While in the recent decade the main strategy of USA’s power struggle over Ibero-American remained as a slow chess match of destabilization and creation of internal disruption aimed at stopping unity, now it seems Trump’s administration is raising once again the existential stakes of our centuries old feud.
Trump’s military buildup in the Caribbean, marked by the deployment of the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier group and a series of lethal strikes on suspected drug-trafficking vessels, signals a dangerous new chapter of intervention in Ibero-America.
This policy, framed as a counter-narcotics operation against the “Andean axis” of Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela and Gustavo Petro’s Colombia represents a significant escalation that goes beyond the historical precedents of the Monroe Doctrine.
While a large-scale ground invasion would be logistically challenging due to the region’s geographical peculiarities and a joint resistance, there is a pursued strategy of coercion and internal subversion.
The current strategy can be understood as a “maximum pressure” campaign combining military, economic, and diplomatic tools. The administration has formally declared an “armed conflict” against cartels designated as “unlawful armed combatants,” a novel legal justification to bypass traditional war authorization. In parallel, the USA maintains a crippling sanctions regime that has contributed to hundreds of thousands of deaths in Venezuela by restricting access to food and medicine.
Diplomatically, the administration centers its regime change efforts in Venezuela on the liberal opposition figure María Corina Machado, a self-declared partner who supports the military strikes and advocates for the privatization of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves.
The proposed action against Venezuela and Colombia, however, is justified not by a foreign threat but by a “war on drugs/terror” precedent that could be applied to other nations in the region, such as Mexico or Colombia. This evokes the fear of a “New Syria” scenario where external military intervention triggers a prolonged and devastating conflict. As seen in the Middle East, neoconservative policies have deepened the USA’s nihilistic ideology, openly advocating brute force and the multiplication of failed states.
This aggressive posture is ideologically underpinned by a revived neoconservatism and the growing influence of Christian Zionism in Ibero-American politics, influenced by figures like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a long-time hawk on Ibero-America, as they instrumentalize the manichean struggle against ghosts of communism to justify a theologically political alignment with USA and Israel.
Beyond Venezuela, they apply concerted pressure across the continent to realign it with a zionist worldview. This includes Trump’s tariff on Brazil, using Jair Bolsonaro’s condemnation as a trampoline for geopolitical demands, a massive bailout offered to Javier Milei’s Argentina, as well as counting with the support of openly zionist Paraguay regime of Santiago Peña.
The potential implications are grave: a sponsored war in the hemisphere would likely trigger a massive regional backlash, severely damaging relations for a generation. It would set a brazen precedent for great-power interventionism, undercutting arguments against Russian and Chinese supposed expansionism, and could lead to a violent, protracted conflict that devastates Venezuela and destabilizes its neighbors.
It is imperative that no regional state unaligned with the USA backs down from their position and keep an adamant critique of this political pressure, lest we risk a fundamental period of our own struggle for freedom and sovereignty.
