This article by Diana Cariboni republished from OpenDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. 

As the days pass, shock subsides over the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, which was ordered by Donald Trump and carried out by the US military. That the victim is a dictator has helped to justify the illegal use of brute force.

There is a long history of US military intervention in Latin America. It’s been the expression of the most enduring principle that has governed relations in the American continent.

Everything Trump did in the first year of his second presidential term was old news: tariff wars, interventions in the internal affairs of other countries, threats, extortion and the revival of the old Monroe Doctrine.

What is new is the brazenness, the absence of even the slightest legal justification, or even the effort to frame actions within some interpretation of international law, however twisted it may be. There is no talk of democracy, freedom or human rights for millions of Venezuelans.

This is an unexplained and uncontested exercise of power. “What’s next, Mr President, Colombia?” journalists asked Trump like subjects asking their emperor. “It sounds good to me,” he replied. Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Greenland… “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.”

The threat is material – Maduro in handcuffs, the naval deployment in the Caribbean, the boats bombed for months – and at the same time diffuse. No one knows what the logic or the alleged motive for the next action will be.

The effect of Trump’s actions, already tested with the so-called “peace deal” for Palestine in the aftermath of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, is to sow confusion and division, and paralysis. The era of this new power has begun with little to oppose it, and with international laws useless like broken toys. And we are all warned.

Maduro was extracted from his bunker in eight minutes, which was enough time to kill 32 Cuban guards who were protecting him. The rest of the regime remains intact, now as the executive arm of Trump’s designs, which have articulated only one priority: oil.

When asked about elections, democracy or the release of some 800 political prisoners, Trump and his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, reply that all this “is premature”. The nature of the events indicates the coup was orchestrated with a part of the regime whose head was Maduro.

Nothing remains of Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution, not even dignity. Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice-president and one of the most vocal figures in his administration, has been appointed interim president, with Trump’s acquiescence. She and her brother Jorge, the president of the National Assembly, Diosdado Cabello, the minister of the interior, and Vladimir Padrino López, the head of the armed forces, have become administrators of a Trump protectorate – a new, perhaps provisional, status quo that sets Venezuela and all of Latin America sailing into uncharted waters.

The eternal misunderstanding

In a speech to the US Congress 202 years ago, US president James Monroe laid the foundations for his new country’s relationship with the other republics emerging across the American continent amid struggles against the European colonial powers.

That relationship would be one of US dominance and Latin American subordination, although the Monroe Doctrine was presented as a warning against new European colonial adventures in America.

“America for Americans” – Monroe’s phrase that coined the eternal misunderstanding – postulated that America, the continent, was for them, who called themselves “Americans”. In that single remark, the rest of the American peoples were left in an inferior category, confined to their nationalities or to a subordinate belonging to the same single continent (Latin Americans, South Americans, Central Americans or Caribbeans). Never simply Americans.

Other US presidents followed Monroe’s lead. More than five decades after his doctrine came Rutherford Hayes’s corollary of 1880, on the need for the US to have exclusive control in Central America and the Caribbean, and therefore of any interoceanic canal, followed by Theodore Roosevelt’s corollary of 1904, which postulated the freedom of the US to intervene by force in any country on the continent if it considered that its interests were affected.

Just a few weeks ago, on the anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine, Trump published his own corollary, which contains nothing new, though the foreign power to keep away now is no longer Europe but China. The novelty lies in what began in Venezuela.

The question of democracy

In December, the UN reported that Venezuela’s human rights situation was continuing to deteriorate. In 2021, the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor opened a formal investigation into crimes against humanity, such as torture, disappearances and executions at the hands of the state.

Like Delcy Rodríguez now, Maduro became interim president in 2013 after the death of leader Hugo Chávez. Shortly afterwards, he won the elections by a narrow margin and, from 2015 onwards, took an openly authoritarian turn when he refused to recognise the result of parliamentary elections that left him without a majority in the National Assembly.

Opponents of the regime tried different approaches to overthrow it. To name just a few: peaceful demonstrations, violent actions, calls for a military uprising, attempts to get neighbouring governments to blockade the country, support for economic sanctions by the US and the European Union, complaints to international organisations, boycotts of elections they considered rigged, negotiations with the regime mediated by third countries, and massive participation in elections. None of this moved the needle.

Despite the opposition’s victory in the 2024 presidential elections, Maduro was once again proclaimed president, through fraud.

Then Trump reappeared, with a military deployment unseen in decades, indiscriminate bombing of ships in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and persecution and stigmatisation of Venezuelan migrants as terrible criminals and mentally ill people ravaging US cities.

The main opposition leader, María Corina Machado, who recently won the Nobel Peace Prize, clung to this strategy like a lifeline in the storm. She argued that the military siege, the accusations of narco-terrorism against Maduro and his circle, and the imminent military action by Washington would bring down the regime and open the door to a transition. Shortly after Maduro’s kidnapping, Machado proclaimed: “Today we are prepared to assert our mandate and take power.”

Trump’s response could not have been colder. He removed her from the scene, claiming she lacked the necessary “respect” and “support” for the moment.

In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Machado tried again to court Trump and said she wanted to give him her Nobel Peace Prize, which the US president has long coveted and considers himself deserving of. Days later, Trump indicated to Fox News that he might meet with her in Washington, saying: “I understand she’s coming in next week sometime, and I look forward to saying hello to her.” The Norwegian Nobel Institute was forced to clarify that its peace prizes cannot be transferred to third parties.

There were celebrations by Venezuelans in exile in cities across the western hemisphere when Maduro’s overthrow was announced, but not within Venezuela. Maduro no longer governs there, but the same regime does, under Trump’s shadow.

This article by Diana Cariboni republished from OpenDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.