Trump’s cartel order revives ‘bitter’ memories in Latin America

President Donald Trump boards Air Force One at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Allentown, Pa., Aug. 3, 2025. Trump’s order for the Pentagon to use military force against certain Latin American drug cartels is triggering fears that the U.S. might return to a pattern of Monroe Doctrine-like military interference in the region. (Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times)

By Simon Romero and Annie Correal

Just a decade ago, the era of U.S. wars, coup plots and military interventions in Latin America seemed to be ebbing when the Obama administration declared that the Monroe Doctrine, which long asserted U.S. military supremacy in the Americas, was dead.

Now this cornerstone of foreign policy is roaring back to life, resurrecting fears over U.S. military interference in the region after President Donald Trump ordered the Pentagon to use military force against certain Latin American drug cartels.

Leaders in the region are still trying to decipher what Trump’s order could mean. Mexico and Venezuela, two nations where the administration has designated cartels within their borders as terrorist groups, seem especially vulnerable.

But up and down much of Latin America, any whisper of reviving such actions could also unleash a chain reaction resulting in a surge in anti-American sentiment. The news of Trump’s order has already intensified a wariness against intervention from abroad, even in Ecuador and other countries plagued by violent drug wars in recent years.

“I’m a right-wing conservative, so I want armed citizens and the military actually shooting,” said Patricio Endara, 46, a businessperson in Quito, the Ecuadorian capital. “But I wouldn’t agree with having foreign soldiers in Ecuador.”

That skepticism draws from the bitter memories left by the long record of U.S. military interventions in the region, whether through direct or indirect action, as during Colombia’s long internal war.

“Those are formulas that have shown, to the point of exhaustion, their failure,” Iván Cepeda, a Colombian senator, said in an interview.

These kinds of interventions “inflict immense damage,” said Fernando González Davidson, a Guatemalan scholar, pointing to how such actions often strove for regime change. “The U.S. leaves power in the hands of a corrupt and criminal class aligned with its own interests.”

A U.S.-backed coup in 1954 in Guatemala ousted a democratically elected leader over concerns that a land reform project threatened United Fruit Co., a powerful American corporation with large tracts of land there.

In the decades that followed, that Guatemalan coup became a rallying cry across the region by exposing U.S. Cold War policy as a tool for protecting U.S. interests over democratic principles and national sovereignty.

Long before the U.S. military’s involvement in the region became so contentious, President James Monroe’s assertion in 1823 that the United States could use its military in Latin America had more bark than bite, historians say.

But in the 1840s, President James K. Polk invoked the doctrine to justify the Mexican-American War, which produced the U.S. conquest of Mexican lands now comprising states such as California, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico.

That humiliating outcome, and other U.S. military interventions in Mexico in the 1910s, profoundly shaped Mexico’s political identity, fostering a strong sense of nationalism that is often in opposition to the United States.

President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico tapped into such sentiment Friday when she rejected the use of U.S. military forces in her country. She made it explicitly clear that Mexico has ruled out any kind of “invasion.”

U.S. military action inside Mexico would be disastrous for bilateral cooperation on issues like migration and security, said Arturo Santa-Cruz, an expert on U.S.-Mexico relations at the University of Guadalajara.

Territorial expansion came into play again during the Spanish-American War in 1898, solidifying the United States’ emergence as a global power when it took Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines from Spain.

President Theodore Roosevelt followed in 1903 by sending warships to support a revolt by separatists in Colombia. They formed Panama and gave the United States control over the Canal Zone, which Panama fully regained only in 1999.

Roosevelt created his own corollary to the Monroe Doctrine the next year, claiming that the United States should exert “police power” in the Americas when it found cases of flagrant “wrongdoing.”

This pivot turbocharged U.S. interventions, and protecting American property often was the justification. In Cuba alone, U.S. forces intervened on three occasions from 1906 to 1922.

During the Cold War, the United States found new ways to intervene. This included supporting coups that ousted democratically elected leaders in Guatemala, Brazil and Chile.

U.S. forces also kept intervening with boots on the ground in places including the Dominican Republic and Grenada, driven by concerns about communists in these countries.

So many interventions had the effect of unifying much of Latin America around the issue of sovereignty. Such positioning was on display when Latin American countries recently closed ranks to oppose Trump’s threats to regain the Panama Canal.

“There’s been an iron will among Latin Americans to define one of their core values as national sovereignty and nonintervention,” said Alan McPherson, a historian at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Even as the Cold War was easing in 1989, the United States once again intervened in Panama to depose its de facto leader, Manuel Noriega, who was wanted by U.S. authorities on drug trafficking charges.

For the Americans, it was “Operation Just Cause,” said Efraín Guerrero, a community leader who gives walking tours in Panama City to keep alive the memory of the U.S. invasion. “But for us, it became ‘Forgetting Forbidden,’ because we have to remember all those who died.”

That intervention could provide a template for a similar action in a country like Venezuela, where the United States has doubled a reward, to $50 million, for information leading to the arrest of its leader, Nicolás Maduro, whom U.S. officials accuse of links to gangs such as Tren de Aragua and the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico.

Since the news of Trump’s move appeared Friday, some critics of the Venezuelan regime have called for the U.S. military to do just that, asking the U.S. president to order U.S. troops to go after Maduro, just as they targeted Panama’s president in 1989.

“Let’s hope he does it,” said a Venezuelan woman in the city of Maracaibo, who asked that her name not appear for fear of Maduro. “This is what we have been waiting for, for years — for Maduro to leave or for Trump to take him. We Venezuelans would happily give him away.”

“This move or threat by the Trump administration,” said Christopher Sabatini, a Latin America expert at the London-based Chatham House, “is going to really touch that historic and deeply felt popular nerve” about U.S. interventions in Latin America. However, he said, throughout history there was also, often, “a particular sort of partisan faction that was lobbying the United States to get involved.”