Best of 2025 - Gunboat hypocrisy in the Caribbean |
Even as Donald Trump crisscrosses the globe, bringing his purported peacemaking skills to parts of the world that did not even know they were at war, his administration has openly been preparing for militarised regime change in Venezuela. Neighbouring Colombia too isn’t safe.
A repost from 30 October 2025
There is nothing new, of course, about the United States’ designs against what has often been designated as its backyard. The region’s 20th-century history is replete with instances of unwarranted US interventions and regime-change operations, not all of which succeeded. Those in living memory stretch from 1954’s Guatemala coup to the Bay of Pigs in 1961, the 1973 Pinochet putsch in Chile and the invasion of Panama in 1989.
The last of these has frequently been referenced as the most likely model for tackling Venezuela, after Trump indicated the CIA had been given the go-ahead for ground operations. For the past couple of months US military forces have been targeting small boats mainly in the Caribbean, claiming without evidence that they were drug-smuggling vessels. No corroborating evidence has been offered and, when a couple of sailors survived an attack on a submersible, they were rapidly repatriated to Ecuador and Colombia instead of being detained and tried as drug smugglers.
Latin America has long served as a key supplier of the seemingly unfathomable urge among Americans to blot out reality, but Venezuela has never been a major culprit. By almost every account, it has little or no role in the stateside fascination with fentanyl, supposedly a far more formidable drug than heroin. Designating........