This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we look now at how Trump’s military attack on Venezuela will impact Latin America, where the U.S.-led coup on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has resurfaced the historical echoes of decades of U.S. intervention in the region, the U.S. State Department posting a message online saying, quote, “This is OUR hemisphere, and President Trump will not allow our security to be threatened,” unquote. The comment followed remarks by President Trump, who referenced the Monroe Doctrine, a credo enacted by U.S. President James Monroe in 1823, that’s been repeatedly invoked by U.S. presidents in order to justify U.S. political and military interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean through much of the 20th and 21st centuries. This is President Trump speaking Saturday.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And the Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we’ve superseded it by a lot, by a real lot. They now call it the Donroe document. I don’t know. It’s Monroe Doctrine. We sort of forgot about it. It was very important, but we forgot about it. We don’t forget about it anymore. Under our new National Security Strategy, American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.
AMY GOODMAN: Leftist governments across Latin America swiftly condemned the U.S. military attack on Venezuela and Maduro’s abduction. Colombian President Gustavo Petro said Monday he would, quote, “take up arms” for his country, if necessary, in response to Trump’s threats against Colombia. Petro also said in a statement, quote, “Come get me. I’m waiting for you here,” unquote, as Trump specifically targeted Petro, claiming, without evidence, Petro’s involvement in cocaine trafficking. Trump has also threatened military action against Cuba and Mexico. This is Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum.
PRESIDENT CLAUDIA SHEINBAUM: [translated] Mexico’s position against any form of intervention is firm, clear and historic. Following recent events in Venezuela where the United States government carried out a direct intervention that resulted in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, as well as the loss of human lives, Mexico reaffirms a principle that is not new and admits no ambiguities. We categorically reject intervention in the internal affairs of other countries. Latin America’s history is clear and compelling. Intervention has never brought democracy, never generated well-being or lasting stability. Only the people themselves can build their own future, decide their path, exercise sovereignty over their natural resources and freely define their form of government. Our position is clearly enshrined in the Constitution of the United Mexican States.
AMY GOODMAN: That was the Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum.
For more, we go to Phoenix, Arizona, where we’re joined by Alexander Aviña, associate professor of Latin American history at Arizona State University, who’s extensively researched and written about capitalism, the U.S.-backed “war on drugs” and state violence, author of the award-winning book, Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside.
So, if you can talk, Professor Aviña, about what this attack on Venezuela means for Latin America, what some are calling the “rehemisphering” of Latin America?
ALEXANDER AVIÑA: Good morning, Amy.
Yeah, I think this is — you know, contrary to what Trump was saying, the Monroe Doctrine has never quite been forgotten by the United States. It’s just the methods of enforcing it or implementing it in the region have varied across presidential administrations and across political parties. I think it bears to keep in mind that U.S. empire in Latin America is a bipartisan project that involved both Republican and Democratic parties, just thinking about how President Obama is the one who labeled Venezuela a threat to U.S. national security back in 2015 as one pertinent example. So I think what we’re witnessing now is just a quite visible and unabashed assertment — assertion of U.S. power over Latin America. Now, that’s one way to read it.
The other way to read this move, and particularly in light of the National Security Strategy, it’s also — it’s a moment to read it as a moment of U.S. weakness, right? They’re basically conceding other parts of the world to peer rivals. They’ve more or less accepted that they cannot compete frontally with China, for example, in Asia. So, as has happened in the past, when the U.S. has forced resistance or defeat elsewhere in the world, they come back, quote-unquote, “home” to the Western Hemisphere, and they use Latin America as an imperial laboratory, as they have since almost the founding of the United States. And so, the U.S. has long served, as historians like Greg Grandin have written about, as a workshop of empire, where the U.S. gets to refine its imperialist tactics abroad, but they also use those moments to try to create internal, domestic political hegemony, depending on which political party or which political coalition is in the ascendancy.
