ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST:
The Trump administration is aggressively intervening in the affairs of Latin America.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: The U.S. has captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
FLORIDO: Venezuela's longtime leader is sitting in a New York jail cell after U.S. forces hauled him out of his bedroom in Caracas in January on drug charges. Expats in Miami celebrated.
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UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Singing, inaudible).
FLORIDO: Across the region, President Trump is sending in the U.S. military, using threats and sanctions to try to get what he wants, like in Cuba. He wants the communist government to fall. This year, he started blocking almost all shipments of oil to the island nation. Its economy is collapsing. And in the seas surrounding Latin America, the U.S. has killed hundreds of people by bombing small boats it says are carrying drugs, though it's offered no proof.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Very soon we're going to start doing it on land, too.
FLORIDO: It's already bombed suspected drug cartels in Ecuador and is reportedly pressuring Guatemala and Mexico to allow the U.S. military in, too. All of this under the umbrella of what Donald Trump has called the Donroe Doctrine, a play on the Monroe Doctrine, a foreign policy framework the U.S. used in the 19th century to establish domination over the Americas.
To talk about all this signals, we spoke with Greg Grandin, the author of many books on the U.S. and Latin America, and a professor of history at Yale. I asked him what this turn towards Latin America looks like right now.
GREG GRANDIN: Well, it's remarkable in its aggression. It's remarkable in the sense that it feels no need to legitimate itself in terms of any kind of moral or normative justification. In Latin America and the Western Hemisphere, you have quite a remarkable, cohesive and, I would say, efficient application of all of the different applications of hard power - of U.S. hard power - to Latin America under the rubric of the war on drugs. I would say that, maybe with the exception of Uruguay, Washington is meddling in Latin American politics to different degrees of intensity in almost every Latin American nation.
FLORIDO: Why has Latin America suddenly taken on such importance for this administration?
GRANDIN: I think there's a couple of reasons. I think that rejection of globalization and rejection of the post-Cold War and the post-World War II premises of foreign policy, where the United States would superintend a global order based on rules, right? The Trump administration has made much of its rejection of that vision. And then all of the talk of rehabilitating and revitalizing the Monroe Doctrine. It's a very particular reading of the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine, for all of its faults, at least was based on the premise that the Western Hemisphere shared certain interests. The Trump administration has largely redefined that doctrine to mean that the Western Hemisphere belongs to the United States.
More importantly, I think, is the electoral calculations of Florida and the way that Florida, having become kind of the command center of MAGA, you know? - the way that, you know, the Cuban lobby, which has - now is no longer the Cuban lobby. But it's the Cuban, it's the Venezuelan, it's the Colombian, it's the Brazilian lobby. It's all of the - it's a greater diaspora of exiles - of fairly wealthy and privileged exiles - who have retreated to Florida and have been pressing Trump, right? They wanted the Trump administration to put forward a very maximalist position on Latin America, which it has done.
FLORIDO: Let's talk about Cuba. The U.S. is moving really aggressively to bring the communist government down or at least bring it to heel. President Trump seems emboldened by how swiftly he was able to usher in a friendly government in Venezuela after abducting President Maduro there. Is he right to think that he could accomplish the same thing in Cuba?
GRANDIN: I imagine that the Trump administration probably would like this to be resolved through some kind of uprising on the island out of desperation. It seems like that's what their calculus is. They're turning the screws time after time and making life as miserable as possible for Cubans and - until it becomes unbearable. Now, on the other hand, the Cuban state - it's not the Venezuelan military, and it's not the Venezuelan state. It's deeper, and it has more organic legitimacy, I think, in some ways. Trump's not going to be able to do in Cuba what he did in Venezuela, where he basically turned the - he basically left the Chavista state in power - the Maduro state in power - and is running it like a holding company.
The Miami Cuban lobby is going to want substantial changes. They're going to want - they want their island back. They want their property back. They want their house on the Malecon back. They wouldn't put up with the kind of compromise that they did in Venezuela, where they just basically made a deal with one faction of the Maduro state.
FLORIDO: Ending the communist system in Cuba has been a longtime goal of the U.S., and it's pressured other countries for a long time to take a stance against Cuba. But a lot of Latin American countries, you know, have maintained relationships with Cuba. And even that seems to be changing right now. How does Trump's endgame in Cuba have the potential, you think, to alter the entire U.S.-Latin America dynamic across the continent?
GRANDIN: It's a good question. Trump is basically operating on a model of domination without hegemony. It is just pure force and pure power and pure, at best, transactional relations. And the asymmetrical relationship of power with Latin America is clear. I mean, a promise of $20 million in aid, and you get Ecuador on board. He's got his way in Chile and Venezuela and Ecuador and Bolivia. But we've already seen that there is this crisis of governance in those countries as a result of him getting his way.
So I think the future is wide open, and I think that that old anti-imperialist demand for national sovereignty ideal might snap back. In any given election, voters are looking at a range of things. They're basing their decisions on particular candidates. And, you know, there is a social base for Trumpism in Latin America. But the problem with Trumpism is that it contains elements of its own negation, right? Because it starts acting out in ways that lead to destabilization.
FLORIDO: Let's talk about Colombia for a minute. President Trump endorsed a right-wing candidate who has promised to crush drug smugglers, to shoot down their airplanes, to sink their boats. What would that mean for Trump to have an ally in the Colombian president?
GRANDIN: What it would mean is, I think, an alliance between Ecuador and Colombia and a return to this very militaristic response to cartels and crime in the Andes, in the countryside. It would be a return to a very militarized state of war. Colombia has moved away from you know, being dominated by conservative governments that were tied to paramilitary regimes. They tried to bring the war to a close. They signed a very important peace treaty with the FARC.
And what you saw in the last couple of months, especially since Ecuador and the U.S. military are running operations, is increasing provocations by Ecuador over the border to kind of create a sense of crisis. The right-wing candidate is promising a hard line to bring the hammer down, and a lot of people are responding to that.
FLORIDO: Is Trump building an effective, unified battlefield against the drug traffickers with, you know, this group of country leaders?
GRANDIN: Well, he's using the pretext of a campaign against the drug traffickers. There was just a study done that despite killing more than 200 speedboat operators, the price of cocaine and the quantity of cocaine on the U.S. market is exactly the same as it was. And I think it'll be the same by escalating the war on drugs in the Andes. But, yes, bringing Ecuador and Colombia together would provide quite a large field of operations for this renewed war on drugs.
FLORIDO: Well, I've been speaking with Greg Grandin. His most recent book is called "America, América: A New History Of The New World." And he's a professor of history at Yale University. Greg Grandin, thanks for your time.
GRANDIN: Well, thank you so much for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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