Harry Targ
Saturday, January 3, 2026
THE UNITED STATES
SUPPORTS COUNTER-REVOLUTION IN LATIN AMERICA: SEEKS TO ROLL BACK THE BOLIVARIAN
REVOLUTION
Harry Targ
Make
no mistake about it. The brutal murders and kidnapping of the president of
Venezuela is designed to crush the spirit of the Bolivarian project. And all
the US media, while implicitly critical of the military action, make sure to
refer to Maduro as an authoritarian. They feature in their stories the
celebration of Venezuelans in Miami. And references to the difficulties of the
Venezuelan economy make no mention of US sanctions.
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(Originally posted May 3, 2016: Most of the essay below from a decade ago describes the efforts of Venezuela, Cuba, and other Latin American countries to break away from US hegemony. It suggests that the desired regional transformation had some successes and then reversals during the first 15 years of the new century. The US military coup in Venezuela on January 3, 2026, signifies a dramatic almost complete reversal of the Bolivarian Project. It remains to be seen how the peoples of Venezuela and Latin America in general respond to this seeming reemergence of US imperialism in the region. And if the Bolivarian spirit survives it should be vigorously supported by peace and justice activists in North America.,)
Peoples Dispatch photo
The
Bolivarian Revolution, the formation of intergovernmental organizations in the
Global South, buoyant economic growth among some of the poorer countries, and
the spread of anti-austerity grassroots social movements everywhere
have sent shock waves across the international system. The world is
experiencing a global transformation potentially as great as when the
nation-state system was constructed out of feudalism in the seventeenth century
or the multipolar world was transformed into a bipolar one after World War II.
Similar dramatic changes resulted from the collapse of the bipolar Cold War
world to a unipolar one after the collapse of the Socialist Bloc. This time
countries of the Global South and mass movements of workers, youth, indigenous
people, and people of color are taking center stage.
However, these twenty-first century tectonic shifts in world affairs have not been occurring automatically. Keepers of the old order, the rich and powerful states of the Global North, continue to promote their hegemonic project particularly when resistance shows its internal weaknesses. The effort to maintain control amid faltering resistance is displayed in recent United States foreign policy toward Latin America.
The Bolivarian Revolution Spreads Across Latin America
The Bolivarian Revolution was the name given by former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to the populist revolution he initiated in his country. Elected in 1998, he embarked on policies to empower the poor, spread literacy, expand access to health care, build worker cooperatives, and modestly redistribute wealth and power from the rich to the poor. His vision was to constitute an economic and political program designed to reverse the neoliberal policy agenda embraced by his predecessors. The oil-rich country, collaborating with revolutionary Cuba, initiated a campaign to make real the nineteenth century dream of Simon Bolivar to create a united and sovereign South America, free from imperial rule. Inspired by grassroots movements, populist governments came to power in Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay, Honduras, Mexico, and Nicaragua. More cautious but left-of-center governments emerged in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile.
Venezuela and Cuba established the eleven nation Bolivarian Alternatives for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) in 2004; Venezuela, Cuba and several other Caribbean countries created, in 2005, Petrocaribe, a trade organization, primarily dealing with oil. In the Hemisphere, twelve South American countries constructed the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) in 2008 and the 33 nation Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) was established in 2011. All of these organizations were inspired by the vision of expanding regional economic and political sovereignty as opposed to the traditional United States hegemony in the region. Primarily they challenged the neoliberal model of economic development.
Setbacks
The successes of the spreading popular movements of the first decade of the twenty-first century were paralleled by buoyant economic growth throughout Latin America. Moises Naim, (“The Coming Turmoil in Latin America,” The Atlantic, October 9, 2015) pointed out that all of Latin America experienced economic growth from 2004 to 2013 due to expanding commodity trade with Asia and increased foreign investments in the region. The major economic player in the region was China. However, comparing 2003-2010 growth rates with 2010-2015, the author reported that rates of growth during the second period were only forty percent of what they were in the first.
With slower growth, declining currency values, higher unemployment and declining social benefits, the narrowing of economic inequality in the region and rising benefits for the poor have been reversed As The Economist put it in June 27, 2015, “Latin America’s economy is screeching to a halt; it managed growth of just 1.3% last year. This year’s figure will be only 0.9%, reckons the IMF, which would mark the fifth successive year of deceleration…Many reckon it now faces a ‘new normal’ of growth of just-2-3% a year. That would jeopardize recent social gains; already the fall in poverty has halted.”
In 2007, Naomi Klein published a fascinating book called The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In it she develops the idea of the shock doctrine, paying homage to the source of the concept, Milton Friedman, the renowned free market economist. From one of his essays, she quotes the following: “…only a crisis--actual or perceived—produces real change. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” The shock doctrine is illustrated by the fact that the declining growth rates in Latin America have been coupled with reactionary political forces in Latin America (and their US friends) becoming re-energized to stifle and dismantle the gains of the Bolivarian revolution and to reverse the gains made by the popular classes.
