No, it’s not just about the oil. Nor is it about the Monroe Doctrine, which has been used for two centuries by United States governments to justify their misdeeds in Latin America.
It’s (obviously) not about drugs either. It’s something simpler: Donald Trump is weak and aggressive (he said on Sunday that the United States “will govern” Venezuela), while his advisors are unscrupulous. The mini-Nazis he has surrounded himself with instinctively feel that the regime cannot last forever (John Bolton, his former National Security Advisor, said Trump “hasn’t got the brains” to be a dictator) and are rushing to deploy military power on three continents to mask their total failure on the domestic front.
Let’s start with oil: the world’s largest producer today is the United States, which extracts as much crude as Russia and Saudi Arabia combined. Venezuela has large reserves but ranks around 20th among producers, extracting less than one million barrels a day. Caracas’s oil industry was nationalized not by Hugo Chávez or Maduro but by Carlos Andrés Pérez, the United States’ best friend, in 1975.
Regime change by force in Caracas certainly fits into the long history of violence against countries that have the misfortune of being located south of the Rio Grande. A Latin American proverb says: “Why will there never be a coup d’état in Washington? Because there’s no American embassy there.” Support for the military juntas in Guatemala alone during the civil war between 1960 and 1996 caused 200,000 victims, 86% of whom were indigenous. Furthermore, the U.S.’s installation of authoritarian regimes in Peru (1962), Argentina (1962 and 1966), Guatemala, Ecuador and Honduras (1963), Brazil (1964), the Dominican Republic (1965), Chile and Uruguay (1973) are historically established facts, as is its strengthening of dictatorships like that of Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay (1954-1989) and Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua (1936-1979).
So the installation of a friendly regime in Caracas, with advantageous oil concessions for the U.S. regime’s friends (“Drill, baby, drill!” was a Trump slogan), is undoubtedly part of the scenario prepared at the White House – but it is a minor reason. What is central is the unhesitating exhibition of military force, an expansion of internal violence on a global scale. Just as Trump’s personal Gestapo – Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – arrests alleged undocumented immigrants without a warrant, puts American citizens in jail and deports its victims to other continents in violation of the Constitution and court rulings, so in foreign policy Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela get bombed – and tomorrow it may happen to any other country that offers an opportunity for the little Duce of the White House to show off how macho he is.
After all, the pretext of prosecuting Maduro for protecting drug trafficking is particularly laughable: on December 1, Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, a former president of Honduras who was truly a protector of cocaine cartels, had been arrested in his country, extradited to the United States and sentenced to decades in prison. This happened while the U.S. Navy bombed the boats of alleged traffickers in the Gulf of Mexico, also murdering the survivors who were calling for help.
In reality, the “war” on drugs launched by the Nixon administration in 1973 was a pretext for criminalizing opposition and ethnic minorities at the time, just as it is a pretext for exhibitions of force on a planetary scale today. In 1970, the number of drug-related arrests in the United States was 322,300; by 2000 it had become 1,375,600, and in 2019 it reached a peak of 1,560,000. The true goal, from the beginning, was to target ethnic minorities: on this we have the testimony of Nixon’s advisor John Ehrlichman (the one who organized Watergate). In a 1994 interview, he calmly confessed that the objective was to hit the left opposed to the Vietnam War and African Americans, by ensuring public opinion associated students with marijuana and Blacks with heroin and by heavily criminalizing both: “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did,” Ehrlichman told journalist Dan Baum of Harper’s.
Nowadays the lies don’t need to be sophisticated: Trump has accused Canada of exporting the opioid fentanyl to the United States, where it was and is being produced by Johnson & Johnson and Purdue Pharma. The latter company ended up in bankruptcy after admitting its responsibilities in the opioid crisis and paying $6 billion into compensation funds for states, local organizations and victims.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/il-regno-della-forza-che-spazza-via-quello-della-legge on 2026-01-04
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