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The instability and authoritarian regimes in the region were supported by the elite training of the US military. The Department of Defense has trained tens of thousands of Latin American military, intelligence, and law enforcement personnel at the notorious School of the Americas in Georgia; Many of them have been accused of egregious human rights abuses, including graduates who, according to an investigation by a Duke University researcher, became “dictators, death squad agents, and murderers,” including Manuel Noriega himself, the Bolivian dictator Hugo Banzer Suarez, the Haitian dictator Raul Cédras, the chief of Pinochet’s secret police, and even the general who this weekend was Maduro’s defense minister, among others from the so-called “hall.” Scammers.
For decades, the United States and one president after another justified these interventions and political support for dictatorships through a Cold War lens, arguing that supporting terrible regimes was better than allowing them to fall into the hands of communism. Ironically, it is the power, dominance, and remarkable skill of the US military and intelligence community in achieving tactical victories that makes such interventions seem more attractive than they should to presidents, from Eisenhower to Reagan to Trump. You can always win in the short term – depose, overthrow or kidnap the leader – and then the long term becomes a gamble.
But the long-term unintended consequences of these actions have echoed in American domestic politics for decades. In fact, their second- and third-order influences have shaped American politics today more than most Americans understand.
And there were clear connections: for example, while planning the Bay of Pigs operation, Hunt met the four Cubans he would later recruit for the Watergate burglary. And there are less obvious matters: Most notably, US intervention in places like the so-called “Northern Triangle” comprising Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador has unleashed destabilizing forces that have contributed to waves of migration north to the US border – millions of would-be migrants whose arrival in the US over the past decade has exacerbated nationalist fears and helped propel Donald Trump first to the presidency in 2016 and then back to the White House in 2016. 2024. Displaced Many are further north where climate change and deforestation have affected agriculture and caused the collapse of farms and local economies; Some of the most destabilizing deforestation, in places like Guatemala, came after the military burned highland areas to remove remote sanctuaries for rebel groups. As Jonathan Blitzer explains in his award-winning study of migration to Latin America and the United States, Everyone who left is hereAfter the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s – a war that Reagan once described as “the front line of the battle that is really ours” – more than a quarter of that country’s population ended up living as refugees in the United States.
Which leads us to:
2. Donald Trump doesn’t have a plan.
In November, in the midst of a fall campaign by the US military to carry out deadly strikes on what it called drug smuggling boats — strikes that ultimately killed more than 100 people and were illegal by almost all international standards — He was interviewed Ambassador John Bolton at the Texas Tribune Festival. Bolton, a hardline neocon who was the longest-serving national security adviser in the White House during his first term, He called for regime change In Venezuela for years, he worked in the first term to support opposition efforts to oust Maduro. “I think our failure to oust Maduro in the first term was our biggest failure,” he told me. (Some of those efforts were spectacular failures, such as A Wired investigation By Zach Dorfman (later revealed.)
But Bolton said he was nonetheless puzzled by how poorly Trump had laid the groundwork in recent months for operations against Maduro. The boat strikes came without any effort to build support with Congress or even develop deep partnerships with the Venezuelan opposition. (In fact, over Trump weekend He was casually fired Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado beat out Trump this fall for the Nobel Peace Prize — and according to the Washington Post, she might as well have been. Marginalized And precisely for that reason.) “I think there is no understanding of what it takes to replace the Maduro regime,” Bolton said.