The Trump Administration Is Creating a Modern Monroe Doctrine to Subjugate Latin America

The Trump administration inherited an apparatus of imperialist intervention that has been refined over decades, comprised of a dense network of development conditionalities and financial choke points. What changed with Trump was the brazenness with which Washington wielded them, namely against the nations that elected left-wing leaders, like his 50 percent tariffs on Brazil for having the audacity to elect one and jail his right-wing ally in Jair Bolsonaro for crimes he committed. In Venezuela, the U.S. has helped in collapsing the state’s oil revenues through sweeping sanctions that amounted to collective punishment; in Colombia, the U.S. has instrumentalized aid as a lever of obedience, rewarding those who upheld U.S. security priorities and isolating movements that sought to redistribute land or challenge extractivism.

The campaign against Venezuela was framed as a moral crusade against “dictatorship,” but it was in fact an experiment that metastasized into a near-total blockade designed to gut the country’s oil sector and subsequently froze billions in state assets abroad. Washington’s rapid recognition of Juan Guaidó as “interim president” in 2019, cheered on by its allies, replaced any pretense of multilateralism with the blunt imposition of external manipulation long associated with U.S.-led colour revolutions. The effect was to suffocate an already besieged society, collapsing import capacity and disrupting medical and food supply chains. This was designed to discipline Venezuela’s polity and reassert U.S. hegemony. Independent U.N. experts and humanitarian researchers have documented the material toll of these measures: worsening shortages of essential medicines, hospital equipment failures, and preventable deaths tied directly to the sanctions regime that throttled oil revenues and financial access. The U.S. has long justified this economic asphyxiation as a push for “democratic restoration,” despite how present and past administrations have intentionally designed their sanctions to strangle any and all means of social reproduction.

In the waters of the southern Caribbean and the maritime approaches to Colombia and Venezuela, the Donald Trump administration has escalated military action under the guise of counter-narcotics, launching lethal strikes on small vessels alleged to be trafficking drugs while bragging openly about his administration’s willingness to kill. The campaign began in early September 2025 with a strike in international waters off Venezuela that killed eleven people, with the administration claiming the boat was operated by a “narco-terrorist” network.  Subsequent attacks followed: on September 15 and September 19 another two vessels were struck, and on October 3 a fourth strike killed four men, all occurring just off Venezuelan or Colombian coastal waters. Just this week, the military announced they killed 14 people in attacks.

This symbiosis between violence, economic coercion and dependency has long defined U.S. relations with Latin America. The Trump years have merely stripped away the humanitarian varnish. Colombia’s militarization and Venezuela’s economic immiseration are two faces of the same architecture—an imperial system which converts sovereignty into conditional privilege. The language of “stability” and “humanitarian concern” masks the continuity of accumulation by dispossession: the disciplining of resource-rich states, the neutralization of social movements, and the management of migration flows created by crises that U.S. policy itself deepens.