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Martin DeCaro (1:29)

Seemintmobile.com you can listen to this podcast without ads plus get bonus content by becoming a subscriber. Go to History as it happens supercast.com history as it happens October 3, 2020 5tr to Trump America and Venezuela Every.

Donald Trump (1:49)

Terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States of America. Please be warned that we will blow you out of existence. That's what we're doing. We have no choice.

Alexander Avigna (1:58)

And it comes as the Trump administration looks to ramp up pressure on Maduro regime in Venezuela.

Zoe (2:03)

His administration is threatening to carry out more military attacks in Latin America under the guise of the War on Drugs.

Marco Rubio (2:10)

Nicolas Maduro is an indicted drug trafficker in the United States and he's a fugitive of American justice.

Alexander Avigna (2:18)

Accusations that pierced through international protocol branding Maduro not merely as a political rival, but as a criminal on the run.

Martin DeCaro (2:26)

The United States is seeking regime change in Venezuela as American leaders condemn President Nicolas Maduro as a fugitive from justice, a narco terrorist. This does not fit the Trump administration's so called isolationist reputation. In fact, the conflict with Venezuela is part of a long bloody pattern of US Interventionism in Latin America in the tradition of the Monroe Doctrine. From Teddy Roosevelt to Donald Trump. That's next as we report history as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.

Alexander Avigna (2:57)

A way to think about US efforts to destabilize Venezuela since the early 2000s till today is to think about it as a microcosm of what the US has been doing of Latin America since the early late 19th century, early 20th century. I mean, almost every single strategy that we've seen in this longer US imperial history against its American neighbors we've seen in Venezuela from the early 2000s up until today. The one thing we haven't seen is a type of military buildup and overt military participation and aggression by the US against the Venezuelan government. It does seem that they're starting to organize some sort of punitive expedition against the Nicolas Maduro government.

Martin DeCaro (3:38)

U S Venezuela relations have not been good for a long time. Maybe you remember a speech by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez that he delivered at the United nations in 2006 when he called President George W. Bush Satan because.

Alexander Avigna (3:54)

Their threat is in their own house. The devil is right at home. The devil. The devil himself is right in the house and the devil came here yesterday.

Martin DeCaro (4:05)

The New York Times then described Chavez as a left wing populist who tried to seize power in a coup six years before winning election in 1998 on a tide of poverty driven resentment. The article went on to say Venezuela belongs to OPEC and is a major energy supplier to the United States. And Chavez has courted Fidel Castro and the leaders of Iran and Syria. All factors that make him a man Washington must watch.

Alexander Avigna (4:32)

Yesterday the devil came here. Right here.

Martin DeCaro (4:37)

Now. It was the year before the UN speech when the United States began sanctioning Venezuelan individuals and entities who were accused of engaging in criminal, anti democratic or corrupt actions. And now, a quarter century later, the Trump administration is seeking the ouster of Chavez's successor Nicolas Maduro, who was indicted by a federal grand jury in March 2020 during President Trump's first term. Maduro is charged in a decades long narco terrorism and international cocaine trafficking conspiracy, accused of overseeing a violent drug cartel. The US is offering a $50 million reward for his capture. Here is Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Marco Rubio (5:16)

I don't care what the UN Says. The UN doesn't know what they're talking about. Maduro is indicted by a grand jury in the Southern District of New York. That means the Southern District of New York presented the evidence to a grand jury and a grand jury indicted him. And then a superseding indictment came out that was unsealed about a year and a half ago that specifically detailed Maduro's actions. So, number one, let there be no doubt. Nicolas Maduro is an indicted drug trafficker in the United States, and he's a fugitive of American justice.

Martin DeCaro (5:45)

To up the pressure, the Trump administration is committing extrajudicial killings of suspected Venezuelan drug traffickers by blowing up their boats in the Caribbean. In fact, the latest on this comes from the New York Times. President Trump has decided the US Is engaged in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels now labeled terrorist organizations and that suspected smugglers are unlawful combatants.

Donald Trump (6:09)

They're the enemies of all humanity. And for this reason, we've recently begun using the supreme power of the United States military to destroy Venezuela terrorists and trafficking networks led by Nicolas Maduro.

Martin DeCaro (6:25)

So the war on Drugs in the 21st century is the publicly stated reason for seeking regime change in this Latin American country. But you can hear echoes of 1989, when the US invaded Panama to capture its military dictator, Manuel Noriega, who, like Maduro, was indicted in the United States on drug trafficking charges.

Narrator/Reporter (6:47)

Well, on Wednesday, December 20th, I ordered US troops to Panama with four to safeguard the lives of American citizens, to help restore democracy, to protect the integrity of the Panama Canal treaties, and to bring General Manuel Noriega to justice. All of these objectives have now been achieved.

Martin DeCaro (7:13)

Beyond these similarities, there is a deeper pattern to notice here. Going back to the 19th century, the United States, under presidents of all parties, asserted a right and responsibility to intervene in Latin America. Although no Latin American country has ever posed a threat to the United States, of course, that is not how Washington saw it. Today, Marco Rubio says Venezuela's drug business is an imminent threat to the United States. Past American leaders justified invasions or coups for a variety of reasons to stop the spread of communism or Soviet influence.

Narrator/Reporter (7:49)

Grenada, we were told, was a friendly island paradise for tourism. Well, it wasn't. It was a Soviet Cuban colony being readied as a major military bastion to export terror and undermine democracy, to protect.

