Unity or Submission? The Great Yankee Risk

“…And there we are, ready to run the great Yankee risk. So, once again, be careful! American domination —the only domination from which one never recovers. I mean from which one never recovers unscarred.” Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 1950.[1]

Trump, the so-called “isolationist,” is waging war. Latin America is the target and the so-called “War on Drugs” has yet again emerged as the justifying political and military framework for the application of nakedly imperialist policies against countries like Venezuela, deemed antithetical to US geopolitical interests. Having recently designated several drug trafficking organizations and criminal gangs as “foreign terrorists,” the Trump administration is melding War-on-Terror logics with a reinvigorated and militarized War on Drugs. Narcos (an already amorphously defined subjectivity) are now simultaneously also terrorists (another infamously amorphous identity), thereby justifying the murder and assassination of individuals based simply on allegations and without due process. Like with deportations and a broader system of migrant brutalization, Trump has broadened the scope of a program he initially inherited from Barack Obama—an extrajudicial assassination program via drones. For after all, the US empire is a thoroughly bipartisan project with some stylistic partisan inflections.

Today’s naval itineration of the Punitive Expedition is chasing an updated specter of the border-crossing bandit-revolutionary: an alleged “narco-terrorist,” head of a mythical drug cartel, who also doubles as the president of Venezuela. Unlike Pancho Villa, Nicolas Maduro has not invaded the United States. The scale and scope of drug-trafficking accusations offered by US officials against him and his country are largely fantastical; the vast majority of cocaine (never mind fentanyl which originates mostly in Mexico) that enters the US comes from western South America traveling north up the Pacific Corridor and Central America. Indeed, a key US ally, an Ecuador ruled by the Harvard graduate banana oligarch-turned-president Daniel Noboa, serves as a key trans-shipment point for 70% of the cocaine destined for the US and Europe. Noboa’s own family company faces allegations of trafficking “narco-bananas.” As I wrote back in early 2020 when Trump first formally accused Maduro of drug-trafficking, the history of gringo Wars on Drugs is replete with inconvenient narco allies and convenient anti-imperialist enemies.

Maduro’s immediate “clear and present” threat to US empire in a region the Yanquis presuppose as theirs to command and control, past and present, thus remains unclear. What this new Punitive Expedition is supposed to actually punish beyond the grandiose public statements made by the Trump administration—other than small Venezuelan boats and their murdered occupants—seems vague and self-defeating. Perhaps this vagueness is actually productive from the perspective of Trump and his Latin American policy point person, Marco Rubio: a revanchist, hard-right anti-communist cooked up in that unique political cultural lab that is south Florida. Yet, US threats and violations of Venezuelan sovereignty tend to intensify and increase popular support for the latter, not its surrender. If inducing regime change in Venezuela is the goal through overt US military action in the Caribbean basin, in parallel with the decades-long covert campaigns of destabilization and catastrophic economic war, then, the extrajudicial execution of nearly twenty Venezuelans is seemingly producing the opposite effect. Venezuelans will defend their sovereignty, their communities, their nation.

And yet, the new Punitive Expedition remains stationed off the coast of Venezuela in menacing fashion, having thus far executed Venezuelans on at least four boats on the pre-crime presumption of involvement in illicit drug smuggling. These executions, the Trump administration says, is a matter of national security to protect the homeland from Maduro and his deployment of evil brown Tren de Aragua (TdA) narco-terrorists hellbent on poisoning innocent (white) gringos. Never mind that TdA is not involved in the transnational trafficking of cocaine. Never mind that the bellicose economic sanctions that Trump intensified during this first term in office destroyed the Venezuelan economy and robbed millions of Venezuelans of the right to stay home. These TdA narco-terrorists, politically protean and ever shape-shifting, can also assume the form of desperate migrants and asylum seekers sporting any tattoos from Venezuela and throughout the Americas. Indeed, Trump’s legal efforts to massively and rapidly expel migrants hinges on his invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798—an act that gives him broad deportation powers during wartime. The war, in this case, is an alleged “invasion” of the US by the TdA.

As such, the three wars that fuel Trump’s political power and base domestically—on terror, drugs, and migrants—converge and rage in the Caribbean basin, while a fourth—on crime—has produced the paramilitary occupation of US cities like Los Angeles, Washington DC, and Chicago. The grainy snuff films of obliterated Venezuelan boats that Trump shares online are for his political base—a base simultaneously galvanized by videos of masked ICE death squads brutalizing migrants and horrified when Southern California communities like Paramount fight back, waving Mexican flags, spraying walls with graffiti that reads “Free Gaza, Fuck ICE.”

The Mexico-Palestine border is everywhere, including in the Caribbean.

Colombian president Gustavo Petro has warned as much at several international conferences since 7 October 2023. He has consistently framed Israel’s genocide against Palestinians as a sort of test run for countries and communities who dare to challenge US empire in any fashion, have the temerity to exercise national sovereignty, or simply exist as populations deemed surplus—and therefore genocidable. There is a striking resemblance in the logics and actions that underscore the US extrajudicial executions of Venezuelans and Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and bombings of civilians throughout West Asia: an utter contempt and disavowal of any international legal or diplomatic frameworks in the service of naked imperialist and settler colonial mass violence and expansionism.

“What we are seeing in Gaza is a rehearsal of the future,” Petro warned—a future that two serial killer nations are bent on hastening.

