Analyzing the Impact of the Donroe Doctrine

It's consider this where every day we go deep on one big news story The Trump administration is aggressively intervening in the affairs of Latin America H The U. S. has captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Venezuela's longtime leader is sitting in a New York jail cell after U. S. forces pulled him out of his bedroom in Caracas in January on drug charges. Expats in Miami celebrated Across the region, President Trump is sending in the US military using threats and sanctions to try to get what he wants, like in Cuba He wants the communist government to fall This year he started blocking almost all shipments of oil to the island nation. Its economy is collapsing And in the seas surrounding Latin America, the US has killed hundreds of people by bombing small boats, it says, are carrying drugs, though it's offered no proof NPR recently reported on fishermen who said a US flagged vessel attacked them at sea. The guys say, Captain look. Tw drones are coming at us One then ripped through the captain's cabin. exploded. The cabin filled with flames, he said Ver soon we're going to start doing it on land too. It's already bombed suspected drug cartels in Ecuador and is reportedly pressuring Guatemala and Mexico to allow the US military in too All of this under the umbrella of what Donald Trump has called the Don Roe doctrine play on the Monroe doctrine, a foreign policy framework the US used in the nineteenth century to establish domination over the Americas Consider this, the Trump administration is superchging its aggression toward Latin America Will the Don Re doctrine backfire NPR, I'm Adrian Flredido This message comes from Dell Technologies. Get long lasting battery life on the Dell XPS laptop powered by Sies three and Telcore, now from six hundred ninety nine dollars. with exclusive student pricing from five hundred ninety nine dollars. 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We talk with some of the most powerful and influential people of this moment Put real questions to them and push for real answers Follow newsmakers on the NPVR app or any podcast player or you can watch on NPR's YouTube channel Consider this from NPR, the Trump administration has moved aggressively to exert its power across Latin America Much of President Trump's second term has been defined by extreme force in the region But he's also exerted a tremendous amount of political pressure In Colombia, a Trump endorsement helped carry a right wing challenger for the presidency into a runoff against the leftist front runner later this month. To talk about what all this signals, we spoke with Greg Grandon, the author of many books on the U S. and Latin America, and a professor of History at Yale I asked him what this turn toward Latin America looks like right now. It's remarkable in its aggression it's remarkable in the sense that it feels no need legitimate itself in terms of any kind of moral or normative justification. In Latin America in the Western heemisphere, you have quite a remarkable, cohesive and, I would say, efficient application of all of the different Applications of hard power, US hard power to Latin America under the rubric of the war on drugs I would say that Maybe with the exception of Uruguay Washington is meddling in Latin American politics D different degrees of intensity. in almost every Latin American nation Why has Latin America suddenly taken on such importance for this administration I think there's a couple of reasons. I think that rejection of globalization and rejection of the post Cold War and the post World War I. premises of foreign policy where the United States would superintend A global order. based on rules, right? The Trump administration has made much of its rejection of that vision And then all of the talk of rehabilitating and revitalizing the Monroe doctrine It's a very particular reading of the Monroe doctrine, the Monroe doctrine and all of its fools at least was based on the premise that the Western Hemisphere shared certain interests. The Trump administration has largely redefined that doctrine to mean that the the Western hemisphere belongs to the United States. More importantly, I think, is The electoral calculations of Florida and the way that Florida haaving become kind of the command center of Malga. you know, the way that the way that the, you know, the Cuban lobby, which has Now is no longer the Cuban lobby, but it's the Cuban, it's the Venezuelan, It's the Colombian, it's the Brazilian lobby. It's all of the's it's a greater diaspora of exiles of fairly wealthy and privileged exiles who have retreated to Florida And and have been pressing Trump. They wanted the Trump administration to put forward a very maximalist position on Latin America, which it has done Let's talk about Cuba. The US is moving really aggressively to bring the communist government down or at least bring it to heal. Trump seems emboldened by how Swiftly he was able to usher in a friendly government in Venezuela after abducting President Maburo there. Is he right to think that he could accomplish the same thing in Cuba? I imagine that the Trump administration probably would like this to be resolved through some kind of rising on the island out of desperation. It seems like that's what their calculus is. They're turning the screws time after time and making life as miserable as possible for Cubans and until it becomes unbearable Now, on the other hand, the Cuban state It's not the Venezuelan military and it's not the Venezuelan state. It's deeper and has more organic legitimacy, I think in some ways. Trump's not going to be able to do in Cuba what he did in Venezuela where He basically turned he basically left the Chavista state in power or the Madoro state in power and and is running it like a holding company The Miami Cuban lobby is going to want substantial changes. Theyre going want they want their island back. they want their property back. They want their house on the Malican back. They wouldn't put up with the kind of compromise that they did in Venezuela, where they just basically made a deal with one faction of the Maduro state Ending the communist system in Cuba has been a long time agal of the U.S.. and it's pressured other countries for a long time to take a stance against Cuba, but a lot of Latin American countries, you know have maintained relationship with Cuba and even that seems to be changing right now How does Trump's end game in Cuba have the potential, you think, to alter the entire US. Latin America dynamic across the continent. It's good question It's basically operating on a model of domination without hegemony It is just pure force and pure power B transactional relations And the asymmetrical relationship of power with Latin America is clear. I mean, a promise of twenty million dollars in aid and you get Ecuador on board. He's got his way in Chile and Venezuela and Ecuador and Bolivia, but we've already seen that there is this crisis of governance in those countries as a result of him getting his way So I think the future is wide open and I think that that old anti imperialist demand for national sovereignty might snap back. in any given election voters looking at a range of things, they're basing their decisions on particular candidates And You know, there there is a social base for Trumpism in Latin America, but the problem with Trumpism is that it contains elements of its own negation R because it starts acting out in ways that lead to destabilization. Let's talk about Colombia for a minute. President Trump endorsed a right wing candidate who has promised to crush drug smugglers to shoot down their airplanes, to sink their boats would that mean for Trump to have an ally in the Colombian president. What it would mean is, I think, an alliance between Ecuador and Colombia and a return to this very militaristic response to cartels and crime in the Andes in the countryside It would be a return to a very militarized state of war. Colombia has moved away from you know, being dominated by conservative governments that were tied to paramilitary regimes They tried to bring the war They signed a very important peace treaty with the FA And what you saw in the last couple of months, especially since Ecuador and the U. S. military are running operations is increasing provocations by Ecuador over the border to kind of create a sense of crisis The right wing candidate is promising a hard line to bring the hammer down. And a lot of people are responding to that Is Trump building an effective unified battlefield against the drug traffickers with you know, this group of, um, of country leaders Well, he's using the pretext of a campaign against the drug traffickers. There was just a study done that despite killing more than two hundred speedboat operators, the price of cocaine and the quantity of cocaine