Martin DeCaro (8:03)

Business interests, to cement US Hegemony over the Western Hemisphere. Among others, the scholar John Coatsworth found that from 1898 to 1994, the US government intervened successfully to change governments in Latin America America at least 41 times. This does not count failed interventions like the Bay of pigs in 1961. So will Venezuela be the next? And if so, how? We'll talk about it with the historian Alexander Avigna, an associate professor of Latin American History in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. He is the author of Specters of Peasant Guerrillas and the Cold War Mexican Countryside. Our conversation next morning Zoe Got donuts.

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Martin DeCaro (9:44)

Data 182025 Visit T mobile.com Alexander Avenia welcome to the podcast.

Alexander Avigna (9:50)

Thank you so much for having me.

Martin DeCaro (9:51)

Martin so would you agree it looks like the Trump administration is attempting regime change in Venezuela?

Alexander Avigna (9:59)

Yeah, certainly looks like it. And I think those of us who have been following developments in Venezuela in the past couple of weeks have more or less asserted this. But now we have more evidence that has come out, thanks to reporting by like the New York Times, that the purpose of these strikes, I think four Venezuelan fisher boats that have been attacked and blown out of the water by the Trump administration, those were part of a broader effort, it looks like, to initiate regime change externally against the Nicolas Maduro government of Venezuela.

Martin DeCaro (10:31)

Not really hiding it. I mean the boats, as you mentioned, that have been blown out of the water, this is really state sanctioned murder. Also the troop buildup in the area, about 6,500 troops and the naval ships. Right. The administration's not hiding the fact that it's been talking to Venezuelan opposition figures. No.

Alexander Avigna (10:50)

And I think, you know, this is part of a decades long bipartisan U.S. effort to destabilize and try to achieve some sort of regime change within Venezuela. This goes back to the early 2000s with this coup d' etat that was attempted against then President Hugo Chavez. We still don't know the extent of direct U.S. participation in that coup. But the fact that in the brief hours that a coup government actually took over the national palace, the fact that the US was, I think, the only government in the Americas that recognized this government, says a lot about US Level of involvement and level of support for this coup against Hugo Chavez. And a way to think about US efforts to destabilize Venezuela since the early 2000s till today is to think about as a microcosm of what the US has been doing to Latin America since the early late 19th century, early 20th century. I mean, almost every single strategy that we've seen in this longer US Imperial history against its American neighbors, we've seen in Venezuela from the early 2000s up until today. The one thing we haven't seen is a type of military buildup and overt military participation and aggression by the US against the Venezuelan government. It does seem that they're starting to organize some sort of punitive expedition against the Nicolas Maduro government.

Martin DeCaro (12:01)

This falls into a larger historical pattern. It's one of the themes I want to touch on in our conversation. Place this in historical context, within a pattern, because the idea, the notion that the Trump administration's foreign policy is a break from the past or a reversal of US interventionism post 9 11, the Trump administration is not isolationist. The United States has never been isolationist at all when it comes to this hemisphere.

Alexander Avigna (12:29)

Exactly. And this is one of the frustrating things for historians of Latin America when we hear mostly US based political scientists or international relations theorists or even other historians talk about isolationism as if it's actually a thing that's existed in the past. Right. And generally when historians and other US Based scholars talk about isolationism, they refer to the first three decades of the 20th century in which they assert that the US retreated from world affairs, particularly after World War I. But from the perspective of Latin America, we're left thinking, well, where was this isolationism? Because from 1900 to 1934, we saw 34 direct US military interventions in the region, usually with the US Marine Corps at the spearhead of these invasions. From 1898 to 1989, we've seen 40 successful regime changes in Latin America instigated by the United States. And if. Even if we go back to the late 19th century, one of the statistics that I received from historian Greg Grandin that always blows my mind is that from 1869 to 1897, the US sent gunboats into Latin America almost 6,000 times to protect US investments and really to scare off rival European imperial powers at the close of the 19th and early 20th century. So this isolationism, I think we need to get beyond. We need to acknowledge it for what it is. It's a myth that serves a particular political purpose, past and present, but as an actually existing thing, it's ludicrous. Whenever I hear, as a Latin American historian, whenever I hear US politician talking about isolationism, my first thought is, oh, no, red flag for Latin America, because we know what's gonna happen next. U.S. aggression toward the region.

Martin DeCaro (14:02)

Now, one of the more notable episodes was Haiti in 1914. The Marines went in there and wound up occupying Haiti for 19 years until 1934. I mean, just to name a few, because I found a list online of all the interventions, and we can't touch on them all in a short podcast. Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Cuba, Panama, over and over again, multiple times. Some of these countries, and this is just in the last decade of the 19th century. First decade of the 20th century, Mexico, 1913, Mexico again in 1914, in Cuba, 1917-1933, a military occupation and economic protectorate. Another theme I want to touch on in this episode is why does this happen? Because on the one hand, especially during the Cold War, American leaders would say they're doing these interventions to the extent that they would admit to them. Right? They're doing these things because of security. Our security depended upon intervening in Latin America. Where is the disconnect between that stated justification and what's actually going on in Venezuela today? I'm trying to figure out what's the US Interest here in Venezuela.

