Given the messy history of U.S. intervention in Latin America and the Caribbean, one might assume that countries and people across the region are uniformly opposed to the Trump administration’s escalating war on alleged drug boats and the prospect of regime change in Venezuela. But the reality is far more nuanced and complicated.
The regional reaction to the military campaign—and the looming possibility of a U.S. operation against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—has been disjointed, despite the rippling consequences of the boat strikes and the sweeping geopolitical implications of the situation.
This can be explained, in part, by ideological divisions across the region. The left-wing leaders of Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil have been the most vocal critics of the strikes, but to varying degrees. Meanwhile, countries with right-wing leaders—such as Paraguay, Argentina, and Ecuador—have generally aligned themselves with the Trump administration’s approach to drug trafficking and Maduro, including by following Washington’s lead and designating the Venezuela-based Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organization.
That said, even the Trump administration’s closest right-wing allies in the region, such as El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, have not gone out of their way to offer public support for the boat strikes, though reporting indicates that the Central American country may be hosting U.S. planes involved in the operation.
Juan Gabriel Tokatlian, an international relations scholar and the provost at the Torcuato Di Tella University in Buenos Aires, Argentina, told Foreign Policy that the “level of fragmentation that we are seeing today among Latin American countries—it’s the most dramatic in the last half-century.”
This is not to say that Latin American countries have always seen eye-to-eye or that the political makeup of the region tends to be homogeneous—even a cursory review of the region’s history shows that this is far from the case. But there have still been times in the past when Latin American countries “joined efforts” against various actions taken by the United States, Tokatlian said.
He pointed to the Contadora Group, which was formed by Mexico, Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela in the early 1980s in response to the crisis in Central America that the Reagan administration played a key role in fomenting via its support for right-wing governments and anti-communist forces.
Today, however, there’s “no major arena where Latin America could join efforts,” Tokatlian said. The Union of South American Nations has been “destroyed,” the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) is “useless,” and the Organization of American States is seemingly worried that criticizing the U.S. operation will lead to economic punishment from U.S. President Donald Trump, he said.
Indeed, concern over Trump’s penchant for wielding U.S. economic power as a diplomatic sledgehammer—particularly as he continues to rail against Latin America over migration—is seemingly among the biggest factors driving how leaders are responding to the situation.
Some leaders haven’t shied away from taking a forceful stand against the U.S. operation. Colombian President Gustavo Petro has strongly condemned the strikes, accusing the Trump administration of committing murder. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva have also condemned the strikes and the U.S. military presence in the Caribbean.
Still, Sheinbaum and Lula, who have both been forced to walk a careful line with Trump amid disagreements over trade and tariffs, have been far more reserved in their criticism than Petro in what may be an effort to avoid Trump’s economic wrath. Trump responded to Petro’s denunciation of the strikes by slashing aid to Colombia, which is traditionally viewed as a top U.S. ally in South America. But Petro, whom Trump also referred to as an “illegal drug leader,” has not relented in his sharp criticism of the U.S. president.
Petro’s approach is “not surprising,” said Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. A fight like this is Petro’s “bread and butter,” Freeman said, underscoring that the Colombian leader built his political career being this “kind of firebrand willing to take fire for saying very unpopular, but often true, things.”
“The fact that he’s kind of burning all of his bridges with the U.S. and completely unpragmatic, but trying to turn this into a political narrative at home, is not surprising,” Freeman said, adding that leaders such as Sheinbaum and Lula are “much more cautious, pragmatic people.”
On the flip side, Trinidadian Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar has also stood out by fervently supporting the operation and welcoming the U.S. military buildup in the region. She did not endorse a Caribbean Community (Caricom) declaration last month that called for reaffirming the principle that the region should remain a “Zone of Peace.” The declaration said that Caricom remains committed to fighting drug traffickers but emphasized that efforts to address such challenges should be facilitated through global cooperation and with respect to international law.
Persad-Bissessar has been perhaps the most vocally supportive regional leader when it comes to the U.S. operation. On the subject of drug smugglers, she has said the United States should “kill them all violently.” The Trinidadian leader also recently allowed a U.S. warship to dock in the country’s capital, despite evident concerns from the public over the recent strikes and protests outside of the U.S. Embassy in Port of Spain, the country’s capital.
Venezuela has responded to Persad-Bissessar’s strong backing for the U.S. strikes by scrapping energy agreements with Trinidad and Tobago, with Maduro accusing the Trinidadian prime minister of turning her country “into an aircraft carrier for the U.S. Empire against Venezuela.” But Persad-Bissessar appears to be betting that she and her country will ultimately benefit from standing with Trump—particularly if Maduro is ousted and it paves the way for more favorable energy deals in the future.