On June 28, 2009 there was a military coup in Honduras, ousting democratically elected Manuel Zelaya from office. Zelaya, who sympathized with the Bolivarian Revolution, was formally replaced in a November 2009 election that was designed to give legitimacy to the coup. The Honduran coup, in retrospect, signaled a return to destabilization by the wealthy classes of the popular currents represented by the Bolivarian Revolution everywhere.
While Brazil’s Workers Party candidate Dilma Rousseff won reelection as president in October 2014, her victory margin was the narrowest (51.6 percent to 48.4 percent) of the four races in which the center/left Workers Party was victorious. The split between the left/center and right-wing forces set the stage for the 2016 campaign by the wealthy to impeach Rousseff for corruption.
Further, in what was called by the New York Times a “transformative election,” the Argentinian people elected as president right-wing advocate of the disastrous neoliberal economic agenda, Mauricio Macri, the mayor of Buenos Aires. Despite the success of prior governments in resisting destructive IMF demands for debt restructuring, Macri promised to return to the policies of the 1990s that led to economic crisis. As the Macri-sympathetic Times editorial put it: “Reforming the stagnant economy will be painful in the short run but could make Argentina more attractive to foreign investors” (November 26, 2015).
Nicolas Maduro won a narrow presidential victory over a rightwing candidate in Venezuela’s April 14, 2013 election to replace his deceased popular predecessor, Hugo Chavez. Over the next two years, opposition forces engaged in periodic street protests, many in wealthier parts of Venezuelan cities. Coupled with growing economic problems and domestic violence, leaders of the major opposition political party have sought to mobilize support to overthrow the Maduro government and the reforms put in place by Hugo Chavez. In a March 27, 2014 account of anti-government protests, the BBC reported that; “The government’s popularity remains high amid its working-class voters, who gave it a further boost in local elections in December.” However, in December, 2015, an anti-government coalition took two-thirds of the parliamentary seats in the most recent election. Almost immediately, opposition politicians began efforts to overturn the popular reforms of the Chavez era and to launch a campaign to impeach Maduro from the presidency.
The United States Role
Throughout the period since the political arrival of Hugo Chavez on the scene in Latin America, the United States has stood in opposition to the Bolivarian Revolution. The United States gave at least tacit support to the failed military coup in Venezuela in 2002. Neighboring Colombia received funds to continue the “war on drugs” while the United States built seven military installations around that country to “protect” Colombia from an “aggressive” Venezuela. In subsequent years, the U.S. Congress has imposed partial embargoes on the visitation rights of selected Venezuelan government officials. Also, the United States has provided funding, training, and educational opportunities to Venezuelans who have played prominent roles in opposition to the Chavez government. It continues to condemn Venezuela’s policies at home, projecting the image that it represents the same kind of threat to the hemisphere that the Cuban revolutionary government represented in the 1960s.
The U.S. government mildly condemned the Honduran coup (compared with statements from the Organization of American States and other nations in the hemisphere). Subsequently it endorsed the November, 2009 election in that country, as presidential candidate Hillary Clinton suggested, to give legitimacy to the coup. Since then, the United States has ignored the grotesque human rights violations and assassinations of opponents of the Honduran government.
Given the twenty-first century challenges the Bolivarian Revolution represent to the Washington Consensus and the neoliberal agenda in the Western Hemisphere, the recent visits by President Obama to Cuba and Argentina represent metaphorically imperialism’s response. The President on the one hand is dramatically reordering the US/Cuba relationship, but is doing so in a way to pressure the Cubans to adopt a US/style political system and a market-based open capitalist economic system.
And his visit to Argentina, just after the Cuba visit, was designed to signal to Argentina and the entire Hemisphere that the United States is committed to a return to neoliberal economic policies. These policies, as always, benefit the rich at the expense of the popular classes. Concretely they include;
-reversing the Cuban revolutionary model
-reinforcing Argentina’s return to dependency on the international financial system
-weakening emerging regional organizations such as UNASUR and CELAC
-replacing
China’s rising presence in the Latin America with a revitalized US economic
hegemony in trade, finance, and investment
However,
it may be the case that the popular classes, tasting some of the benefits of
the transition to socialism in the twenty-first century, will resist the
attempts in the region to reestablish US hegemony and the neoliberal agenda.
The outcome is yet to be determined.
Friday, December 5, 2025
NOW THE TRUMP
COROLLARY TO THE MONROE DOCTRINE
Harry Targ
Within a few years of the U.S.
colonization of Cuba and the Philippines, President Theodore Roosevelt
elaborated on the U.S. world mission. He spoke of the necessity of promoting
peace and justice in the world: a project that required adequate military
capabilities both for “securing respect for itself and of doing good to
others.” To those who claim that the United States seeks material advantage in
its activist policy toward the countries of the Western Hemisphere, Roosevelt
responded that such claims were untrue. The U.S., he said, is motivated by
altruism: “All that this country desires is to see the neighboring countries
stable, orderly, and prosperous. Any country whose people conduct themselves
well can count upon our hearty friendship.”
Cuba was an example, he said: “If every country washed by the Caribbean Sea would show the progress in stable and just civilization which with the aid of the Platt Amendment Cuba has shown since our troops left the island, and which so many of the republics in both Americas are constantly and brilliantly showing, all questions of interference by the Nation with their affairs would be at an end.”