Alexander Avigna (15:19)

When we look at the history of the US from the perspective of Latin America, or even from the perspective of Native American history, one of the constant themes for the US is expansionism. That's, like, built into this country that we live in. You know, the Monroe Doctrine gets promulgated by President James Monroe in late 1823, and it's. It's a really mysterious document that can be read in multiple ways. It's actually kind of a vague document, but generally the idea is America should belong to the Americans. European powers stay out this fledgling. At that moment, fledgling new independent Latin American republic should be allowed to develop on their own terms. And if any European Powers try to come back in, the US will serve as some sort of bulwark against them. Now, at the moment that the US announced this in 1823, that was a ludicrous proposition. But that idea of the Monroe Doctrine itself, if we think about the great US historian Frederick Jackson Turner, he made the argument in the late 19th century that the germ of the Monroe Doctrine actually began in the Ohio valley in the 1780s and 1790s. So he made that direct connection between US expansionism right after independence, again, Native American groups in the Ohio Valley, and that then served as a model for the Monroe Doctrine for the entire region, the entire Western Hemisphere. And if that's the case, then there's like a built in expansionism into the United States. And the question, as you correctly pose, is why? I think throughout the 19th century in Latin America, especially late 19th, early 20th century US investment, it was capitalism, it was US investment in Latin America. And where investment went, American gunboats trailed behind to protect US business interests, whether private or government in the region. And any efforts by Latin American countries to go against those investments, or, you know, a certain leader would mismanage political rule that would lead to instability and therefore lead to these countries inability to pay back loans or create unstable climate for business and investment. Then the US would send the gunboats and the Marines to reestablish that stability. What the US wanted in that first period of the late 19th, early 20th century, the so called isolationist period, was a stable region where American investment could flourish. And politically it'd be a region that belonged to US Hegemony against rival European powers. That was the goal. The guy that could really help us go through this history because he participated in almost every single episode, was Major General Smedley Butler, who wrote War is a Racket. And he's very clear about what he did as part of the Marine Corps. He says, look, we did this for New York City banks, gangster capitalism. In this great pamphlet, he says something like, the best that Al Capone could do was operate his rackets in three districts in Chicago. And then he says, I could teach him a thing or two. I did it on three continents. You wanted open markets in Latin America for US goods, and they wanted cheap labor and natural resources from Latin America to the United States. That's the first part.

Martin DeCaro (17:57)

You know, my task here is try to keep this sprawling subject from becoming too sprawling. But you know, based on your answer there, during the Cold War, capitalism or corruption or corporate interest remained a factor. If you look at what happened in Guatemala in the early 1950s for United Fruit Company. But during the Cold War, there was also an ideological element as well. It's harder to figure out what is happening in Venezuela today with no Cold war. Right. We're 30 years after the Cold War ended and it's not obvious that oil has a lot to do with what's happening right now either. Although oil was of course important historically. It was Hugo Chavez who offered to help Americans with their home heating bills at the time of that coup you mentioned. So about what's happening now, the Trump administration, Marco Rubio, they say that Nicolas Maduro, who is of course indefensible, we're not trying to defend his regime here. He is the leader of a drug cartel basically, and an illegitimate leader. What do you make of all this?

Alexander Avigna (18:56)

I think we see in this current effort, we see a combination of that early isolationist period in terms of justifications with the type of justifications that we witnessed during the Cold War. I mean, I think we see a mixture of the two. It's hard for me to not believe that oil is somehow involved simply because Venezuela has the world's largest proven oil deposits. Although as we know, Chevron has been since the last couple years, Chevron has been working once again, restarting its operations in Venezuela without much fanfare. Right. So it's an interesting choice to take a more bellicose position by the Trump administration, particularly when there's elements within his administration like Richard Grinnell, who are saying, look, we can come to an agreement diplomatically, which I think he's right. The Trump administration doesn't care about democracy. They don't care about the most recent elections.

Martin DeCaro (19:38)

No, there are no high minded cared about oil.

Alexander Avigna (19:40)

But if they cared about the oil, then you would think they would go more with Richard Grinnell's approach. Right. So there's something else going on and this is, I think, where we can turn to the idea of national security and anti communism as it's been incubated as a political culture in South Florida. And I think here Marco Rubio is key as part of this policy. We know that he's the key point person for Latin America. He comes from this very specific South Floridian political milieu that's revanchist, that's extremely right wing, that's extremely anti communist, that's been nourished over the decades by different generations of Latin American exiles who have similar political beliefs and left their country because they lost some sort of political or revolutionary process. This is an exercise of American power against a much weaker opponent. For Domestic purposes, I think to fulfill certain domestic political constituencies, to make the Trump administration look powerful domestically. But I think he's also sending a message to the rest of Latin America and using Latin America to position itself globally as a resurgent, war fighting entity once again, which is part of what we saw with this recent meeting with all the generals and the admirals with Pete Hegseth. And that's been a constant in Latin American history. The US can do what it wants in the region because of its low cost, and they do it to exercise its power.

Martin DeCaro (20:51)

And domestic politics is always important here. I believe it was Lyndon Johnson when he explained why he sent the Marines into, what was it, the Dominican Republic. Yes, 1965. He said it was because domestic politics to fend off a challenge from Republicans who were saying he was too weak on this or that issue.

Alexander Avigna (21:11)

And that's how I view this one. I mean, because you see that the Trump administration is uniting three wars that animate his political base. The war on drugs, the war on migrants, and the war on Latin America in general. And it's all coming together in this episode and in this intervention in Venezuela. The drug thing is a complete fiction, so we can talk about that if you want, but Nicolas Maduro is not.

