The United States has a long record of fomenting regime change in Latin America, whether under the rubric of the Monroe Doctrine in the 19th and early 20th centuries or the fight against communism during the Cold War. This strategy has seldom worked out well, even when successful, and it has led to deep-rooted resentment of “The Colossus of the North.” Yet, for some reason, President Donald Trump seems eager to reprise this ignominious history in Venezuela.
Trump is circling Maduro. This points to a dark history.
The White House is ratcheting up military pressure on Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.
October 27, 2025 The Washington Post
U.S. military interventions in Haiti (1915-1934), the Dominican Republic (1916-1924) and Nicaragua (1926-1933) led to the rise not of democracy but of brutal despots: François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Rafael Trujillo and Anastasio Somoza. The CIA-backed overthrow in 1954 of Guatemala’s elected leftist president Jacobo Arbenz helped lead to a bloody 36-year civil war. It also radicalized many Latin Americans, including a young Argentine doctor named Che Guevara who happened to be in Guatemala when the coup occurred.
The CIA’s 1961 Bay of Pigs operation, designed to topple Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, was a notorious fiasco that embarrassed the new president, John F. Kennedy. It also led Castro to agree to the stationing of Soviet nuclear missiles on his soil to protect his regime from further attacks, resulting in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
Things sometimes worked out better when Washington was able to mobilize overwhelming military might against small countries for fast, in-and-out operations — e.g., Grenada, 1983, Panama, 1989. But Venezuela is far from small: It has a slightly larger population than Iraq did when U.S. troops invaded that country in 2003. It has also proved resistant to U.S. efforts to overthrow its dictatorial regime.
In 2019, the first Trump administration tried and failed to instigate a military coup against Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro. After purging his military, Maduro is now considered “coup proof” — and, facing drug-trafficking charges in the United States, he is unlikely to leave power voluntarily.
Yet Trump recently confirmed that he had authorized the CIA to launch another covert action against Maduro. (Shouldn’t it be called an “overt action”?) It isn’t clear whether the presidential finding authorizes the CIA to overthrow Maduro, but simply making the directive public will turn up “the heat” on Maduro’s regime, as Trump said.
Also turning up the heat is the presence of a massive U.S. armada in the Caribbean, including an amphibious assault ship loaded with Marines, a guided-missile cruiser, three guided-missile destroyers, a nuclear-powered attack submarine, a Special Operations forces ship, drones and helicopters, and 10 F-35 fighter jets. B-1 and B-52 bombers have flown near Venezuela, and now an aircraft carrier battle group is headed to the region.
Some of those assets have been employed to blow up a string of supposed drug-smuggling boats, mostly in the waters off Venezuela — attacks that even conservative legal scholars say are likely illegal. The Wall Street Journal reports that, according to U.S. officials, “while Trump’s primary aim is to stop the flow of drugs into the U.S., the hope is that the pressure campaign will also convince Maduro he can no longer remain in power.”
Why is Trump so intent on driving out Maduro? Clearly, he cannot be motivated by a George W. Bush-like zeal to spread democracy, given all that he has done to undermine democracy at home and to support dictators (such as El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele
When asked why he authorized the action against Venezuela, Trump cited two factors: “No. 1, they have emptied their prisons into the United States of America. And the other thing, the drugs, we have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela.” But, as the BBC noted, “Venezuela plays a relatively minor role in the region’s drug trade.” Moreover, there is no evidence of the Maduro regime’s deliberately sending convicts to America. In any case, if the goal is to stop immigration from Venezuela, fomenting a political crisis is a funny way to go about it; lifting U.S. sanctions might be more effective.
Maduro is an odious dictator, but it’s hard to see his regime as a threat sufficient to warrant armed intervention. The regime-change policy is also riddled with numerous contradictions and inconsistencies that are likely to doom it. For example, if the boat strikes are supposed to deny Maduro drug-smuggling revenue, then why did the Trump administration approve a license for Chevron to pump oil in Venezuela? That will help fund the regime it hates.
Another issue: Trump is alienating Venezuela’s largest neighbors, Colombia and Brazil. Trump imposed 50 percent tariffs on Brazil in a failed attempt to stop the trial of former president Jair Bolsonaro, his ally, on coup charges. And Trump threatened to cut off all U.S. aid to Colombia after its leftist president, Gustavo Petro, criticized his strikes on suspected drug boats. Trump called Petro a “lunatic who has many mental problems” and “an illegal drug leader,” and the Treasury Department sanctioned him on Friday. In the 1980s, the CIA supported the Nicaraguan contras from bases in neighboring Honduras; it’s doubtful that either Brazil or Colombia would extend such aid today to topple Maduro after the fights Trump has picked with their leaders.
If Trump wants to make a long-term difference in Venezuela, he should undertake a public diplomacy campaign to support the Venezuelan opposition led by the courageous recent Nobel Peace Prize recipient María Corina Machado. That would, of course, require rethinking the administration’s self-defeating efforts to close down the National Endowment for Democracy, the Voice of America and other tools of public diplomacy. Trying to foment regime change by military force or covert action is likely to backfire and simply feed anti-Yanqui sentiment in Latin America. If history is any guide, lasting regime change must come from within.