United Front or An “Archipelago of Idiot Nations?”

Any serious student of Latin American history—and Native American history for that matter—knows that “America First” isolationism is a myth, past and present. During its early twentieth century “isolationist” period—after a brief, fleeting moment of imperial expansionist madness in 1898-1899 that somehow resulted in new colonial possessions—the US invaded Latin America at least 34 times. The US invaded, occupied, and looted Haiti for nearly 20 years (1915-1934)—the empire’s longest occupation until Afghanistan (2001-2021), unless we remember Puerto Rico as the US military uses the island today to build up its military capacity against Venezuela. This is the history that Trump currently evokes—a history of imperialist gangsterism in the service of US political and capitalist domination over the region.

The isolationist myth continues to exist as a politically galvanizing myth for both major political parties in the US that—paraphrasing Julius Nyerere—extravagantly form part of a single, imperial state. For Trump, it allows him to tap into inchoate antiwar sentiments that exist on the Right (despite all material evidence to the contrary) while bringing the war home that his base demands. US liberals and “Never Trumpers” who share a distaste for the president’s uncouth style and rhetoric, nonetheless deploy the isolationist myth as a convenient foil because they accept the premise regarding the necessity and legitimacy of US “global leadership” as some amorphous “force for good” in the world.

Yet, the ongoing extrajudicial executions of Venezuelans in the Caribbean by US military forces represents the rule—not the exception—of so-called US “isolationism.” US isolationism, past and present, looks like the overt deployment of US military forces; the state-sanctioned murder of Venezuelans; the waging of economic wars that kill more slowly, more broadly, society-wide in Cuba and Venezuela; the support of “dictatorships of flies,” to borrow from Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, like El Salvador today. Recent exceptions—Joe Biden’s support for presidential electoral results in Brazil (2022) and Guatemala (2023)—while meaningful, represent such a low bar for what should be standard procedure: non-interventionism and respect for national sovereignty.

Yet there is another dimension in this history of alleged isolationism. Let us remember that the original America First, a slogan first used by Woodrow Wilson during this second presidential campaign in 1916, also generated anti-imperialist responses and movements throughout the region. From the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the world’s first social democratic Constitution, to the Nicaraguan “small crazy army” as Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral called the Augusto César Sandino-led guerrillas who fought the occupying US Marines in the late 1920s and early 30s, Latin America taught the US something about the costs of perpetual militarism and intervention. Historian Greg Grandin argues that in this period, Latin America saved the US from itself, from its worst imperialist, self-destructive impulses.[2] Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) and his Brain Trust learned the lesson for the sake of national self-preservation.

Neither that capacity nor desire exists in the White House today.

That history of resistance raises a question faced by the entire region since Independence, since the 1823 promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine, and the imperial, colonial expansion of the US throughout the 19th century. That question is: does the region unite in the face of a bellicose expansionist “neighbor” or does it remain fragmented and divided?

Is it José Martí’s “Our América?” Or a tradition that the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano sardonically referred to as that of “an archipelago of idiot nations organized for separation and trained to dislike one another?”[3]

The region’s nations have some contemporary examples to draw from. Do they choose the Nayib Bukele route—active, pliant carceral collaboration with the US empire à la the current dictator of El Salvador—and, in the words of Aimé Césaire, run the great Yankee risk? The history of US-Latin American relations is littered with disposable authoritarian allies. “He may be a son of a bitch but he’s our son of a bitch”—as FDR allegedly said of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza—generally has an expiration date. Noboa and Argentine president Javier Milei are currently running that risk. So too, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana, as both countries have expressed support for the US naval expedition currently targeting Venezuela.

Strangled by years of economic war and sanctions, the example (and costs) of defiance and resistance offered by Cuba and Venezuela may also seem unappealing for the rest of the region. Perhaps Mexico and Brazil represent some sort of middle path. Yet such a path does not guarantee any sort of respect for national sovereignty. Mexico faces continuous economic and military threats, despite being the US’ top trading partner, while Brazil suffered the imposition of 50% tariffs on its exports to the US over what Trump called the “witch hunt” against former president and coup leader Jair Bolsonaro. Both Trump and Rubio promised additional retaliation after Bolsonaro’s recent conviction. Transforming the entire country into an anti-migrant wall and collaborating with the US war on migrants has not entirely protected Mexico. Betraying Haitian sovereignty by materially backing “the current occupation of the country by the Western-led Core Group”—as our comrade Jemima Pierra argues—has also not helped either Mexico or Brazil appease the empire. Meanwhile, Haitians protesting the dismantling of their state and sovereignty have suffered horrific repression—including a recent attack by Canadian drones used by the Haitian police that targeted “gang members” and killed eight children.

Unity or archipelago: this is the key question faced by Latin American countries at this moment. Its political and economic sovereignty are at stake. The US government seems to know the stakes. Last April in Panama, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth gave a speech in which he offered a warning to the region: “to put America first, we will put the Americas first”—an ominous hallmark of US isolationism.

Alexander Aviña is a member of AISC. ______________________________________________________________________________

[1] Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (Monthly Review Press, 2000 [1950]), 77.

[2] Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, 2006), 11-51.

[3] Eduardo Galeano, Century of the Wind: Memory of Fire, Volume 3 (Open Road Integrated Media, 2014 [1986]), 1897.