By attacking Venezuela, President Trump has just lit the American cigarette burning forever.
For more than 175 years – since the United States conquered part of Mexico – almost every president has clashed with Latin America while telling the rest of the world to stay out of hell.
We helped overthrow democratically elected leaders and supported murderous tyrants. Death squads are trained and provide bail to favored partners. He continued the economic blockade and encouraged corporate America to treat the region’s wealth, and its workers, like a cookie jar.
From the Mexican American war to the invasion of the Bay of Pigs, the Panama Canal to NAFTA, we have only looked to Latin America while uniting our actions under the banner of kindness.
It rarely ends well for anyone involved – especially us. Many of the leaders we put in power turned into depots and we tolerated them until they continued their positions, like Manuel Noriega of Panama. The political turmoil it helped create led generations of Latin Americans to immigrate El Nortewe are basically changing our country just as many Americans think people like my family should have lived in their ancestral homes.
So when Trump was at Mar-a-Lago on Saturday, he insisted that the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife by the US military was a very smart and post-D-day military operation. He also declared that the US would “run the country” and pulled out his weird “YMCA” dance with the idea of making money from Venezuela’s oil.
His message to the world: Venezuela is ours until we say so, like the rest of Latin America. And if allies and enemies alike haven’t gotten the hint, Trump announced a revised Monroe Doctrine — the idea that the US can do whatever it wants in the Western Hemisphere — called the “Donroe Doctrine.”
Because of course he did.
No one in Washington should be more familiar with this dark history than Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cubans who fled the island during the rule of the US-backed caudillo Fulgencio Batista.
Rubio grew up in a community of exile that saw Batista’s successor, Fidel Castro, stay in power for decades, despite the US embargo. As one of Florida’s top US officials, Rubio represented millions of Latin American immigrants who had fled civil wars that the US caused in some way.
Yet he is Trumpworld’s biggest advocate for Latin American regime change, helping to reinforce a campaign promise to fight the president’s intervention like a narco boat off the coast of South America.
On Saturday, Rubio watched silently as Trump threatened Colombian President Gustavo Petro to “watch his ass.” When it was Rubio’s turn to answer questions from reporters, he said Cuban leaders “should be worried” and gave a warning to the rest of the world: “Don’t play with this president in office, because it won’t be right.”
In Latin America, few are more reviled than vendido – to sell. Betraying one’s country for personal or political gain is the original sin that dates back to the nations that sided with the Spanish conquistadors to bring down oppressive regimes, and then met the same sad fate. Vendidos have controlled the history of this region and stopped its development, and the leaders – Porfirio Diaz of Mexico, Somozas of Nicaragua, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic – are more than happy to go along with the group. Yankees at the expense of his people.
Rubio belongs to this long, dirty list — and in many ways, the worst vendido to all of them.
Then Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), left, listens during a 2016 presidential debate with candidate Donald Trump.
(Wilfredo Lee / Associated Press)
I still remember the fresh-faced, thoughtful guy trying to pass a bipartisan amnesty bill in 2013. Although he is more to my taste, he has come across as a Latino politician who knows how to thread the needle between liberals and conservatives, gringos and us.
It was great to see him call out Trump’s masculinity when the two faced off in the 2016 Republican primary. He told CNN’s Jake Tapper, in words that sound more prophetic than ever, “In the years to come, there are a lot of people …
The thirst for power has a way of corrupting even the most rational hearts, alas. Rubio finally aligned himself with Trump in 2016, backing Trump’s allegations that the 2020 election was rigged and declaring at the 2024 National Convention that Trump “has not only changed our party, he has emboldened an organization.”
Rubio’s reward for his boot licking? He sets our foreign policy agenda, which is like putting an arsonist in charge of a fireworks store.
I’m sure all of this comes across as left-wing rhetoric to Venezuelans, many of whom have cheered Maduro’s fate from Spain to Mexico, Miami to Los Angeles. Only lost pendejo he can support what Maduro did in Venezuela, which was a prosperous country and a stable US ally for decades as the rest of South America lurched from one crisis to another.
But for Trump, overthrowing Maduro did not mean the well-being of the Venezuelan people or bringing democracy to their country; it was about taking advantage of American power and enriching the US
Meanwhile, his Leviathan deportation has rounded up tens of thousands of undocumented Venezuelans and canceled the temporary protected status of hundreds of thousands more.
Back in 2022, when Rubio was a member of parliament, he encouraged Venezuelans to qualify for temporary protected status, which is given to citizens of countries deemed too dangerous to return to. At the time, Rubio said that “failure to do so will lead to the real death penalty for many Venezuelans who have fled their country.”
Now? At a May news conference, he insisted that the 240 Venezuelans deported to El Salvador by early 2025 “were not immigrants, these were criminals,” even though the Deportation Data Project found that only 16% of them had criminal convictions.
Rubio has long posed as a modern-day Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan who led the liberation of South America from Spain and has been a hero to many Latinos ever since.
But even Bolívar knew he doubted American hegemony, writing in an 1829 letter that the US “seems destined by Providence to suffer. [Latin] America is troubled in the name of Freedom. “
Trouble, your name is Marco Rubio. By pushing Trump to play Latin America, he is running the same old song of US meddling between your family and my family. By allowing Maduro’s allies to stay in power if they play with you and Trump, or steal the election in 2024, it proves that he is as Venezuelan as Maduro.
Vendido.
