Written by: Adam Riggio

While the major focus of pretty much everyone in the world right now is to contain the spread of COVID-19 (and rightly so), the unsavoury business of global politics continues. In this case, I’m referring to the indictment that US federal prosecutors filed against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the latest in two decades of the American government’s attempts to remove the country’s socialist party from power.

Following the charges, the United States military has, along with vessels from allied Latin American countries, begun a naval blockade of Venezuela. They are harassing ships leaving and arriving at Venezuelan ports, supposedly hunting for cocaine shipments. It seems especially serious, since the US has even stopped importing Venezuelan crude oil.

Well, What Is It This Time?

The charges against President Maduro allege that he has run a massive cocaine trafficking network for most of his career with the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, working with the communist guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. This column isn’t about disputing or investigating the truth or falsity of these charges, as I’m going to look at the bigger picture.

What matters here is that, after more than two decades of persistent and popular Socialist Party governance in Venezuela, the executive branch of the United States government is still trying to overthrow them. In 2002, for example, the CIA conspired with Venezuelan businessman Pedro Carmona and his private militia to overthrow the Socialist President Hugo Chavez. This coup attempt was not only a failure, but likely bolstered popular support for the left wing leader and party.

That’s just the most theatrical example about Venezuela. The record of United States military meddling for backroom influence over Latin American governments persists since the nineteenth century. It will take me too long to run through all the examples, but you can spend a few minutes researching the Monroe Doctrine, Operation CONDOR, the Colombian civil war, and the last sixty years of severe economic sanctions and military subterfuge against Cuba. Those are just a few noteworthy examples; I left out the deep cuts.

Open another tab and start reading. It might take a while to read it all, but it’s a worthwhile endeavour.

Millions Suffer For a Useless Ideology

United States military and political influence in Latin America took on an aggressive, ideological character during the Cold War. United States policy, no matter what party controlled their government, ordered and supervised support for brutal military takeovers or fascist guerrilla uprisings throughout the hemisphere. Millions died over the decades thanks to state and paramilitary violence fuelled in large part by American money and intelligence agency intervention.

Those fascist groups, narco-terrorists, and oligarchic dictators developed in opposition to liberation movements of the poor and Indigenous or Mestizo populations throughout Latin America. Bolivia’s new fascist dictatorship of Christian extremist Jeanine Áñez is a typical example.

Because those people’s movements focussed on delivering oppressed populations from economic exploitation and racist domination, they naturally gravitated to socialist and social democratic politics. This wrapped them up in the Cold War between the USA and USSR, as the Soviet government allied with the liberation movements, and the United States therefore allied with those movements’ enemies.

This dedication to toppling Soviet allies has become baked into the military and intelligence cultures of the United States. After decades of training fascist paramilitaries at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, much of that sympathy for fascism and ethnic cleansing has bubbled among the US military too. Though the Cold War is over, the US military’s demonic animus toward socialism abroad remains.

El Gran Juego Estéril de Las Américas

The United States military and intelligence agency has sided with fascists for decades across Latin America, lending support to authoritarian and extremist leaders. Most recently, we’ve seen Áñez and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro turn the full might of their governments on anyone who won’t fit their vision the Americas as a culture of merciless Christian white supremacy.

We take for granted today that United States governments will always, to some degree, oppose the rights of the poor, LGBTQ, black, and Indigenous people in Latin America. We assume their malice so deeply that even when a socialist like Hugo Chavez dies of natural causes, it’s really a CIA conspiracy. But consider this. The Mexican revolution and civil war over the 1910s saw the victory of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional. The PRI’s political program was explicitly socialist, and in its early years, they worked to dismantle whatever power base the old ruling class still held after the war.

We would presume that the United States would have worked to subvert this socialist government on its border. And the US military gave support to the status quo government as the revolution began. Then they began giving aid to the socialist revolutionaries in 1913.

The United States was meddling, but its leaders and military cared nothing about the political programs of their favoured contestants for power. The possibility of a society toppling its oligarch class and rebuilding its economics and politics to uplift poor and racialized people was no problem to the United States, no matter the extent of their imperialism.

Even the Victory of Socialists Isn’t Enough

US imperialism was always about influence and interests. The PRI did institute itself as the literal governing party of Mexico for eight decades, from the end of the Mexican civil war to the election of the Partido Acción Nacional’s presidential candidate Vicente Fox. For those eight decades, poor and racialized Mexicans found themselves in a better society than under Pórfirio Díaz, the robber barons’ dictator.

But Mexico’s government slowly fell into the same sad patterns of corruption, cronyism, and cheap influence-peddling that happens habitually in party apparatuses that merge with the state itself. By 1968, the Institutional Revolutionary Party was carrying out a campaign of clandestine murder against socialist revolutionaries in the Dirty War. It meant nothing for a socialist government to back the most bloodthirsty fascisms. All you need is to know who butters your bread.

Does Nicolas Maduro likely have connections with the FARC? He likely does, just as Vladimir Putin is connected to Russian nationalist guerrillas in Ukraine, Ali Khamenei is connected to Hezbollah, and American Presidents over the years were connected to unsavoury militias who do their dirty work. Such alliances are an ordinary way that political leaders deal with enemies abroad. When one leader is prosecuted and attacked for that, then just about every world leader is open to such charges?

Should we expect that?