The massive military deployment in the Caribbean generated speculation about a possible new direct intervention by the United States in Latin America.
For now, at least, President Donald Trump qualified suggestions that Washington is planning attacks inside Venezuela, apparently settling for attacking numerous warships under the pretext of an anti-drug operation. However, the American presence in the region will be further increased in the coming weeks with the arrival of the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford.
As a specialist in relations between the United States and Latin America, I know that the actions of the current US administration are reminiscent of a long history of interventions in the region. If the escalation, from attacks on ships, led to a direct military confrontation with Venezuela, such aggression would seem to be common in inter-American relations.
And, without a doubt, governments throughout Latin America, both inside and outside Venezuela, will frame it in this historical context.
Although reminiscent of certain quasi-piracy practices of the US Navy, the current military deployment is, in key aspects, unprecedented and shocking. It could also damage US relations with the rest of the hemisphere for the next generation.
A history of interventions
In the most obvious way, the deployment of a flotilla of warships in the southern Caribbean evokes the dark echoes of “gunboat diplomacy”: the unilateral sending of marines or soldiers to coerce foreign governments, a practice especially frequent in Latin America. A reliable record counts 41 of these interventions in the region between 1898 and 1994.
Of these, 17 were direct cases of US aggression against sovereign nations and 24 were interventions by US forces in support of Latin American dictators or military regimes. Many culminated in the overthrow of democratic governments and the deaths of thousands of people. Between 1915 and 1934, for example, the United States invaded and occupied Haiti, killing up to 11,500 people.
During World War II and the Cold War, Washington continued to dictate Latin American policy, showing a marked willingness to respond to any perceived threat to American investments or markets and supporting pro-Washington dictatorships, such as the Augusto Pinochet regime in Chile between 1973 and 1990.
In general, Latin Americans felt uncomfortable with these ostentatious displays of Washington’s power. This opposition from Latin American governments was the main reason why President Franklin D. Roosevelt abandoned interventions with his “Good Neighbor” policy in the 1930s. However, interventions continued during the Cold War, with actions against leftist governments in Nicaragua and Grenada in the 1980s.
The end of the Cold War did not completely put an end to military interventions. Some U.S. armed forces still operated in the hemisphere, but since 1994, they did so as part of multilateral forces, as in Haiti, or in response to invitations or collaborating with host countries, for example, in counternarcotics operations in the Andes and Central America.
Respect for national sovereignty and non-intervention—fundamental principles in the hemisphere—especially in the context of increased drug-related violence, has largely assuaged resistance to the presence of U.S. troops in the hemisphere’s largest countries, such as Mexico and Brazil.
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This is not a simple reboot of the Monroe Doctrine
Is Trump simply reviving a long-abandoned stance on the US role in the region?
Not at all. In two key respects, an aggression against Venezuela or any other Latin American country now—justified by Washington as a response to insufficient law enforcement against drug trafficking—would be dangerously unprecedented.
First, it would completely derail the long-standing justification for American armed intervention known as the Monroe Doctrine.
Since 1823, when President James Monroe proclaimed it, the United States has sought to keep foreign powers out of the hemisphere’s republics.
Once a Latin American people achieved independence, Washington believed he had the right to keep it, and the U.S. Navy helped him in any way it could.
At the beginning of the 20th century, this supposed help resembled that of a police officer patrolling the Caribbean Sea, brandishing what was then the US Navy. President Theodore Roosevelt called this practice a “big stick” strategy to prevent the landing of Europeans and, for example, the collection of debts. Sometimes this was accomplished by first sending the Marines to move the country’s gold to Wall Street.
An expansion of the Panama precedent
Even during the Cold War, the Monroe Doctrine could logically be invoked to keep the Soviets out of the hemisphere, whether in Guatemala in 1954, Cuba in 1961, the Dominican Republic in 1965, or Grenada in 1983.
Often, as in Guatemala, the Soviet link was weak, even nonexistent. But a tenuous thread still persisted that kept the Monroe Doctrine in force, in order to prevent the entry of a “foreign ideology.”
The doctrine became definitively obsolete with the invasion of Panama in 1989 to overthrow its authoritarian leader, Manuel Noriega, convicted of drug trafficking and guilty of undermining his country’s democracy. Nobody pointed out any extrahemispheric accomplice.
The removal of Noriega by some 26,000 US troops could be the closest parallel to Trump’s strategy of attacking suspected drug trafficking ships in the Caribbean. Trump has already claimed—and repeatedly—that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, like Noriega, is not the head of state of his own country and is therefore prosecutable. Even more far-fetched, he alleged that the Venezuelan leader is the head of the Aragua Train, an organization designated as a “foreign terrorist organization” by US authorities. It is not unreasonable to think that from there to asking for—and participating in—the overthrow of Maduro with the pretext of eliminating an international “narcoterrorist” there is not much difference.
But even here, the parallel with Panama differs in one crucial respect: a US attack on Venezuela would be very different in scale and geography. Maduro’s country is twelve times larger, with approximately six times the population. Its active troops number at least 100,000.
Read more: Venezuelan intelligence thwarted CIA plan to attack US ships: Maduro
Could Venezuela be another Iraq?
Of all the American invasions and occupations in Latin America, none occurred in South America or in a large country.
While it is true that troops from the “colossus of the north” invaded Mexico several times, starting in 1846, they never managed to control the entire country. In the Mexican-American War, American troops withdrew shortly after 1848. In 1914, they occupied a single city, Veracruz, and in 1916, they pursued a bandit during the Punitive Expedition.
In all of these cases, the United States discovered that taking Mexican territory was costly and fruitless.
And a regime change brought about by the United States in a sovereign country today, like Venezuela, would likely trigger massive resistance not only by its military, but throughout the country.
Maduro’s threat of a “republic in arms” in the event of a US invasion could be pure bravado. But it also might not be. Many experts predict that such an invasion would be a disaster. Maduro has already requested military assistance from Russia, China and even Iran. Even without such aid, the mobilization of US resources in the Caribbean does not guarantee success.
And while many governments in the rest of the hemisphere would undoubtedly want Maduro to leave, they would dislike the method used even more. The presidents of Colombia and Mexico criticized the attacks, and others warned of the resentment that would be generated in the hemisphere if an intervention subsequently occurred.
In part, this is due to the United States’ interventionist past in Latin America, but it also responds to a survival instinct, particularly among leftist governments that have already earned Trump’s ire. As President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil stated: “If this becomes a trend, if everyone believes they can invade another’s territory to do whatever they want, where is the respect for the sovereignty of nations?”
Venezuela, contrary to what the White House claims, is not a major producer or transit point for narcotics. What would happen if Trump set his sights on other governments even more compromised by drug trafficking corruption, such as those of Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia and Peru?
The concern would be to not become the next domino.
*Alan McPherson He is Professor of History at Temple University
This text was originally published in The Conversation
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