President of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro Photo: flickr/ UN Geneva)
Donald Trump likes to posture on the world stage as a peacemaker. But that isn’t how it looks in Latin America.
He’s just ordered the USS Gerald R Ford, the US’s largest aircraft carrier, to join a growing military build-up directed against president Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.
The US already had 10,000 troops, eight warships, a nuclear-powered submarine and F-35 fighter jets in the region. Giant B-52 bombers have flown off Venezuela’s coast.
The Trump administration is adopting a policy of reducing Washington’s global commitments to focus on securing the “homeland” and dominating the Western hemisphere. This is reflected in Trump’s efforts to acquire Greenland and bully Panama and Canada.
In the first half of the 20th century, the US replaced Britain as the dominant imperialist power in Central and South America. After 1945, the CIA was intensively active in Latin America, backing military coups against left wing governments in Guatemala in 1954, Brazil in 1964 and Chile in 1973. The US underwrote savage counter-insurgency wars in Guatemala, El Salvador and Colombia.
But, writes Michael Stott, Latin America editor of the Financial Times newspaper, “Almost every US president since Clinton has neglected Latin America, with serious economic and military consequences.
“China has taken full advantage. An America First agenda demands renewed focus on a region which is the main source of two of America’s biggest domestic problems—mass migration and illegal drugs. As the source of almost 8 million migrants, Venezuela plays a central role.”
Under president Hugo Chavez, Venezuela became a beacon for the international left in the 2000s. Chavez defied US imperialism and fought off a coup attempt thanks to the active support of the poor in the capital Caracas.
But even before his death in 2013 ended Chavez’s search for “21st century socialism”, a corrupt bureaucratic regime was taking shape around his successor, Maduro.
Venezuela has long been a target for the Republican right in the US. Maduro is now in Washington’s sights on the spurious grounds that Venezuela is supplying illegal drugs to the US.
Already the Pentagon has mounted at least ten strikes targeting alleged narco-trafficking boats, killing 43 people.
Questioned last week about the legality of these actions, Trump gave a chilling reply. “I don’t think we’re gonna necessarily ask for a declaration of war. I think we’re just gonna kill people. Okay? We’re gonna kill them. They’re gonna be, like, dead,” he said.
He can cite the precedent provided by Barack Obama when he was president from 2009-17. The great liberal Democrat ordered 542 drone strikes that killed an estimated 3,797 people, including 324 civilians. He boasted to senior aides in 2011, “Turns out I’m really good at killing people.”
Trump has a long way to go to catch up with Obama. But he’s seeking not just to assassinate Venezuelans but to overthrow their government. The military force he has assembled is formidable. But it is too small to mount a full-scale invasion of a large Latin America country. Experts say this would require between 50,000 and 150,000 troops.
But the New York Times newspaper reports that Trump has issued a presidential finding authorising the CIA “to carry out lethal operations in Venezuela”.
It has a large armoury of dirty tricks—and Israel can offer plenty of tips on how to assassinate enemy leaders. The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the far-right Venezuelan leader Maria Corina Machado signals the European ruling classes’ support for a coup.
The Socialist Workers Party has signed an international declaration on Venezuela initiated by the Workers Party in Argentina. This says, “We oppose imperialist intervention and militaristic aggression aimed at regime change, but we do not give political support to Maduro and his corrupt, repressive circles against the working people.”
There can be no going back to the hideous era of Latin American military dictatorships in the 1960s and 1970s.
But this means working people, and all the poor and oppressed of the continent, must mobilise against both the local ruling classes and the brutal bullies in Washington.
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Imperial powers are bogged down in long wars
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He conjures up the promise of more radical change
