By bombing several strategic sites in Caracas and abducting the president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, as well as his wife [Cilia Flores] during the night of January 2 to 3, Donald Trump has revived a harsh US imperial posture toward Latin America that many believed to have ended with the close of the Cold War.
Carried out by Delta Force [US special forces], which was behind the elimination of Saddam Hussein in Iraq (2003), the capture of General Manuel Noriega in Panama (1989) and the hunt for Pablo Escobar in Colombia (1993), Operation Absolute Resolve brought back memories of several tragic episodes across the continent. One recalls the CIA-orchestrated ousting of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz (1954), the occupation of the Dominican Republic (1965) and the deployment of US Marines on the island of Grenada (1983).
All were interventions carried out in the name of fighting communism, flouting the most basic norms of international law as redefined after World War II [1939-45] and which the international community more or less docilely accepted – including France and the United Kingdom, who were pressured to endorse the dismantling of Guatemalan democracy in 1954 or face being abandoned, the former in Indochina and the latter in Egypt – given the geopolitical and economic hegemony enjoyed by the US during those years.
New political landscape
In the early 1990s, however, Latin America and the Caribbean took a back seat on Washington’s international agenda. Beginning with the first Gulf War (1990-91) and, especially, after September 11, 2001, the Middle East became the US State Department’s primary focus. In the early 2010s, under then-president Barack Obama, Asia also emerged as a priority, to the extent that new actors – China most notably, but also Russia – were able to capitalize on the vacuum and seize significant markets, at times even establishing themselves as preferred partners. Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, many experts agreed that the US had lost Latin America.
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Fonte: Le Monde
