There is no longer any room for interpretation. Recent events have confirmed, beyond doubt, that the United States intends to dominate Latin America and the Caribbean and to crush opposition, even by using military means.
Honduras offers a clear example. Days before the November 30 vote, US President Trump’s flagrant intervention indisputably altered the outcome, leaving the election unresolved weeks later. My colleague Kurt Hackbarth aptly coined the term “preemptive fraud.”
“The method?” writes Hackbarth. “Blackmailing voters at their weakest points — debt, migration, violence — to force the desired electoral outcome. Cleaner, without the need to get one’s hands dirty with ballot stuffers, armies or clandestine operations.”
Given its success in Honduras and Argentina and the lack of any serious regional or institutional pushback, rest assured that, moving forward, Washington will deploy this tactic widely.
The best way to inoculate a population against Washington’s latest method of deception is through deep, widespread political consciousness — so that the people will recognize attempts to deny their right to choose their own destiny and reject those attempts forthright.
But even a conscious and mobilized population doesn’t guarantee a country’s sovereignty. US imperialism has repeatedly shown that it won’t tolerate counter-hegemonic governments winning at the ballot box, which brings us to Venezuela.
For decades, the US has sought to oust Venezuela’s leftist Bolivarian Revolution, using every tactic in the playbook — from coups, illegal sanctions, and now to outright piracy on the high seas. This week, the US seized an oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast carrying roughly $78 million in crude oil, a wanton act of piracy. Furthermore, Trump threatened to impose a de facto US Navy-backed oil blockade on Venezuela.
Make no mistake, a blockade not sanctioned by the UN Security Council or imposed outside an armed conflict is illegal under international law, as are the executions through drone strikes on small boats carried out by the US. Washington openly flouts international law, aided by US media efforts to manufacture consent through barefaced lies, claiming that unilateral US coercive measures constitute “international sanctions.”
A US naval blockade on Venezuela would constitute collective punishment, another crime against humanity. Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodríguez warns a blockade would trigger another massive economic crisis. Venezuela already has to jump through US-imposed hurdles to sell its most important export, oil. Following Wednesday’s seizure, Asian buyers are demanding deeper discounts on Venezuelan crude. By cutting off oil revenues, Trump is increasing pressure to remove elected President Nicolás Maduro from office.
Washington loves to label countries that defy it as “rogue states,” but the country posing a threat to its neighbors is the United States — and the danger is rising. The National Security Strategy for 2025, published earlier this month, confirms a renewed US focus on the so-called Western Hemisphere, aimed at rebuilding US capacity to contest global hegemony amid its rivalry with China. Read in tandem with the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, the strategy represents a massive threat to the sovereignty of Latin American and Caribbean countries.
The US, this “rogue state,” has used every possible means to interfere in the internal affairs of Latin American countries and now threatens direct land invasions. Yet, the region remains woefully unprepared. Time is running out to forge a coherent regional response to the threat the US poses to all.
José Luis Granados Ceja is a journalist and political analyst based in Mexico City. He is co-host of the Mexican public television show Sin Muros, was staff writer with Venezuela Analysis, contributor to Drop Site News, and writes a monthly opinion column for the Mexico Solidarity Project and also co-hosts the Mexico Solidarity Project’s weekly podcast, Soberanía.
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