The 'Donroe doctrine' sows new division across the Americas

As Latin America awoke to the news that the US military had attacked Venezuela and extracted its leader, Nicolás Maduro, the immediate reaction from leaders across the region ranged from celebration to condemnation.

- Thomas Graham

The Trump administration began amassing military assets in the southern Caribbean in mid-August, nominally to stop the trafficking of drugs to the US. But when it alleged that Maduro himself was the leader of a drug-trafficking cartel, many concluded that the true objective might be regime change in Venezuela.

The extraction of Maduro is a brutally clear demonstration of the “Donroe doctrine”: Donald Trump's revival of the 1823 Monroe doctrine, in which the US marked the Americas as its patch and was willing to impose its will through force.

While the region has long been wary of US interventions, Maduro had become an unpopular, isolated leader.

Still, the strongest condemnation of the US intervention came from Brazil, whose president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said that the US had crossed “an unacceptable line”.

“These acts represent a grave affront to Venezuela’s sovereignty and yet another extremely dangerous precedent for the entire international community,” Lula wrote on X.