Pobre México: tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos.
Poor little Mexico — So far from God, and so close to the United States.
—Mexican Proverb.
The World awoke on January 3, 2026 to find that the United States’ armed forces had attacked Venezuela’s capital city of Caracas, and taken the country’s de facto president, Nicolas Maduro, prisoner. I say de facto because the legitimacy of the election that returned him to power has been denied by a great many foreign nations, including our own. He was indicted by an American Court for Narco-Trafficking. On that basis, the administration maintains that it was not necessary to inform Congress about the military plans because it involved the arrest of a drug trafficker rather than an attack on a sovereign nation. As of this moment, all sorts of concerned American politicians and mediosi are talking about every aspect of the event, as are the various foreign governments and multinational organisations.
Without waiting to find out how its shall all play out, it must be bourne in mind that the United States have a long history of intervention in Venezuela and Latin America as a whole. In November of 2025, the Trump administration issued a document entitled National Security Strategy of the United States of America. It is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand Mr. Trump’s actions in the future. As regards this hemisphere, its coverage begins: “After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere. This ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine is a common-sense and potent restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American security interests.”
To understand fully both the Monroe Doctrine and the context of our relationship with Latin America, we must go back in time — 250 years, in fact, to the foundation of the United States. During the revolutionary war — despite the (some might say treasonable) actions of General Howe in allowing Washington’s army to escape three times during the 1776 Hudson Valley Campaign — it was obvious to the rebel leadership that they could not win without outside assistance. They focused on allying with Great Britain’s two largest adversaries, France and Spain. Due to a combination of diplomatic skill and certain important military victories, France joined the war as our oldest ally in 1778, and Spain the following year. Britain could not in the end defeat this combination — and the Netherlands joining in 1780 was the final straw.
But gratitude is not renowned in our subsequent history. Certainly, none of the three countries received a great deal of gratitude for their essential work in making our independence possible. France and the Netherlands we would later reward by helping them to be pushed out of their colonial empires. But our relations with Spain were tense from the beginning.
During the negotiations between the powers in Paris in 1783 to end what had become a world war, the British and Americans made a secret pact that if the British were to retain West Florida, whose northern boundary had been extended after the British acquired the colony two decades earlier, then they would keep the boundary they themselves had created. But if it were to revert to Spain, Britain would back American demands that the boundary return to where it had been in 1763. Unfortunately for Spanish-American relations, the Spaniards found out — and henceforth insisted that the disputed territory — which they rapidly garrisoned — was theirs.
Indeed, this was the high noon of Spanish America. Having regained Florida (which included all the Gulf Coast to the Mississippi) and being in control of what would be the Louisiana Purchase and the American Southwest, the Spanish position in America appeared invulnerable. But the French Revolution and its aftermath would successively weaken Spain. The first chink in Spain’s armour came in 1795, with the Treaty of San Lorenzo, wherein Spain agreed to the United States’ reading of the treaty of 1783 and surrendered northern West Florida. Spain’s defeat at the hands of Napoleon led to their ceding Louisiana to France — who, in turn, sold it to the United States in 1803. The boundaries of the purchased territory were vague; the Americans insisted that West Florida had been part of the deal, and that the new boundary with Texas was further west than Spain would accept. Piece by piece, bit by bit, the Americans nicked border territories east and west of New Orleans. Meanwhile, in 1808, Napoleon overthrew King Ferdinand VII of Spain and replaced him with his own brother, Joseph. This led to the bloody “Peninsular War.”
In Spanish America, however, it led to a crisis of governance. To which King should the Viceroyalties give their allegiance? In various urban centres, the Creole elite — many of whom prided themselves on being followers of Rousseau and fans of the American revolution, men such as Simon Bolivar — saw this as a chance to take complete power for themselves. Starting in Buenos Aires in 1810, local groups did just that, and so the wars of Latin American Independence began. Although facing stiff resistance — much of it native-born — to the republics they wished to create, slowly but surely the Latin American Oligarchs began carving out their new republics.