Martin DeCaro (21:31)

The head of a drug cartel insofar that drugs from Venezuela reach the United States. This is not how you handle that issue. I mean, the United States has taken a different approach with other countries where drugs were an issue, rather than blowing up boats off the coast and talking with the opposition about toppling the government. There is another question here, and that is how the opposition actually aims to oust Maduro. From the New York Times mentioned here is Maria Machado. She is the head of the opposition, praised by Marco Rubio as the Venezuelan Iron Lady. Her advisor, Pedro Uruchertu, said in an interview that the opposition had developed a plan for the first 100 hours after Mr. Maduro's ouster that would involve a transfer of power to Edmundo Gonzalez, who ran for president against Maduro last year.

Alexander Avigna (22:23)

Demonstrators packed the streets of Caracas on Tuesday cheering for Venezuela's opposition, who said they had vote tallies to prove that President Nicolas Maduro had lost Sunday's election in a landslide.

Narrator/Reporter (22:35)

President Nicolas Maduro, who's been branded as a dictator by the US Is being accused of voter fraud. The head of the election voting company said the numbers were manipulated by at least 1 million.

Martin DeCaro (22:48)

So here's how the opposition plans, according to the New York Times, to get rid of Maduro, persuading other governments to take Diplomatic, financial, intelligence and law enforcement actions, he said. So in the Cold War, the CIA used to do this stuff. They'd work with people inside the country to get rid of the ruler. There's always somebody in the country that wants to get rid of the ruling class. And they CIA exploits that division. Right. It doesn't look like the US is actually going to invade Venezuela. What do you make of all this?

Alexander Avigna (23:16)

The Venezuelan right wing since 2002, since that failed coup in 2002 has been fundamentally unable to convince a large percentage of the Venezuelan population to back its status as a viable political opposition to first Hugo Chavez and then Nicolas Maduro. Really the first effort that seemed successful were the most recent elections that according to the Carter Center, Edmundo Gonzalez is the candidate of the opposition. 1 One way to look at these elections is that they did not really occur in a free and fair open way that we've seen since 2015 of the Obama administration when he labeled Venezuela an extraordinary threat to U.S. national security. You've had a ramping up of economic sanctions that have completely devastated the country. And that's part of the purpose of waging economic war against a place like Venezuela today, or Chile in the 1970s or Allende. You're forcing the people living in those countries to take political positions and votes that they may not normally take, but they want the economic war to stop so they will back political opposition figures who they normally would not. And I think this is something that may be happening in Venezuela. Someone like Maria Corina Machado. She's gone under incredible transformation since the early 2010s when she was a really far right wing political figure. She was in the National palace in 2002 signing that statement. She's been involved in every single right wing opposition movement to destabilize the Venezuelan government. It's really interesting how she's become now this paragon of like human rights and democracy in Venezuela when her recent past doesn't really demonstrate that. It's hard for me to imagine then political opposition that's calling for a military invasion of their own country in the event that invasion is successful, that they would then be walking with open arms by their country folk who know that they just that this opposition was calling for the military invasion of their country. Does that make sense? Like people, regardless of what they think of their national leaders, people tend to defend their communities, their families and their countries against external aggressors.

Martin DeCaro (24:59)

That's right. The New York Times sent a reporter down there, sorry to interject to speak to normal ordinary Venezuelans who don't like the government. But they say if the United States is going to come in here guns blazing, we're going to defend our country. And that would happen anywhere. Anywhere.

Alexander Avigna (25:15)

And that's happened in the past decades of US Efforts to destabilize Cuba, generate internal opposition to the government, and to generate regime change operations that generally led to Cuban society closing ranks around a government that may or may not be popular. Right. And I think we're seeing a similar dynamic. Cuban revolutionary troops such as these have invaded Castro's leftist island fortress, reportedly rallied by a mysterious coded radio message.

Martin DeCaro (25:42)

Alert, alert.

Alexander Avigna (25:43)

Look well at the rainbow. The fish will be running very soon from the sea. And by parachute, the rebels have struck along the coast within 90 miles of Havana. So this political opposition that has been weak up until the most recent presidential elections is going to seem even weaker if they come into power on top of US Tanks and US Warships.

Martin DeCaro (26:02)

So what the Trump administration is doing is more aggressive than, say, past recent administrations, but it still does fall within a pattern. You mentioned Obama and the sanctions. Venezuela has been a heavily sanctioned country for decades now, which raises a question. When was the last time the United States and Venezuela had good relations? When did things start to go south?

Alexander Avigna (26:23)

I think the last time there was working productive relationship. 1980s and 1990s, particularly during the government of Carlos Andres Perez in the 1980s, who oversaw the neoliberal transformation of the Venezuelan economy. In order to accept IMF loans to save the Venezuelan economy, he had to install really severe austerity measures, which then generated a popular rebellion in the capital city of Caracas in 1989, now known as the Caracaso, where the streets were taken over by people because they were rejecting these neoliberal austerity measures. And the Venezuelan government under this president cracked down really hard. We still don't have an accurate idea of how many people were killed in that rebellion. Which then leads to Hugo Chavez's first foray into national prominence in 1992, when he led a failed military coup against this government that was backed by the U.S. nonetheless, during the 80s and 90s, the U.S. and Venezuela at the high level more or less got along. They were close Cold War allies as well previously. It's really with the election of Hugo Chavez at the end of the 90s and early 2000s, when efforts to socially democratize the Venezuelan economic and political system that started to lead to frictions with George W. Bush administration, a series of.

