On Dec. 20, 1989, U.S. forces from sea and air launched into a full-blown invasion of Panama, with 27,000 troops including Navy SEAL teams rapidly overwhelming the Panama Defense Forces, grounding aircraft and bombarding the Chorrillo neighborhood. The target of so-called “Operation Just Cause” was General Manuel Noriega, who holed up in the Vatican embassy. But after U.S. Humvees blasted days of rock music (including Whitesnake and Guns'N'Roses!), he surrendered on Jan. 3 and troops took him in handcuffs to Miami. A U.S. court convicted Noriega (who was known as “Pineapple Face” and was into santería) of cocaine trafficking in 1992, with top narcos as witnesseses.
The Invasion of Panama has come up as an obvious comparison with the recent U.S. military build up of nine war ships along with fighter jets and reaper drones in the east Caribbean around Venezuela. U.S. forces say they have blown up three go-fast boats, alleging they were moving drugs and offered a $50 million reward for President Nicolas Maduro.
Like Noriega, Maduro has been indicted for cocaine trafficking, with the addition that Maduro is also charged with “narco-terrorism conspiracy.” And as happened with Panama, the United States wants a new government in Venezuela, or a “regime change,” in the parlance made popular by the Iraq War.
Yet there are also glaring differences between Venezuela and Panama. Noriega was a ruthless right wing dictator who had worked for the CIA and supported U.S. proxies, although he may also have dealt with Cuba. Venezuela is a bigger, more powerful country, sitting on the world’s largest proven oil reserves. It has a self-declared socialist government that has been in power for decades - and has overseen widespread malnutrition and the exodus of 8 million refugees.
President Donald Trump and his cabinet are openly pushing for Maduro to go. “Under President Trump’s leadership, Maduro will not escape justice and he will be held accountable for his despicable crimes,” said Attorney General Pam Bondi last month when announcing that his reward was doubled. But it’s tricky to see how hard Washington will push. Here I go through three scenarios in the efforts (or is it already an operation with a code name) to “regime-change” Venezuela.
I am coming at this from an analytical position, trying to understand what is happening rather than shout an opinion about it. But in today’s heated ideological climate, the facts about Venezuela, Trump and the drug war are disputed by polarized political camps.
I believe that various conflicting things are true. I’m sympathetic to Latin American sovereignty and highly skeptical about U.S. interventions which have been disastrous from Iraq to Afghanistan. The CIA also secretly organized bloody coups with bad results, like in Guatemala. At the same time, Maduro has overseen immense suffering of his people, and managed the economy disastrously, although sanctions have added to the pain. There is strong evidence the government works with cocaine traffickers and guerillas. And it almost certainly fixed the elections last year and so most Venezuelans, at home and in exile, would like a change. Maduro never had the popularity of his mentor Hugo Chávez even in the working class bastions of Caracas.
Still, the Trump administration is using the pretext of the war on drugs, and anger about fentanyl deaths, for a political operation against a government they don’t want, and which is mixed up in cocaine. And the doctrine of blowing up anybody alleged to be carrying drugs is a dangerous precedent.
Yet whatever I think, a conflict is escalating, many more people could die, and we may see a seismic geopolitical shift in Latin America.
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