On January 3rd, Venezuelan head of state Nicholas Maduro was abducted from his home along with his wife by U.S. special forces. This was no isolated incident. This past Monday, Dr. Francisco Rodriguez, expert in Venezuelan economics, was hosted by the Latin American and Latinx Studies program to explain the nation’s economic collapse, as well as the concept of “scorched earth politics.”
There is no doubt that Venezuela has now become the poster child for the Trump administration’s redefined execution of the Monroe Doctrine, or the “Donroe” Doctrine. To understand how this came to be, one must first understand the economic rise of Venezuela. A nation cannot have the largest economic collapse in recorded history without once being on top of the world. Under Hugo Chavez, the nation’s policies consisted of nationalization and price control. The Latin American country had a booming oil industry, carefully rising and falling but maintaining a net plus. In the 2010s, the US placed a series of what is considered the most punitive sanctions since Iraq on Venezuela. This strategy is explained to us by Dr. Rodriguez, who states that during peacetime such sanctions are not seen as a war crime. His definition of this is “scorched earth politics” which stems from the military strategy of literally setting fire to fields (in contemporary times, this would instead be infrastructure, crops, shelters) to essentially deprive the enemy from any chance at survival. So for Venezuela, this meant prohibiting any U.S. companies from dealing with the Venezuelan government, freezing assets, and blocking access to U.S. markets for the state oil company.
The purpose of this chokehold is to force out the Maduro regime or push ideological change. Historically, these economic war tactics almost never actually incite any change; they instead destroy the citizens at the bottom of the nation’s class structure.
The scorched earth approach is nothing new in the history of U.S. interventionism. I actually had the pleasure of having dinner with Dr. Rodriguez along with faculty from the LALS program and students in ENE after his talk. I was able to speak to him about Cuba’s version of U.S. sanction practices as well as how Venezuela affects all aspects of Cuban life. He had a profound understanding of the intricacies of Cuba’s situation in terms of its survival, both ideologically and economically.
As aforementioned, this may be the first time the U.S. has gone mask-off and abducted a foreign nation’s head of state, but it is a catalyst in a long history of imperialism in what the United States claims to be “its backyard.” The major highlights start with the United Fruit Company in Guatemala, where the CIA employed psychological warfare, propaganda, and created a rebel army to topple the democratic government of Jacobo Arbenz. In Cuba, John F. Kennedy approved a covert operation to topple the freshly established government of the nation, which at the time had just overthrown dictatorial force Fulgencio Batista. The Dominican Republic, Chile, and Haiti have also faced U.S. backed coups of a democratically elected left wing government. With that in mind, all this history should serve to spark interest to advance your education, because absolutely nothing the U.S. does exists in a vacuum, it instead echoes patterns of the past which continues to perpetuate the sentiment of American exceptionalism.
Freshman Ramona Banos is the Photography Editor. Her email is vbanos@fandm.edu.