Along these lines, it’s evident that the unpopularity of the Maduro regime across Latin America and the Caribbean is also fostering the mixed reactions to the U.S. operation.
Recent polling pointed to fairly strong levels of support among people in the region for a U.S. military intervention in Venezuela to depose Maduro and his government. In fact, the polling indicated that respondents in the United States were generally less likely to support such a scenario than people in those regions were. Experts said that the results were not especially surprising, given that Maduro’s regime is widely blamed for creating the conditions that have pushed millions of Venezuelan migrants and refugees into neighboring countries.
“Many people in Latin America view Nicolás Maduro as a dictator. They would be thrilled to see him gone, and there’s a widespread understanding that the United States military is probably one of the few organizations that could ensure that he is pushed from power,” said James Bosworth, the founder of the political risk analysis firm Hxagon.
“While most people who study Latin American history understand the negative consequences of U.S. interventions across the region, it’s worth noting that the last U.S. intervention in Latin America or the Caribbean was over two decades ago. It’s not something that the average citizen in Latin America has experienced in their lifetime,” Bosworth said.
There’s no doubt that the history of U.S. interventions in Latin America has shaped the region, said Freeman of the Council on Foreign Relations , but it’s far from the most pressing concern for people in the present day.
“At the forefront of people’s minds today are crime, corruption, low growth, the failures of their own domestic elites to change those situations. That’s what people are angry about,” Freeman said. This is partly why a number of leaders have expressed support for the U.S. strikes, he added, because “it’s extremely toxic for any government right now in the region to be perceived as on the side of organized crime.”
To this point, Brazil’s Lula is in a tough position after a recent police raid in Rio de Janeiro that was the deadliest in the country’s history. While Lula condemned the incident as “disastrous” and a “massacre,” polling indicates that a majority of Brazilians approve of the raid at a time when many in the country are concerned about crime.
In spite of the apparent desire for a tough-on-crime approach and the potential political benefits of siding with the United States against drug cartels, the region’s general lack of strong pushback to the expanding campaign of strikes on alleged traffickers is still a gamble that’s already having consequences.
Since early September, the United States has conducted 19 strikes near Latin America—first in the Caribbean Sea and later in the Pacific. The operation has killed at least 76 people. Serious concerns have been raised in Washington and beyond over the legality and effectiveness of the strikes, which were recently condemned by the United Nations human rights chief as “unacceptable” and a violation of international law.
The operation is also clearly raising nerves across the region amid open questions about precisely who is being killed. Last week, the Dominican Republic announced that it was postponing the 2025 Summit of the Americas, citing “the profound divisions that currently hinder productive dialogue in the Americas.” European Union leaders have also pulled out of an EU-CELAC summit in Colombia amid Petro’s spat with Trump.
Experts also warn that the increased U.S. military action is likely to affect a range of economic sectors in the region.
“The impact of this is going to be large in the tourism sector in places like Aruba [and] Curaçao—the Dutch Islands—which are within sight of the Venezuelan mainland. Not to mention Trinidad and Tobago as well—cruise ships regularly call [in] to Port of Spain,” said Christopher Hernandez-Roy, a senior fellow and deputy director of the Americas program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “And then, of course, there’s the impact on fishing. For some of these islands, it’s a way of life.”
The Trump administration has claimed that it’s targeting “narco-terrorists” who are poisoning the United States with deadly drugs and crime, without offering hard evidence to back up these assertions. And many experts have said that the strikes are not only illegal but also extremely unlikely to have a significant impact on the flow of drugs into the United States.
Trump and those around him have publicly sent mixed messages on whether the true aim of the operation is to create the conditions for toppling Maduro. But the administration has reportedly been privately weighing its options, and the scale of the force that the United States has amassed in the Caribbean continues to fuel skepticism that this is solely about thwarting drug traffickers.
Whether or not the United States moves forward with a direct attack on the Maduro regime with the aim of bringing it down remains to be seen. In the meantime, it’s clear that the strikes on alleged drug boats are poised to continue for the foreseeable future. Maduro, for his part, has called for Latin American and Caribbean countries to issue a “unified response” against the U.S. military presence in the region.
As much of Latin America continues to sit back and watch this unfold, Tokatlian said he is shocked at the lack of legal defensive positioning by countries around the region in terms of both what is happening and what may happen regarding Venezuela. It’s a sign of the ways in which a rules-based order is “dying” in today’s world, he said, pointing to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as another example.
“We do not have constraints today vis-à-vis the question of the use of force,” Tokatlian said, adding that any military action by the United States against Venezuela would mark yet another “addition to a world where the rules are breaking apart.
