“So far from God, so close to the United States”, worried Mexican leader Porfiro Diaz at the beginning of the last century. After having relatively distanced itself from it, the United States seems to have once again made Latin America an “Americas First” priority. By sending nearly 8% of the American armada, the most powerful fleet deployed since the Cuban crisis in 1962, to fight against drug trafficking operating from Colombia and Venezuela, Donald Trump is returning to assumed interventionism in his Latin backyard. The Trumpian claims on the Panama Canal, a former American enclave, backed by those relating to Greenland or Canada, aim to consolidate the extension of the United States.
But the armed struggle against drug cartels or illegal immigration masks the broader intention to see the revolutionary dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro disappear in Venezuela. For some, this “act of war” would revive the Monroe Doctrine enacted in 1823 to tell Europeans to take more care of the Western Hemisphere. Others rather invoke the legacy of Theodore Roosevelt in 1904, who claimed the exclusive right to intervene in the economic, and therefore political, affairs of the continent.
Later, this theory will be used to “to stem” communist spread. Since the end of the Cold War, geopolitics also having a horror of a vacuum, the ” withdrawal “ America in Latin America has not only left the field open to revolutionary dictatorships, it has also given rise to the predations of China. The renewed American interest in the “Far West” certainly contradicts Maga isolationism but in diplomacy, when the threat looms, necessity reigns. However, by qualifying drug traffickers as terrorists, “al-Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere”the American president takes up the accents of the doctrine carried by Bush and Obama against the Islamists at the risk perhaps of experiencing the same setbacks.
Castro’s takeover undermines Washington’s ascendancy in its backyard
In 1823, President Monroe enunciated his eponymous doctrine intended to protect “the continents of America” recently decolonized from their former European tutelage in the name of morality and security. In reality, the United States no longer looks towards Old Europe but towards “their” hemisphere. Admiral Mahan then drew the outlines of a sea power based on a navy capable of securing trade routes, particularly in the “American Mediterranean” of the Caribbean and the Pacific. At the beginning of the 20th century, the United States was already acting as a “peace” prescriber in Haiti for its debt (1902), in Panama to ensure the provision of the future canal (1903), in the Dominican Republic, its protectorate (1905) or in Cuba (1906). Theodore Roosevelt consolidated this “dollar diplomacy” through the use of armed force, or Big Stick (1904), placing Latin America under his rule until the Cuban revolution of 1959.
Against narco-states
This asymmetrical balance of power was enshrined by the Organization of American States (OAS), which intended to reserve, in 1948, “America for the Americans”. The OAS, in fact, supports the leader of the free world favoring his interventions in Guatemala, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Chile to prevent these states from falling into the Soviet sphere. Castro’s takeover begins Washington’s ascendancy in its backyard.
The United States is resigned to the existence of an enemy power within missile range of its borders. To avoid any Castro contagion, they helped Latin American governments against Che Guevara’s Focos, financed the Contras in Nicaragua against the Sandinista revolutionaries and Reagan invaded Granada (1983) because “the security of all the Americas is at stake in Central America.” Tensions between South America and Washington were even more acute when the continent was torn apart over the Falklands War (1982).
The end of the Cold War seems to revive the spirit of “good neighborliness” of the 1930s as cooperation infrastructures such as NAFTA multiply. But, the time has come to fight against illegal immigration and drug cartels. In 1989, the Marines overthrew General Noriega accused of having transformed Panama into a narco-state. Today, the strikes carried out against drug transports off the coasts of Ecuador and Colombia mainly target Venezuelan Maduro.
The Colombian Petro, also under the gaze of Washington, has just been listed as a “drug lord” by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). With his proverbial frankness, Donald Trump announced “just kill the people who bring drugs into our country”. Behind the scenes, the American president would like to get rid of Maduro, ally of Cuba, heir of Chavez and re-elected fraudulently, for the benefit of the recent Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado.
A military stalemate could see a coalition of states that were still suspicious of each other yesterday
The CIA already operates discreetly in Venezuela. So, the White House predicts that “land will be the next step”the memory of Vietnam, and more recently Iraq, should worry the Oval Office. The project divides the Republican camp which is demanding legal formalization of the intervention in Congress. The Western Hemisphere may also fragment.
If Trinidad and Tobago, El Salvador and Argentina are fond of the American president, a military stalemate could see a coalition of states which were still suspicious of each other yesterday but could support, like Lula’s Brazil, the “victims of American imperialism”. The American president could affirm, after his re-election, that the Latin American states “need us much more than we need them. »let him take care that this need does not turn into hatred.
