In the depths of a winter night, US airborne forces scream over Caribbean waters. Jets rain fire on key infrastructure, while attack helicopters deliver raiding parties of special operatives to targets on the ground. Amid the spectacle of shock and awe, a president is kidnapped and indicted on drug-trafficking charges. It’s a key test case for how an ambitious Republican administration intends to handle an era of seismic change.
This was December 20, 1989; the operation in question was the ouster of strongman Panamanian leader and erstwhile CIA asset Manuel Noriega. But there’s an unmistakable parallel with Donald Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife. It illustrates everything that has changed, and stayed the same, in the three decades separating these two acts of aggression. The first occurred at the start of a new age of American hyperpower. The second is a symptom of that age’s chaotic and violent decline.
George H. W. Bush’s deposition of Noriega signaled a new, post–Cold War age of American world-making. Within a few years, the United States let rip in the Persian Gulf (like Noriega, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein would quickly learn that serving US interests is no guarantee of protection), alongside new wars on three continents.
The collapse of the Soviet Union surely watered down the appeal of anti-communism as a rationale for constant warfare. But the War on Drugs had already been built up as a replacement justification for forever wars, devouring lives and resources on a global scale. Soviet retreat brought Latin America little peace from US militarism. If anything, the reverse was true, with Washington playing a key role in feeding Colombia’s civil war.
The region also provided a unique study in leftist resurgence during a period of neoliberal dominance. Venezuela’s barrios delivered Hugo Chávez to power in 1998 and a new, indigenous-led alliance brought Evo Morales and the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) to…
Auteur: Nathan Akehurst