Martin DeCaro (27:29)

Economic and social reforms that reduce poverty and illiteracy while improving health and other living conditions for millions of Venezuelans, the Bolivarian Revolution, which of course was supported by high oil prices. When oil prices went down, that was the end of that experiment. Brett Wilkins, writing for Venezuelanalysis.com says a few years after Venezuela shifted to democracy in 1958, most other South American nations began falling under the iron fisted rule of US backed military dictatorships. There was something called the School of the Americas where US officials trained the people who had run these repressive regimes, trained them in kidnapping, torture, assassination and democracy suppression. US backed death squads trained from US authored torture manuals, murdered, tortured and terrorized innocent men, women and children from Central America to Argentina. He said. But while this was going on, Venezuelans were enjoying some decades of peace and prosperity. But the US never stopped meddling in Venezuela's affairs after the free and fair election of Hugo Chavez. So that brings us to the period you were discussing, the 80s and 90s and then Chavez election in 1998, and things changed for the worse.

Narrator/Reporter (28:46)

Today, Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez unleashed a tirade calling President Bush the devil and denouncing the UN itself. It was a belligerent, audacious attack and in the General assembly he was applauded for it.

Martin DeCaro (29:00)

But you know, Alex, we can go back even further here to establish the pattern. Coincidentally, Teddy Roosevelt, someone who I think Donald Trump admires, although he's probably never read a book about him, proclaimed the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine in the early 1900s, and it had to do with a crisis in Venezuela. Tell us about the Roosevelt Corollary. What was it?

Alexander Avigna (29:24)

Because of Venezuelan boundary disputes with British Guyana in the late 19th century and then the early 20th century, economic issues with European creditors and the threat of European intervention to invade Venezuela to get it to pay back its debts that led Theodore Roosevelt to issue this corollary which essentially made the United States an international police force within the Americas, that in case of a Latin American country being unable to pay back debts, to paraphrase his message, it was something like if the ties of civilization are loosened, then the US was going to intervene and re establish quote, unquote civilization in these Latin American countries while keeping European powers out of the region.

Martin DeCaro (30:02)

Yeah, British, German and Italian gunboats actually blockaded Venezuela's ports in 1902 when Venezuelan government defaulted on its debts, as you mentioned. And here is a quote from the Corollary, Theodore Roosevelt chronic wrongdoing may in America as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation. I guess in this case it was a fear of too much European meddling in the US backyard Because no Latin American country has ever threatened the security of the United States.

Alexander Avigna (30:36)

Only one, which. We'll talk about that if you want, but it wasn't a serious threat. But I'm referring to Pancho Villas, quote, unquote, invasion of New Mexico in 1916. But yes, it wasn't a real threat to national security. I think TR and this speaks to some of the issues that we've talked about. There's also domestic considerations that drove Theodore Roosevelt very, like Marshall, imperialist notions and ideas toward Latin America. Right. He was obsessed, if you read his writings, he was obsessed with questions of white masculinity in the US becoming like too effeminate, too bourgeois, too white collar. So his solution was to encourage what some historians have referred to as a martial masculinity that gets practiced through imperialist interventions in Latin America. Now, he personally practiced that in the Spanish American War of 1898, but he continues to promote this idea afterwards, which is why I tell my students that in many ways TR is the world's first Crossfitter. Because it's that same idea, right? Like, how do you prove a certain white masculinity through martial imperialist intervention in countries that are deemed racially inferior? If you recall Ryard Kipling's famous poem of like the White Man's Burden, he wrote that for the United States. Right. He wrote that to encourage the United States government to take over and formally colonize the Philippine Islands at the end of the 19th century. And Teddy Roosevelt was very much a part of that milieu and he had ideas that were very similar to that. So there's. There's a masculinity angle, there's a racial angle that feeds into the Roosevelt corollary.

Martin DeCaro (31:56)

I'm glad you brought up the racism part of that. And racism is a big part of this when you believe people are not capable of managing their own affairs. And you can find propaganda posters going back 100, 125 years showing Latin American people in images that you would never see today. Although, who knows? I thought that in polite society people were no longer able to say certain things, and I've been proven wrong about that recently. But anyway, you can find these propaganda posters depicting Mexicans or whoever looking like animals or, you know, rodents.

Alexander Avigna (32:30)

Yeah, it's the idea that these peoples are allegedly racially inferior and therefore incapable of self rule, incapable of reaching what someone like Theodore Roosevelt referred to as civilization, and that the requires the intervention of the United States to essentially occupy their countries, engage in some sort of nation building, and make sure that they get their financial arrangements in order before the US leaves. The longest occupation in US history was the one you referenced earlier, Martin, the occupation of Haiti. That was the longest one until Afghanistan. And it's also something that more or less gets written out of more mainstream traditional historical narratives of the period, but it's a really important one. There's an incident in that occupation where U.S. marines go to the main gold deposit of the Haitian government. They go and they steal the gold, place it on the ship and they send it directly to Wall street banks. Right. So it's like a very clear form of gangsterism that we now are supposed to remember as the form of isolationism, deeply imbued with racist attitudes. Yes.

Martin DeCaro (33:27)

During the Cold War, which was about a half century. The justification for interventions when they were made, sometimes these were covert operations that the US government would disavow. Right. It was anti communism, whether it was toppling a leftist regime out of fear of communism or helping put down a communist insurgency that was threatening a right wing government. Right. Did any of this have to do with democracy?

