Beating them up south of the border

Are you shocked by President Trump’s actions over Venezuela in recent weeks?  He has deployed a huge military arsenal in the Caribbean Sea. This has involved bombers, fighters, drones, patrol planes and support aircraft.  It has targeted and killed dozens of people on board boats in the area, claiming that they were carrying drugs.He has recently – just a week ago – seized an oil tanker. It’s not clear whether he thought it had drugs aboard,  but he seized it just the same.  He appears determined to topple President Maduro, the successor of President Hugo Chavez, who took oil production in Venezuela out of the hands of private companies.

While this attempt to topple Maduro is in the news, US attention to South American countries has been a consistent feature for years. Any country there which doesn’t act in ways favourable to the US, as distinct from favourable to its own people, feels the heat of CIA and US military forces.

For example, in the 1970s the US had no problem with regimes in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay,Bolivia or Brazil, all of which practiced torture, killing and disappearing on its own citizens.   Billions of US military aid went oncounter-insurgency.

Regardless of who was president, the US has always seen South America as its back yard, which lives in the shadow of the US. Trump’s latest complaint appeared on his Truth Social site, declaring that Venezuala had stolen US property. That’s his way of interpreting Hugo Chavez’s appalling cheek in taking over  his country’s oil production from US private companies.

So don’t let anyone leave you with the notion that trouble in South America began with Trump. The US has played the bully with South America for decades, centuries even.

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