History shows that Trump’s Venezuela campaign will be disastrous

Since Sept. 1, the United States has been blowing up boats in the Caribbean Sea and killing people on board with apparent impunity. The current known death toll stands at 32. According to President Donald Trump, the dead — and those the Navy continues to target — are Venezuelan “unlawful combatants” and “narco-terrorist” members of the Tren de Aragua gang and are alleged to be transporting drugs bound for America. This amounts to war on drug cartels, Trump has said, allowing the U.S. to act in self-defense.

As Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir has written, this “phony war” is indicative of the twisted pathology of Trump’s worldview. Reporting over the last week has made it clear: The danger of this situation going sideways becomes greater every day. And considering America’s history in the region, such an outcome almost seems pre-ordained.

Last week, Adm. Alvin Holsey, who heads the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees operations in Central and South America, resigned less than one year into his three-year term. Although the Pentagon did not give a reason for his departure, the New York Times reported that he had raised concerns about the boat attacks, as well as the larger drug counter-mission. 

Holsey’s is a high-ranking resignation, but he is not the first to resign or be forced out over the strikes against Venezuelan boats. On Oct. 15, CNN’s Natasha Bertrand reported on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s destruction of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, with “multiple current and former JAGs telling CNN that the strikes do not appear lawful.” Doubts have also been raised within the defense department’s Office of General Counsel. The Pentagon has denied these reports, saying there is unanimous agreement that the strikes are lawful. 

They are not. As Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said on “Meet The Press” on Sunday, “[W]hen you kill someone, if you’re not in a declared war, you really need to know someone’s name at least. You have to accuse them of something. You have to present evidence. So all of these people have been blown up without any evidence of a crime.”

The president, though, does not seem to feel any moral obligation — or pressure — to produce any evidence, and over the weekend he inadvertently revealed the vacuity of the administration’s arguments. “It was my greatest honor to destroy a very large DRUG-CARRYING SUBMARINE that was navigating towards the United States on a well known narcotrafficking transit route,” he said in a social media post. While two were killed, Trump announced that the “two surviving terrorists are being returned to their Countries of origin, Ecuador and Colombia, for detention and prosecution.” 

Can we see the problem here? He killed two people because they were allegedly unlawful combatant terrorists with whom we are at war. But then he sent their two compatriots back to their home countries for prosecution? How does that make any sense? 

On Saturday night, Colombian President Gustavo Petro, went public with an accusation that in September, the U.S. murdered an innocent Colombian fisherman whose boat was in distress. Trump responded that Petro is an “illegal drug dealer” with “a fresh mouth toward America.” He announced that he would immediately halt all counter-narcotics aid payments to Colombia —  which seems counterproductive — and, needless to say, he also vowed to raise tariffs. 

On Sunday, Hegseth announced yet another boat strike. This time, its three passengers were alleged to be members of yet another gang — the Colombian Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), which has long been a designated foreign terrorist organization. The timing certainly suggests the strike could be another of Trump’s patented paybacks, this time to the Colombian president with the “fresh mouth.” It appears that America has escalated its military mission to include yet another South American nation.

If all of this weren’t enough, last week Trump declared that he had approved covert operations in Venezuela, which certainly challenges the meaning of the word covert. The CIA has a long and checkered history in the region over many years, but I don’t think any president has been dim enough to announce it in advance. American interference in Latin American affairs has almost always led to total disaster. It’s hard to imagine that this crazy scheme won’t end up being the worst of all.

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Perhaps the most famous American fiasco in the region was the Bay of Pigs. Conceived under President Dwight Eisenhower and greenlit in the early months of President John F. Kennedy’s administration, the aim was to overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba. But it was a debacle of epic proportions and massive embarrassment for the U.S. Castro remained in power until 2008.

Before that came the U.S.-backed coup in Guatemala in 1954, during which the CIA deposed a democratically elected leader, ushered in decades of dictatorship and wars, and showed that even when the agency’s plans were successful there was calamity. Later, the U.S. government didn’t stop a military coup in Brazil, helped dissidents assassinate the leader of the Dominican Republic and covertly supported the insurgent contras in Nicaragua, leading to the Iran-Contra scandal.

But the most grotesque of U.S. interference in the region was the government’s complicity in the so-called “dirty wars” of Argentina and Chile in the 1970s. Under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Secretary of State (and Nobel Peace Prize laureate) Henry Kissinger approved the repression of Argentina’s left-wing under the military junta that had overthrown the democratically elected government. At least 10,000 people were disappeared, murdered and tortured. In Chile, the U.S. backed a coup of the democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende. The result was the brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose spy master brought together all the right-wing governments in the region — including Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay — in support of Operation Condor, a campaign of repression against leftist movements and assassinations of individuals throughout the region. 

But the apparent template for Trump’s obsession with Venezuela was America’s invasion of Panama in 1989, which removed dictator Manual Noriega from power. According to official numbers, 514 Panamanian soldiers and civilians were killed in the invasion. Local tallies, though, placed the number “close to 1,000. Noriega was eventually arrested and brought to the U.S., where he was convicted on charges of drug trafficking, racketeering and money laundering. Since Noriega was actually a CIA asset, one might have thought the government could have removed him from power without all the fireworks. He was released to France in 2010. 

Even “Plan Colombia,” which was ostensibly a human rights oriented strategy conceived in the 1990s under the Clinton administration, had mixed results. Under this program, the U.S. provided economic aid to the country while strengthening the rule of law and supplying military equipment to fight drug cartels. Plan Colombia helped the economy and reduced violence overall, but it also displaced large numbers of people, and the drug eradication program was an environmental disaster. 

Presidential administrations have meddled in Latin America and South America for decades. While Trump is clownishly crude in his approach, he certainly isn’t the first president to use a “splendid little war” to prove U.S. dominance. And like all those before him, he’s almost certainly going to create a whole lot of human misery in the process.