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The bombs fell in the early hours of January 3. They cascaded over the city, one and then another. The bright orange explosions rocked Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, shaking people awake.

“The bombs lasted a while,” Caracas resident and community organizer Yanahir Reyes told Truthout. “And you could hear the helicopters, the planes. It was terrifying.”

The U.S. forces rained down fire — focused on the military barracks in the capital and nearby states, but also hitting surrounding neighborhoods.

Videos of the invading forces spiraled quickly onto social media. Countless videos of the bombs falling, people screaming, trying to make sense of it all, while the explosions shook buildings and destroyed homes. And the sound of the arrival of the U.S. forces echoed across the city.

Shock. Fear. Confusion.

“The scariest part was videos of helicopters — helicopters flying in Caracas and bombing targets on the ground around Fuerte Tiuna [Venezuela’s largest military barracks],” Caracas-based journalist Ricardo Vaz told Truthout. “What are they here for? Are there troops on the ground?”

U.S. forces would kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, under charges of drug trafficking. Maduro is now in New York, awaiting trial at the Southern District Court. According to the BBC, a Venezuelan official says at least 80 people were killed in the U.S. invasion.

This was the invasion that Donald Trump had vowed for months. An invasion that U.S. administrations had threatened for years and decades, going all the way back to President George W. Bush.

And it marked the U.S. once again deploying direct military action in other countries in the region. A return to President Theodore Roosevelt’s gunboat diplomacy, where the United States pushes its agenda and its interests by force. The Monroe Doctrine on steroids, or what Trump has called it his own “Donroe Doctrine” — Donald plus Monroe.

It is a terrifying precedent. It is the first time the United States has taken unilateral military action against a nation in Latin America in more than 35 years. Many analysts and Latin Americans had hoped this bellicose foreign policy and direct U.S. aggression had been relegated to the history books.

But those playbooks have been dusted off and are being used again, echoing the December 20, 1989, U.S. invasion of Panama. And it was a copy and paste job — give or take some minor alterations.

“This is meant to send a message way beyond Venezuela, not only way beyond Venezuela in the region, but worldwide.”

“The invasion of Venezuela is a blatant violation of international law,” John Lindsay-Poland told Truthout. He’s the author of the book Emperors in the Jungle, about the history of U.S. intervention in Panama and the 1989 invasion. “It is a prelude, potentially, to a long and violent conflict within Venezuela. And it’s a throwback to other times when leaders who had broken democracy, who had exploited their peoples in Haiti in 1915 or in Panama in 1989, became the fodder for further U.S. invasions and occupation.”

As the 1989 invasion of Panama would be considered a training exercise for the ensuing U.S. wars in the Middle East, the Venezuelan invasion on January 3 was Trump’s........

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