JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
It's been three weeks now since United States forces went into Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro. And one of the reasons the Trump administration gave for doing so was that Maduro was illegitimate. Here's U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz speaking at a security briefing earlier this month.
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MIKE WALTZ: Maduro is not just an indicted drug trafficker. He was an illegitimate so-called president. He was not a head of state.
SUMMERS: This latest involvement in a Latin American country's government is part of a long tradition of U.S. interference, from economic sanctions to covert operations to overthrow governments in that region. To talk more about that history, I'm joined now by my colleague Gene Demby, the host of NPR's Code Switch. Hi.
GENE DEMBY, BYLINE: What's good, Juana?
SUMMERS: So, Gene, I know you've been looking at some recent historical context to the U.S. actions in Venezuela. What have you learned?
DEMBY: So in the decade after Maduro took over as president of Venezuela, the economy there tanked, which was made worse by U.S. sanctions imposed on Venezuela in 2017. The country became politically unstable, social services fell apart, and Maduro increasingly relied on the military to shore up his fragile grip on power. According to the U.N., nearly 8 million Venezuelans have fled Venezuela since 2014. Then, in Venezuela's elections in 2024, Maduro refused to release the results and declared himself president, even though...
GREG GRANDIN: Most polls suggest that Maduro lost that election by about maybe 60-to-40%.
DEMBY: That voice you're hearing belongs to Greg Grandin. He's a historian at Yale. He's written a number of books about the relationship between the United States and Latin America.
SUMMERS: So the Trump administration calling Maduro's leadership illegitimate isn't inaccurate?
DEMBY: Yeah, absolutely. It's accurate, but as far as an excuse to intervene, Grandin says that the U.S. works with lots of nonelected authoritarian leaders all the time. And one of the things that Trump ran on in his candidacy was that he would not get involved in other countries. So after removing Maduro, the administration has sort of toggled through a bunch of different justifications for its actions in Venezuela.
GRANDIN: In some ways, Trump was cosplaying the role of a colonial plunderer. First, the justification was immigration, then it was fentanyl and cocaine, and then he just settled on oil. We're going to take the oil.
DEMBY: But regardless of the reason, Grandin says the core question is...
GRANDIN: Who gets to decide the quality of another country's sovereignty?
SUMMERS: Gene, what else did Grandin have to say about how that's been decided?
DEMBY: So this was really eye-opening. So Grandin says that the idea of state sovereignty as we understand it today, that idea that a country has the right to govern itself without interference comes from the formation of Latin American countries as they fought for independence from Spain in the 1820s.
GRANDIN: So they came up with this notion that every nation had the right to sovereignty.
DEMBY: Meanwhile, here in the United States, President James Monroe is also saying Europe cannot intervene in the Western Hemisphere anymore. And that policy, of course, became known as the Monroe Doctrine. And at the same time, the U.S. is expanding into Latin America.
GRANDIN: Now, they also lived in the shadow of an expanding United States - right? - that took Texas, that took Mexico, that took Cuba.
DEMBY: Juana, this is all happening in the 1800s and early 1900s.
SUMMERS: Right.
DEMBY: And eventually, under FDR, the U.S. pledged to honor the sovereignty of those smaller nations. That was a historical moment that never happened before. But as Greg Grandin explained...
GRANDIN: You know, the United States continued to intervene in Latin American affairs, but it either did so covertly where it didn't admit it - you know, through the CIA - or it used organizations like the Organization of American States to isolate Cuba, for example, after the Cuban Revolution. So it was still able to use the institutions of liberal internationalism and formally hold on to the doctrine of sovereignty even as it was, de facto, figuring out workarounds to violate it.
DEMBY: So the U.S. has remained deeply involved in Latin America, and part of what Grandin calls Trump's America First nationalism has translated into the administration's mass deportation policy and the way it treats Venezuelan migrants who have come to the United States.
SUMMERS: Gene Demby, host of NPR's Code Switch, thanks so much for bringing us this analysis.
DEMBY: Thank you, Juana.
SUMMERS: You can listen to the full episode of Code Switch on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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