Monroe Doctrine also asserted US hegemony over the Americas.

Over time, the Monroe Doctrine was transformed from a warning against European imperialism into a rationale for US imperial interventions and conquest, beginning with waging war on Mexico – again, under false pretenses, this time challenged by opponents including a young congressman named Abraham Lincoln – that resulted in the seizure of more than half of Mexican territory.

The US attempted to use the Monroe Doctrine to justify acquisition of a 10-mile zone around the Panama Canal via “gunboat diplomacy” and, after the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary, the right to intervene in Latin American and Caribbean countries when it judged their governments unstable, indebted, hostile, or vulnerable to foreign influence. Invasions and occupations of Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua followed.

During the Cold War, successive US administrations used the largely imagined communist “threat” as pretext for CIA overthrows of democratically elected governments in Guatemala, Chile, Brazil, and other countries outside the Americas, including Iran and Congo – none of which were actually run by communists. The US also backed the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, attempts to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and terrorism targeting his regime and the Cuban people. Right-wing, pro-US military dictatorships were installed and lavished with financial, armed, and security aid, including torture training by operatives from the CIA, USAID, and other agencies.

The State Department video was not well received throughout Latin America. One Brazilian news site resented its “threatening tone,” while Cuban media underscored the socialist island’s sovereignty amid fears of a takeover repeatedly teased by US President Donald Trump.

In addition to illegal airstrikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean and bombing and invasion of Venezuela to kidnap Maduro and his wife, the US under Trump has deployed troops to Ecuador as part of a joint campaign against alleged drug gangs dubbed Operation Total Extermination. Trump has also ordered the military to plan an invasion to seize the Panama Canal, attack Mexico and Colombia, invade and annex Greenland, and somehow make Canada the “51st state.”

Critics and supporters alike have called Trump’s aggressive policies in the Americas the “Donroe Doctrine.”

All told, Trump has bombed seven countries around the world since returning to the White House and 10 nations over the course of his two terms – including Iran, where he launched an illegal war with Israel.

Respondents to international public opinion surveys have repeatedly named the United States as the biggest threat to world peace. The late former US President Jimmy Carter even called his own country the “most warlike nation in the history of the world.”

The US has attacked, invaded, or bombed dozens of countries and supported most right-wing dictatorships in the world since the end of World War II. It has overthrown or attempted to overthrow numerous foreign governments and has actively sought to crush many people’s liberation movements over that same period. It has also meddled in elections in countries that are allies and adversaries alike.

“Despite what warmongers want you to believe, the Monroe Doctrine undermines the partnerships needed to confront our complex challenges,” Ramirez said on Tuesday. “We must change course. We must pass the New Good Neighbor Act.”

Named after the short-lived period when the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration pursued policies of nonintervention and improved diplomatic relations with Latin America in the 1930s, the New Good Neighbor Act – a resolution introduced in February by Ramirez and Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-NY) – calls on the US to adopt a new approach to the region based on cooperation, not confrontation.

“For more than 200 years, the United States has used the Monroe Doctrine to justify a paternalistic, damaging approach to relations with Latin America and the Caribbean,” Ramirez said at the time. “As a result, the legacy of our nation’s foreign policy in those regions is political instability, deep poverty, extreme migration, and colonialism. It is well past time we change our approach.”

“We must recognize our interconnectedness and admit that the Monroe Doctrine undermines the partnership needed to confront the complex challenges of this century,” she added. “We must become better neighbors.”

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Trump’s ‘narco‑terrorism’ war in Latin America evokes Reagan – then as now, it’s more about fighting leftists than drug runners

More than any other U.S. president in decades, Donald Trump has aggressively pursued military interventions in Latin America.

On Jan. 3, 2026, U.S. special forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on charges of narco-terrorism. In the months before the operation, U.S. Southern Command began targeting small, fast-moving boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. The death toll from the continuing war on these alleged narco-terrorists has risen to over 200 people.

At the heart of these events is the Trump administration’s stated goal of combating drug trafficking organizations. The White House and State Department have designated a plethora of guerrilla groups, drug cartels, gangs and criminal enterprises as “foreign terrorist organizations.”

Washington has also expanded security ties with Ecuador and El Salvador, which are led by right-wing Trump allies. At the same time, the administration has pressured left-wing governments in Colombia, Guatemala, Brazil and Mexico to join the U.S. war on drugs or else risk Trump’s wrath.

