President Donald Trump recently announced on Truth Social that the airspace “above and around Venezuela” was now closed in its entirety. The declaration was legally puzzling, as a US president cannot unilaterally shut down the airspace of a sovereign nation. Yet politically, it was the clearest expression of the new hemispheric doctrine emerging from Washington: a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine that claims unilateral authority over Latin America and the Caribbean.
Just days earlier, in a presidential message marking the 250th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine, Trump announced that the United States would once again assert uncontested leadership in the western hemisphere. This declaration was also included in the new National Security Strategy, in which the Trump administration recast the Caribbean and Latin America as a zone where “the American people, not foreign nations nor globalist institutions, control their own destiny.” The message is unmistakable: the US supremacy in the hemisphere is to be restored through presidential will, military power, and emergency authority, unconstrained by Congress or international law.
This declaration arrives amid a dramatic military buildup in the Caribbean, in which the United States has quietly transformed Puerto Rico into the forward platform for Operation Southern Spear. Under the banner of counternarcotics, the Pentagon has deployed an armada of warships, including the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford and at least 15,000 troops, a mobilization described by analysts as the region’s largest since the Cuban Missile Crisis and the invasion of Panama in 1989. Satellite imagery shows US cruisers and destroyers consistently positioned fifty to one hundred miles off Venezuela’s coast, far from the primary drug-smuggling corridors the administration claims to be targeting.
The shift became unmistakable after the Trump administration decided to designate President Nicolás Maduro…
Auteur: Jose Atiles