Alexander Avigna (33:52)

No, no. I think what the US has always valued most from its Latin American and Caribbean neighbors is some form of stability that then allows for like the normal operation of capitalism in the region and the prevention of potentially disruptive processes like mass displacement, migration, refug flows from Latin America to the United States. I mean, this is part of the constant themes of US Mexico relations. For instance, the US tolerated eight decades long dictatorship in Mexico because of stability, because that dictatorship could ensure a certain level of political and economic stability that did not threaten what is essentially the US's southern flank. Right. It's its soft underbelly which is the US Mexico border. And I think it's a similar application or idea that gets applied to the rest of the region. Democracy is a justification that is made to sound good and to pacify domestic constituencies in the us. But it's never really been about democracy. The great Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, when he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982, it's a really powerful speech. I encourage people to look it up. It's readily available online. But he poses a really powerful question in that speech. And he asks, why is Latin America unable to create and form its own form of social democracy, but in Europe this was a possibility. So he says something like, why was Guatemala not able to form a social democracy in the 1950s, but Norway, Sweden, Finland and other Western European and Northern European countries, why have they been allowed to form social democracies? And that remains to this Day a really powerful challenge to US Empire in the region. What is it about Latin America that the US Will not allow countries to create some sort of better style of government economy that benefit the vast majority of its populations.

Martin DeCaro (35:33)

So let's talk about Guatemala then, in 1954, because this does raise an issue as to why, and we were talking earlier about it's hard to understand exactly why the Trump administration wants regime change in Venezuela. It's probably multiple reasons. Democracy is not one of them. In that I give Trump credit. He does not pretend he's a transactionalist. He does not pretend not to be corrupt or amoral, doesn't justify the behavior, but at least he's not pretending that this is about any type of high principle. So Guatemala, 1954. Jacobo Arbenz was the elected leader, a leftist. He did an agrarian reform program that actually affected lands that the United Fruit Company was not using at the time and that is now Chiquita banana. So think of that every time you buy bananas in the grocery store. The United Fruit Company was convinced that its interests were adversely affected by this agrarian reform and other policies that the Arbenz government was undertaking. So Eisenhower was convinced that the CIA had to intervene and this was a direct intervention. I think the CIA even flew bombers, bomber planes over the Capitol and dropped bombs there to get rid of our bends. And that led to a horrible, repressive right wing government. So John Coatsworth, a scholar who studied this part of the world, says there are two hypotheses. He brings up Guatemala in an article he wrote actually 20 years ago. There's the capitalism hypothesis and the corruption hypothesis. Do you have a view on this? When it comes to trying to figure out why the United States intervened in these countries, it wasn't because of any real threat to US security.

Alexander Avigna (37:12)

Historians of Guatemala have more or less established that it was a combination of factors. Obviously, the United Fruit Company angle was an important one, particularly because multiple members of the Eisenhower administration and cabinet were directly connected. Like as in they used to work for United Fruit Co. For a long time. That was the more popular understanding as to why the US used the CIA to achieve the overthrow of the democratically elected Jacobo Warbenz government. But there's another consideration. This is the Cold War consideration. The fact that Jacob Warbenz in his cabinet had one or two communists served as justification for the Eisenhower administration. To then say, Guatemala is going to become a Bolshevik beachhead in Central America and from there Bolshevism is going to spread to other parts of Central America and even to Mexico. The irony of this, if we just think about the agrarian reform program that Jacob Warbenz had initiated, and Jacob Arbenz was the second, only the second democratically elected government of Guatemala of the 20th century, this agrarian reform program was similar to US efforts in Japan. So again that question. The US, when it militarily occupied Japan after the end of World War II, they initiated an agrarian reform program very similar to what Arbenz was trying to do in Guatemala. Our Benzos own program was supported by the World bank and other international agencies because this was actually a program of capitalist modernization. It was not socialist, it was not communist. It was a way to increase agricultural productivity by giving land to smallholders who were more invested in actually making the land productive. But what was allowed to occur in post war Japan was not allowed to occur in Guatemala. So it's multiple factors, right? It is United Fruit Company. It's the fact that there was Guatemalan communists in the cabinet. It. But fundamentally also it allowed the Eisenhower administration to set a very powerful marker in the Americas at that moment and say, we're not going to tolerate any government in this region that doesn't follow our dictates. And there was protest from other parts of Latin America against US efforts because it was pretty obvious that the US was involved in this. But this was also an effort to exercise US power, to act physically, demonstrate US power in the region where they generally suffer very little costs.

Martin DeCaro (39:12)

Yeah, ideology, military or political? Yeah, ideology is important here. Psychological dominoes, per Coatsworth. He talks about the capitalism hypothesis. It's not about saving an individual company like United Fruit, but to save the private enterprise system. A threat to it anywhere can become a threat to it everywhere if, say, one country's allowed to set an example like Guatemala.

Alexander Avigna (39:38)

No, I mean, what's striking about Guatemala is that that the Arbenz administration tried to follow national and international law in applying these reforms. Right. So they offered compensation to United Fruit Company. Now what they used to determine compensation were the very tax receipts that UFC turned over when they had to pay taxes. So obviously they were under counting or undervaluing their property value to pay low taxes. Well then the Arbenz administration used that to determine compensation. And this is something that's like in this broader History of U.S. latin America relations in 20th century. The legalistic side is Latin America. They played a key role in shaping and developing international law. They abide by it generally. The US was constantly violating the very thing they say that they're for on a global scale.