When it comes to opening legal avenues for the application of armed force, the narco-terrorism label is useful. Indeed, it is how the Trump administration justified Operation Absolute Resolve to capture and indict Maduro. Yet Trump’s decision to pardon a right-wing ally – former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández – who was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking and related weapons offenses, appeared to some observers to be “at odds with Trump’s war on drugs.”

The history of that war on drugs, however, especially during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, shows that the narco-terrorism label has always been politicized. My research on Reagan and the drug war suggests that the nebulousness of the concept aided U.S. policymakers in achieving fundamentally anti-communist and anti-leftist political objectives.

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A 2000-Year-Old ‘Lost Script’ Has Been Deciphered—Now It May Help Solve the Enduring Mystery of Ancient Teotihuacan

At the height of its power, the ancient city of Teotihuacan was a marvel of grandeur and magnificence in ancient Mesoamerica, having ascended to become its largest city, as well as being one of its most culturally significant.

Yet by 900 A.D., Teotihuacan had fallen under the might of the invading Toltecs, and knowledge of who had assembled one of the leading cultural centers of the early Americas was erased. Little was left for modern archaeologists beyond the culture’s imposing architecture, which include the famous Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon.

However, these impressive structural remnants were not all that the inhabitants of Teotihuacan left behind. Amid the site’s ruins, ancient murals, and the artifacts that have weathered Mesoamerican climates for millennia, archaeologists have also found symbols left by the city’s ancient inhabitants, which to this day have remained undeciphered.

That is, until now. In a new research effort, led by Magnus Pharao Hansen and Christopher Helmke of the University of Copenhagen, the meaning behind Teotihuacan’s enigmatic symbols is finally coming to light, revealing new evidence of an early Uto-Aztecan writing system.

The discovery, detailed in a study that appeared in the journal Current Anthropology, could potentially reshape theories about the ancient city and its inhabitants, and opens a window to more deeply understanding the lives and beliefs of those who once thrived at Teotihuacan before its fall.

This ancient Uto-Aztecan writing system, the researchers say, appears to have evolved over time into the Cora, Huichol, and ultimately the Nahuatl languages, the latter being associated with the Aztecs.

After studying symbols found in Teotihuacan’s murals and artifacts, the researchers concluded that these markings form a true writing system. They suggest it represents an early Uto-Aztecan language, which later evolved into Cora, Huichol, and Nahuatl, the language associated with the Aztecs.

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The Critical Minerals Trade: The Illegal Route Connecting the Amazon with China

A complex network of actors has emerged around the critical minerals of the Amazon. Some operate along contested river corridors, trading with guerrilla groups and corrupt security forces. Others, under a façade of legality, move massive quantities of material through large port cities connected to international trade routes. Together, these operations endanger the environment and the sovereignty of entire nations.

The grayish-black sand and small stones sifted from river sediments and dug from pits across the Amazon hold little recognized value for local communities. Yet these materials are rapidly shipped abroad, where Chinese refineries process a wide variety of minerals and rare earth elements. 

In Venezuela, much of the mineral output is first collected in centers operated by the Venezuelan Mining Corporation (CVM). Collection hubs for cassiterite and coltan in Los Pijiguaos and Morichalito, two nearby towns in the state of Bolívar, were established in 2023, after the Venezuelan government designated cassiterite, nickel, rhodium, titanium, and other rare-earth-related minerals as strategic resources for exploration, extraction, and commercialization. 

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Nostalgia isn’t strategy: Stop the Monroe revisionism and listen

“[T]herefore you may rest assured that if the Nicaraguan activities were brought to light, they would furnish one of the largest scandals in the history of the country.”

Such was the concluding line of a letter from Marine Corps Sergeant Harry Boyle to Idaho Senator William Borah on April 23, 1930. Boyle’s warning was not merely an artifact of a bygone intervention, but a caution against imperial hubris — one newly relevant in the wake of “Operation Absolute Resolve” in Venezuela.

The Trump administration has amplified the afterglow of its tactical success with renewed assertions of hemispheric hegemony through a nostalgic and often ahistorical reading of the Monroe Doctrine. Despite the administration’s enthusiasm for old-fashioned hemispheric imperialism, the historical record ought to caution for restraint, not revisionism.