Although the Mother Country was finally liberated from Napoleon in 1815, she was devastated. The rest of Argentina would break off in 1816; Chile in 1818; Colombia, Panama, Venezuela, and Ecuador as a group in 1819 — the year in which Spain signed the treaty giving an indefensible Florida up to the United States and establishing what would be the border between the United States and Mexico until 1836. There was a liberal revolution in Spain in 1821; it was suppressed with foreign assistance, but while the liberals were in power in Madrid, Mexico’s Spanish military leadership joined with existing rebels to declare independence as the Empire of Mexico, a Catholic state under General Iturbide — Emperor Agustin I. The Americans recognised the new country and sent Ambassador Joel Poinsett as our representative. On the one hand, he sent the Poinsettia plant back to the United States; on the other hand, he introduced Freemasonry to Mexico, and poinsettismo has been a word for American interference in Mexican affairs ever since.
In the meantime, the Holy Alliance of France, Austria, Russia, Prussia, and all the other European countries save Turkey and the Papal States, began to plan the reconquest of Spanish America in 1823. This marked the break between Great Britain and her continental allies against Napoleon. The British government declared that they would not tolerate such an action. President James Monroe spurned the British offer of an alliance and instead declared the “Monroe Doctrine.” This began: “The occasion has been judged proper for asserting, as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” It went on to say that “We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power, we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintained it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.”
From that time on — as in the Mexican Civil War called the War of the Reform — the United States would generally bring what weight it had in any given Latin American country to the Liberal, Anti-Catholic side. The War of the Reform saw the US government arm Juarez’s anticlericals to the teeth. They won; but the American Civil War gave their Conservative opponents the chance to join with the French, overthrow Juarez, and crown Maximilian Emperor of Mexico. The end of the conflict brought the Americans back to the table and ended the Second Mexican Empire. But the same pattern continued, with such highlights as the murder of Ecuador’s president Garcia Moreno being planned in the American embassy in Quito.
In 1898, we fought one of our most unjust wars to date — the Spanish-American War, ostensibly to free Cuba from “Spanish oppression.” Having defeated the Spaniards, we could not very well keep Cuba, for whose independence we had fought. But we did hold on to Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam. This strengthened our hold on Latin America — and indeed, it was another Venezuelan dictator, Cipriano Castro, whose misgovernment brought forth from Theodore Roosevelt his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine: “All that this country desires is to see the neighboring countries stable, orderly, and prosperous. Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count upon our hearty friendship. If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States. Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.”
Through the 1900s up until World War II, this corollary was the document under which we occupied at different times Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Nicaragua, and the Mexican Port of Vera Cruz (as immortalised in the Warren Zevon song of that name). Our aid to the Mexican government in bloodily suppressing the Cristeros was delivered under this banner. Despite Theodore’s cousin Franklin’s “Good Neighbour Policy,” which eschewed outright interventions of that type, many Latin Americans came to support whomever Washington’s enemy du jour was — be it National Socialism and Fascism in the interwar and WWII years, or Communism in the postwar era. In response to that threat, as bourne out in Cuba, over the postwar years there would be interventions in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and lastly, Panama — our last until to-day, exactly 35 years later.
Why is all of this history important? Well, it has to be pointed out that none of our military adventures since 1945 have been congressionally declared wars; but where that body did demand oversight prior to 1945, everywhere else, it did not in regard to Latin America. Although it has been 35 years until now since our last intervention there, this fact remains.
Each of our interventions was in the midst of very complex situations — and each was unique. I do not pretend to have a great deal of insight into it. But the fact remains that for most of our history, presidentially-ordered interventions in Latin American affairs have been considered acceptable by the greater part of American administrations. That independence might be the chief culprit in Latin America’s ongoing instability is a possibility that no one is allowed to seriously entertain — after all, if we question the results of their initial revolutions, might we not question our own?