Martin DeCaro (40:18)

Our conversation Continues. THE Reagan Administration and Rollback Something that's still astonishing to me when I studied the Reagan administration in Latin America is that it didn't matter how small or insignificant the country was, Communism had to be stopped. Grenada, a tiny island, of course, was of no threat to the United States. And where there really was no communist infiltration, Reagan's stated justifications were false. When he ordered the invasion of Grenada.

Narrator/Reporter (40:53)

Maurice Bishop, a protege of Fidel Castro, staged a military coup and overthrew the government with which had been elected under the Constitution. Left to the people by the British, he sought the help of Cuba in building an airport which he claimed was for tourist trade, but which looked suspiciously suitable for military aircraft, including Soviet built long range bombers.

Martin DeCaro (41:16)

Nicaragua and the Sandinistas. The support for death squads in that conflict, you can take a look at say El Salvador, right, that started under the Carter administration. There was a leftist revolt in El Salvador. So no matter how small or insignificant the country, there was this idea among some of the Reaganites in the CIA and his administration that communism could not be allowed, even if it was in an indigenous communist movement, could not be allowed to take root anywhere.

Alexander Avigna (41:44)

Ideology was a prime factor. And the relative lack of power in these Central American countries to the United States also offered the Reagan administration an opportunity to demonstrate its overwhelming power by repressing these efforts and these movements in Central America, if that makes any sense. It's not that Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala represented some sort of military threat, even though that kind of captures the popular imagination. Anyone who've seen the original Red dawn movie, that movie really captures the paranoia that kind of fueled some of the right wing in the United States at the time. But really Central America offered Reagan and his administration the opportunity to demonstrate US power because they could, because they could violate international law by doing things like mining the harbors of Nicaragua. Fundamentally what this entailed is the Reagan administration practicing horrific levels of violence to undermine and prevent these Latin American countries from practicing national sovereignty and self determination. And they violated U.S. law to do this right. The Iran Contra scandal going around Congress, congressional prohibitions from funding these death squads in Nicaragua and doing so by selling arms to Iran and getting involved in different narco trafficking ventures to then use those resources covertly to fund these right wing contract esquads to destabilize Nicaragua, a country of like at that point, 2.9 million people.

Narrator/Reporter (43:01)

Let me put this in capital letters. I did not know about the diversion of funds. Indeed I didn't know there were excess funds. Yet the buck does not stop With Admiral Poindexter, as he stated in his testimony, it stops with me.

Alexander Avigna (43:17)

And in many ways it took a lot of terror by the US in backing the most horrific genocidal death squad regimes in Central America to prevent the aspirations of the vast majority of populations in those countries to achieve some sort of a better life. But there's long term consequences to this as well though, right? A lot of the migration flows that we start to see in the late 2000s, early 2010s, they're a direct consequence to the type of violence that the US exercised in the region that completely destabilized and disarticulated these societies.

Martin DeCaro (43:47)

That's right.

Alexander Avigna (43:47)

There's a direct connection between migration flows in the 2000 and tens to what the Reagan administration did to Central America in the 1980s.

Martin DeCaro (43:53)

There's always unintended consequences. One of my past guests I was debating El Salvador with pointed out to me that the Marxist revolutionary uprising there, they weren't any good either. Right. And had they won that revolution, that wouldn't have been good for the people of El Salvador either. But there are always unintended consequences. Now, this guest did not defend the training of the death squads and the support of the death squads in El Salvador that started under Carter and then accelerated under Reagan until there was a policy change late first term, early second term. Somewhere in the mid-1980s, there was a policy change under the Reagan administration to try to get democracy in El Salvador and to disarm the Marxists. I see you smiling.

Alexander Avigna (44:35)

I would say it's a contradictory effort and primarily because they were losing the public relations battle. Yes, reporters were finding out things like El mosote massacre, where US trained Salvadorian military were executing 900 people. If we talk about these movements, I mean, this is as close as you're going to get as a good guy, bad guy story in Latin American history. Because, yes, the leadership of some of these movements identified in a variety of different Marxist left wing ways. But what really fueled these movements in Nicaragua, in Guatemala and in Salvador was liberation theology. It was Catholicism, yes, but it was a particular variant of Catholicism as defined by people based on their everyday experiences, based on critical interrogation of their everyday existence that led them to question things like why am I poor? The old answer used to be, well, God deemed me to be poor, therefore accept your fate. But what starts to happen in the 70s and 80s is you have this expansion of liberation theology where people started to do things like organize agricultural cooperatives, engage in literacy campaigns, think about gender rights premised on the fact that poverty was not a providentially designed facet of their existence, that they could change their existence if they mobilized and organized. That fundamentally is what drove these revolutionary movements. And this is what historians of the era have shown in the last 10.

Martin DeCaro (45:49)

20 years of scholarship, resisting the right wing governments that had been supported by the United States.

Alexander Avigna (45:54)

Yes. The Salvador civil war starts in 1980 after the nation's highest Catholic authority, Archbishop now St Oscar Romero, was assassinated by a US trained death squad. Yeah, I think we need to be careful when we say these movements were Marxist. Yes, to a certain extent they were. But they were able to achieve popular support because they had a very flexible, mobilizing idea of liberation theology that connected the grassroots to the leadership. That was potentially the most serious political threat that the elites of these different Central American countries face. And that's why they backed death squads, genocidal militaries. And Reagan's support, that's not happening as.

Martin DeCaro (46:30)

Much as it used to be. As far as the US doing some of this stuff.