When modern American officials invoke the Monroe Doctrine, they often do so with a confidence that suggests its meaning is settled and its record vindicated. Historically, the doctrine — both in meaning and in application — was far more contested than modern enthusiasts let on. Indeed, the high-water mark of American imperialism in the Caribbean exposed the high costs and meager returns of micromanaging neighboring states.

Critics of the president’s muscular approach to Latin America have often cited the recent Middle Eastern record of U.S. interventionism as a warning. While such comparisons have limits, the Latin American record offers little reassurance of its own. For all the confidence of its modern champions, the meaning and application of the Monroe Doctrine was never fixed, codified, or uncontested.

The apex of American military hegemony in the Caribbean basin, often justified under the auspices of the Monroe Doctrine, came during the so-called Banana Wars. From the 1890s through the early 1930s, U.S. forces intervened in seven countries, including decades-long occupations of Haiti and Nicaragua. Over this period, successive presidents used military force to protect American agricultural interests from nationalization and labor unrest and to prevent Latin American debt defaults that policymakers feared might invite European intervention.

Despite new waves of wistfulness in some corners of the MAGA movement, such interventions were not uniformly popular on Capitol Hill or in the general populace, and by the mid-1920s, the tide had turned against such acts of naked imperialism. Bolstered by the anguish of World War I, a diverse set of domestic voices, religious pacifists on one end, to xenophobic populists on the other, viewed military action in the Caribbean as wasteful, pointless, and morally abhorrent.

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Heroes, dictators, and the long fight for sovereignty in Latin America before Maduro

Latin America’s most celebrated heroes came from vastly different political traditions. What bound them together was not ideology, but a shared insistence on defending the interests of their people – and, above all, national sovereignty. In the 19th century, that struggle was directed against European colonial powers, primarily Spain. By the 20th, it increasingly meant confronting pressure from the United States, which since at least the late 1800s had openly framed the region – codified in doctrines and policy – as its strategic “backyard.

Those who chose accommodation over resistance left a far murkier legacy. Under intense external pressure, many leaders accepted limits on sovereignty in exchange for stability, investment, or political survival. Over time, this produced a familiar historical pattern: figures who aligned with foreign power were readily replaced when they ceased to be useful, while those who resisted – often at great personal cost – were absorbed into national memory as symbols of dignity, defiance, and unfinished struggle.

In this piece, we revisit the heroes and the betrayers who came to embody these opposing paths in Latin America’s modern history.

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“Cocaine Mills”: Trump Puts Three More Latin American Countries On Notice

President Trump soon after the overnight into early Saturday brief invasion of Venezuela and nabbing of President Nicolas Maduro – now in US custody on American soil – put more Latin American countries on notice, calling them essentially “cocaine mills” which ship ‘poison’ into the United States.

The not-so-veiled warnings and threats were issued to the governments of Mexico, Colombia, and Cuba – the latter which has been a Washington enemy stretching many decades back into the height of the Cold War.

In the comments, Trump again called Maduro as a “narco-terrorist” while fielding a question about the implications for neighboring countries, before linking the Venezuelan leader to his ally Colombian President Gustavo Petro.

“He has cocaine mills, he has factories where he makes cocaine and they’re sending it into the United States” Trump said of the Colombian leader, adding, “he does have to watch his ass.” 

And on Cuba, the warning was more veiled, as he described his administration is “going to be something we’ll end up talking about” as Washington suppose wants to “help the people” of this “failing nation” akin to Venezuela. 

“It’s very similar in the sense that we want to help the people in Cuba, but we also want to help the people who were forced out of Cuba and are living in this country,” he continued, in reference to Trump’s own significant support base among Cuban-Americans.

Among the more interesting and somewhat post-Venezuela regime change remarks by Trump were aimed just south of the border. Trump again put Left wing, or perhaps more accurately center-left Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo on notice.

Trump described that the drug cartels are basically running the country, and that “something’s going to have to be done with Mexico” and that the government is “frightened” of them.

“They’re running Mexico. I’ve asked her numerous times: ‘Would you like us to take out the cartels?’ ‘No, no, no, Mr. President, no, no, no, please.’ So we have to do something,” he said in a phone interview with Fox.

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Back to old ways: Maduro’s capture follows a long list of US interventions in Latin America

The US operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is just the latest chapter in a long list of interventions and regime changes staged by Washington throughout Latin America over the past century.