The moment — the difference now, I think, is that — is, again, to reiterate, this is a U.S. — a moment of U.S. weakness internationally, but, I think, also for the Trump coalition, is a moment of weakness internally. So, one way — I think the way I read this is this is a — you know, if you have to — continually have to say that you’re strong and you’re powerful and that you own the Americas, constantly, online, through different images, through different public appearances, in a way, that’s a weakness — right? — the fact that you have to continuously assert how powerful you are. So, that’s one way to read it.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the Monroe Doctrine, what most people, you know, certainly don’t understand, going back to the early 1800s.
ALEXANDER AVIÑA: So, the Monroe Doctrine is famously — contains multiple meanings. I mean, it depends on who’s reading it, at what moment in time, etc. But initially, this was not a law, right? It was a promulgation of President James Monroe that asserted that Latin America or the Americas was to remain a place strictly for Americans, broadly defined, of the region. And it was a sort of an anti-colonial statement against European rival powers in the context of Latin American independence wars. And initially, Latin American independence leaders, like Simón Bolívar, saw this as a positive. They figured that the United States was going to be an ally in their efforts to overthrow colonial rule. But even someone like Bolívar really quickly learned that the United States was not going to play that role and that it was going to just resume the imperialist control over the region that had previously been taken up by European powers.
The other important moment in this history is when President Theodore Roosevelt invoked his own Roosevelt Corollary in the late 18th — or, the early 20th century, when he essentially made the United States an international police power over the Americas, and it justified constant U.S. military intervention in the region, using the justification of — well, the justification that any, quote-unquote, “loosening of ties of civilization” in Latin America would then trigger some sort of U.S. police response, in the form of U.S. Marines invading Latin American countries, to the tune of about 34 between 1900 to 1934.
And then Trump comes in, and he’s — first, he talked about a Trump corollary, and now he’s taken over the entire Monroe Doctrine, to call it the “Donroe Doctrine.” And again, as your previous guest was saying, it’s difficult to assign some sort of serious ideological coherence to whatever Trump says, but I do see that this is an effort to coalesce a really fractious internal political coalition within his party within the United States, at the same time that it’s wielding illegal, violent actions against sovereign Latin American nations like Venezuela.
AMY GOODMAN: And when you look at the history of the U.S. involved with the coup against Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala in 1954 as he was trying to enact land reform, against Allende, who died in the palace on another September 11th, September 11, 1973, as the U.S.-backed Pinochet forces rose to power, do you see this as an extension of this, as we wrap up?
ALEXANDER AVIÑA: Yeah, I do. And again, it’s just part of this long history of constant U.S. intervention in the region to prevent and not tolerate Latin American assertions of sovereignty and self-determination. Those two examples are also good to highlight that it doesn’t matter what type of Latin American leader is in power and how they achieve that power. In the end, if they are deemed intolerable or antithetical to U.S. imperial designs, they are going to be overthrown or destabilized by the United States. You could have Saint Francis as a president, and he will still be overthrown by the United States if a president of this country deems that leader to be a threat or an obstacle to U.S. imperial designs in what they have long characterized as, quote-unquote, “our hemisphere,” “our backyard.” So, this is just one more action.
The one new thing — well, relatively new thing — is that they’re using narcoterrorism charges against President Nicolás Maduro, and that’s a more recent 1980s origin story. But it still fits within this longer history of constant U.S. violation of Latin American sovereignty and attempts to assert self-determination.
AMY GOODMAN: Alexander Aviña, I want to thank you for being with us, associate professor of Latin American history at Arizona State University, who’s researched and written about capitalism, the U.S.-backed “war on drugs” and state violence.
Coming up, we speak to a Wall Street Journal reporter on oil stocks surging, especially Chevron, and also how the Trump family businesses have generated at least $4 billion since Trump was reelected. In December, Trump Media merged with a company aiming to build the world’s first viable nuclear fusion plant to power AI projects. Stay with us.