Alexander Avigna (46:34)

No. I think one thing that the U.S. well, this directly connects to Venezuela. They have found other vehicles or frameworks to frame covert interventions in Latin America. And this is where the war on drugs becomes a big issue. Already during the Reagan administration you had figures, including a predecessor of mine here at asu, talk about narco terrorism being the greatest threat to the region. And that then becomes a really effective foreign policy framework in the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, to justify continued U.S. intervention in Latin America. And what do we have in Venezuela today? It's that exact same framework to justify U.S. intervention and potentially targeted assassinations and airstrikes on the country of Venezuela under this rubric of a war on drugs that we all know is fallacious. It's inaccurate.

Martin DeCaro (47:19)

Yeah, yeah. Drug cartels are material reality. Yeah, drug cartels are awful things, but they're not terrorist organizations.

Alexander Avigna (47:26)

All we have to say, honestly. But in this post reality world, it might not matter, but like fentanyl does not come from Venezuela, which is what Rubio and Trump have been saying. Fentanyl mostly comes from Mexico.

Donald Trump (47:36)

Let's put it this way, people don't like taking big loads of drugs in boats anymore. There aren't too many boats that are traveling on the seas by Venezuela. They tend not to want to travel very quickly anymore. And we virtually stopped drugs coming into our country by sea. We call them the water drugs. They kill hundreds of thousands of people.

Martin DeCaro (48:01)

Well, by placing anything under the rubric of terrorism, it gives the government more legal authority to do Stuff, Totally, yes.

Alexander Avigna (48:08)

And this is what we see. The war on terror, the war on migrants, and the war on drugs coming together in this attack on Venezuela today.

Martin DeCaro (48:14)

I do have John Dower's book, the Violent American Century. He cites Coatsworth, who estimates that the Cold War in Central America saw nearly 300,000 deaths in a population of 30 million, plus a million refugees who fled the area, mostly for the United States. Based on examination of published CIA and State Department materials, plus other reports unsympathetic to communist regimes, he reached this conclusion. Between 1960 and the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites. In other words, from 1960-90, the Soviet bloc as a whole was less repressive, measured in terms of human victims, than many individual Latin American countries. And the point here being that many of those countries had the support of the United States. So, looking ahead here, what are the potential unintended consequences of a US Intervention in Venezuela?

Alexander Avigna (49:15)

Oh, it's horrific, I think. I mean, Venezuela has already lost maybe one sixth of its population through migration and refugee flows as a consequence of the economic sanctions that Trump intensified during his first administration. We had excellent reporting from Washington Post reporter Jeff Stein earlier this year, late last year, documenting the economic impact of those sanctioned regimes against Venezuela. And he found that essentially, Venezuela since 2017 has experienced, like their own version of the Great Depression times four, times eight. I forget the order of magnitude the Jeff Stein uncovered in his reporting. So Venezuela is already a country that is just destroyed economically. Right. So further destabilizing this country through an overt military attack is going to generate the type of mass movement and refugee flows that the Trump administration says it's trying to prevent by sending the U.S. military to the U.S. mexico border, unleashing ice to occupy different American cities, and in the process, shred any sort of bill of rights that we may or may not have. So you have this circular logic in which a potential US Military strike on Venezuela is going to generate the very evils that the Trump administration sees as explanations for its existence and its politics. That's one and two. It might then encourage them to do something equally as catastrophic, which would be to engage in any sort of unilateral military strikes against Mexico. That would be also another. I mean, for me, as a historian of Mexico, it's almost unfathomable. But the fact that this idea has been mainstreamed in the past five years really puts me Uneasy situation to think about the consequences of this.

Martin DeCaro (50:48)

It's insane. I mean, where is Congress in all this? NBC News is reporting that the administration is actually preparing, along with the military, for options to strike drug targets inside Venezuela. So it wouldn't be necessarily a Marines invasion, but missile strikes, air strikes on drug targets inside Venezuela. I mean, that's called war.

Alexander Avigna (51:11)

And they're not drug targets. I mean, we know that these are not going to be drug targets, just like the boats. Like, how do we know? Trump said that they knew one of the boats was smuggling drugs because they saw fentanyl and cocaine floating on the water. I mean, that's just, like, ludicrous. That doesn't happen. So we know that these targets are. They're going to be justified as being drug targets. Drug labs or, I don't know, warehouses. But we can be pretty certain that they're not going to be drug targets. They're going to be other types of targets. It's designed to foment internal resistance to the Maduro administration while trying to ignite regime change from the outside as well.

Donald Trump (51:44)

I've also designated multiple savage drug cartels as far as foreign terrorist organizations, along with two bloodthirsty transnational gangs, probably the worst gangs anywhere in the world. Mississippi 13 and trend Aragua. Trend was from Venezuela, by the way. Such organizations torture, maim, mutilate and murder with impunity. They're the enemies of all humanity. And for this reason, we've recently begun using the supreme power of the United States military to destroy Venezuelan terrorists and trafficking networks led by Nicolas Maduro. To every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States of America, please be warned that we will blow you out of existence. That's what we're doing. We have no choice. Can't let it happen. They're destroying. I believe we lost 300,000 people last year to drugs. 300,000 fentanyl and other drugs. Each boat that we sink carries drugs that would kill more than 25,000Americans. We will not let that happen.

Martin DeCaro (52:59)

On the next episode of History As It Happens. It is the second anniversary of the 107 Hamas terrorist attack in Israel. Hamas has been weakened, although not destroyed. But what about its ideas? Will they live on? That is next. As we report History As It Happens. Make sure you sign up for my free newsletter. Just go to Substack and search for History As It Happens.

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