He assured Latin
Americans in this address to Congress in 1904 that if “….if they thus obey the
primary laws of civilized society they may rest assured that they will be
treated by us in a spirit of cordial and helpful sympathy. We would interfere
with them only in the last resort….” (“Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe
Doctrine,” President’s Annual Message to Congress, December 6,
1904).
During a presentation in Norway in 1910 Roosevelt praised the U.S. for leaving Cuba as promised after the war to return only temporarily because of “a disaster…a revolution” such that “we were obliged to land troops again.”
The President proudly
declared: “And before I left the Presidency Cuba resumed its career as a
separate republic, holding its head erect as a sovereign state among the other
nations of the earth. All that our people want is just exactly what the Cuban
people themselves want—that is, a continuance of order within the island, and
peace and prosperity, so that there shall be no shadow of an excuse for any
outside intervention.” (“the Colonial Policy of the United States,” An
Address Delivered at Christiania, Norway, May 5, 1910).
Earlier on January 18,
1909, to the Methodist Episcopal Church (“The Expansion of the White Races”)
Roosevelt applauded the increasing presence--he estimated 100 million people—of
“European races” throughout the world. The indigenous peoples of the Western
Hemisphere have been assimilated with their “intruders” with the end result
“that the Indian population of America is larger today than it was when
Columbus discovered the continent and stands on a far higher plane of happiness
and efficiency.”
And to highlight the
missionary message Roosevelt added: “Of course the best that can happen to any
people that has not already a high civilization of its own is to assimilate and
profit by American or European ideas, the ideas of civilization and Christianity,
without submitting to alien control; but such control, in spite of all its
defects, is in a very large number of cases the prerequisite condition to the
moral and material advance of the peoples who dwell in the darker corners of
the earth.”
The "Trump
Corollary" Articulated in the Newly Released National Security Strategy
(November 2025)
"We want to ensure
that the Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough
to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States; we want a
Hemisphere whose governments cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels,
and other transnational criminal organizations; we want a Hemisphere that
remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that
supports critical supply chains; and we want to ensure our continued access to
key strategic locations. In other words, we will assert and enforce a “Trump
Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine;"
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf
And military pacts in
the region:
Congress has mandated
that each new administration articulate its foreign policy views and priorities
for the years ahead. The document referred to above illuminates and describes
the visions and policies of the Trump Administration. The document articulates
the failures of the post-Cold War policies of prior administrations and
articulates an "American First" foreign policy of military
projection, insisting on allies to pay more for defense, solidifying global
access to US military forces and commerce, and reasserting US hegemony in the
Western Hemisphere.
As to the Western
Hemisphere the document says:
-"We must look to
expand our network in the region"
-The National Security
Council will "immediately begin a robust interagency process to task
agencies...to identify strategic points and resources..."
-"Non-Hemispheric
competitors have made major inroads in our Hemisphere..."
-Prior administrations
have allowed the imposition of outside influence to happen: "another great
American strategic mistake of recent decades."
-To rollback outside
influence in the Hemisphere as to "espionage, cybersecurity, debt-traps,
and other ways" the U.S. should "leverage in finance and technology
to induce countries to reject such assistance."
-In Latin America and
around the world the US "should make clear that American goods, services,
and technologies are a far better buy in the long run...requiring closer
collaboration between the U.S. Government and the American private
sector."
And the document suggests that the "Trump Corollary" is not just about the Western Hemisphere but also foresees a worldwide struggle against Chinese influence particularly in the Indo-Pacific region. "the source of almost half the world's GDP based on purchasing power parity (PPP)."
Recognizing the Chinese
economic challenge the document asserts that what makes America different is
"our openness, transparency, trustworthiness, commitment to freedom and
innovation, and free market capitalism..." And while the struggle with China
for a world presence is largely economic, "a favorable conventional
military balance remains an essential component of strategic
competition."
The document includes
discussions of the Middle East, Africa, and the revitalization of Europe. In
his cover letter Trump boasts of the correctives that have occurred in United
States foreign policy in the first nine months of his second term: "we have
brought our nation-and the world- back from the brink of catastrophe and
disaster...No administration in history has achieved so dramatic a turnaround
in so short a time."
Conclusion
What the National
Security Strategy document underscores is the intellectual background of what
has been clearly observed about US foreign policy:
--a worldwide campaign
to override any challenges to US economic and military hegemony.
--the maintenance and
enhancement of a national security apparatus including a trillion-dollar
military budget, a warfighting and interventionist capacity, a hybrid war
campaign, murder on the high seas
--an ideological
rationale that celebrates "free enterprise" capitalism, a mythology
about American Democracy, the superiority of "the white race," the
demonization of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and the likeminded
demonization of "immigrants."
--All the demons that
have been articulated by Trump are enshrined in the idea and the practice of
the Global South.
And finally, the theory and practice of the National Security Strategy document is an update of the theory and practice articulated by Theodore Roosevelt since the so-called Spanish-American War as US industrial capitalism and militarism became a global force.