With the adoption of the Monroe Doctrine in the 19th century, the US essentially declared the Western Hemisphere to be its own backyard. Under this policy, the US played a role in staging dozens of coups and government overthrows in the 20th century alone, including several cases of direct military intervention and occupation, reaching a peak during the Cold War.

The chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, told a press conference on Saturday that the operation to capture Maduro had been “meticulously planned, drawing lessons from decades of missions.” According to the general, “there is always a chance that we’ll be tasked to do this type of mission again.”

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Milei Launches ‘Isaac Accords’ To Expand Israeli Influence In Latin America

Argentinian President Javier Milei formally launched the Isaac Accords on Saturday, a new initiative aimed at strengthening political, economic, and cultural cooperation between Israel and Latin America.

Milei announced the initiative following a meeting with Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, who visited Buenos Aires on Saturday as part of a regional diplomatic tour. 

The Isaac Accords are being promoted in partnership with Washington and are modeled after the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab countries, including the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco.

Milei said Argentina would serve as a “pioneer” alongside the US to promote the new framework to other Latin American countries, including Uruguay, Panama, and Costa Rica.

Foreign Minister Gideon Saar praised Milei’s love of Judaism and Israel as “sincere, powerful, and moving.” Before the meeting began, Milei recited the “Shehecheyanu,” a traditional Jewish blessing, and placed a kippah on his head.

“When the president saw me place the kippah on my head to make the blessing, he immediately placed on his own head the kippah he keeps in his office,” Saar wrote. 

After his election, Milei “transformed Argentina from a critic of Israel to one of its staunchest supporters,” according to the Times of Israel,including announcing plans to move its embassy to occupied Jerusalem.

Though Milei was raised Catholic, he has stated he will convert to Judaism once he leaves office. Argentine officials said that possible joint projects with Israel in the fields of technology, security, and economic development are already under consideration. 

Argentina’s Foreign Minister Pablo Quirno is scheduled to travel to Israel in February for additional talks to advance the initiative.

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President Trump Seems Itching for Multiple Wars in the Western Hemisphere

Donald Trump seems to be following through in his second term as president on the threat of a United States war on Venezuela he made in his first term. Significant US military force has been recently placed near Venezuela ready for attack, the US has already destroyed several boats near Venezuela and killed most the people on them in a claimed effort to counter “narco-terrorism,” and Trump last week said he has authorized Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operation and is considering attacks on land in Venezuela.

The justification the Trump administration presents for all this is that it is part of the US government’s drug war, an endeavor that has meted out death, destruction, and rights abuses decade after decade as drug use in America continues along. The Trump administration also re-characterizes alleged drug transport as “narco-terrorism” in an effort to gain legal and public support for hostile actions.

Trump seems not to be content to go to war against just Venezuela whose President Nicolás Maduro he has proclaimed is a drug kingpin. Trump on Sunday pegged the president of neighboring Western Hemisphere nation Colombia with the same accusation used against Maduro. Here is how Trump put it in a Sunday post at his Truth Social page:

President Gustavo Petro, of Colombia, is an illegal drug leader strongly encouraging the massive production of drugs, in big and small fields, all over Colombia. It has become the biggest business in Colombia, by far, and Petro does nothing to stop it, despite large scale payments and subsidies from the USA that are nothing more than a long term rip off of America. AS OF TODAY, THESE PAYMENTS, OR ANY OTHER FORM OF PAYMENT, OR SUBSIDIES, WILL NO LONGER BE MADE TO COLOMBIA. The purpose of this drug production is the sale of massive amounts of product into the United States, causing death, destruction, and havoc. Petro, a low rated and very unpopular leader, with a fresh mouth toward America, better close up these killing fields immediately, or the United States will close them up for him, and it won’t be done nicely. Thank you for your attention to this matter! ~ President Donald J. Trump

Notice Trump’s comment that the Colombia president “better close up these killing fields immediately, or the United States will close them up for him, and it won’t be done nicely.” That is a threat of war.

Will Trump stop with just these two countries in a Western Hemisphere war spree? Trump, after regaining the presidency earlier this year, took actions in apparent preparation for war on Mexico as well – actions in line with Trump’s comments since his first term supportive of war on Mexico and argued to be for protecting Americans from drugs and terrorism as with wars on Venezuela and Colombia.

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