While all eyes are on the four-month-long US military campaign against Venezuela, the White House has been quietly striking security agreements with other countries to deploy US troops across Latin America and the Caribbean.
As Donald Trump announced a blockade on oil tankers under sanctions and ordered the seizure of vessels amid airstrikes that have killed more than 100 people in the Caribbean and the Pacific, the US secured military deals with Paraguay, Ecuador, Peru and Trinidad and Tobago in the past week alone.
The agreements – ranging from airport access, as in Trinidad and Tobago, to the temporary deployment of US troops for joint operations against “narco-terrorists” in Paraguay – are being signed under the banner of a so-called “war on drugs”, the same rationale Washington has used to justify its offensive against Venezuela, although White House officials and Trump himself has said that the goals also include seizing the country’s vast energy reserves and bringing down the dictator Nicolás Maduro.
Although Washington has long maintained similar agreements in the region, the scale and timing of the new deals are seen by analysts as a further escalation amid what would be an unprecedented US invasion of a South American country.
“If the US were to launch a larger offensive that included airstrikes on Venezuela or other countries that have been mentioned, such as Colombia or Cuba, it would want operating locations around the region,” said Jennifer Kavanagh, the director of military analysis at the Defense Priorities thinktank.
“Constructing a network of locations would be important for the sustainability of any type of operation. So we can’t say for sure that these activities are directly targeting Venezuela, but I think it’s naive to suggest that they’re not somehow related,” she added.
Recent agreements include the “temporary” deployment of US air force troops to Ecuador – despite Ecuadorians having rejected in a referendum the establishment of foreign military bases – and a decision by Peru’s congress, after a request from the White House, to authorise US military and intelligence personnel to operate armed in the country.
“And this has nothing to do with drugs,” said Jorge Heine, a former Chilean ambassador and a research professor at Boston University’s School of Global Studies. “Paraguay is not considered a major centre for either drug production or distribution, nor is Venezuela. This has much more to do with the US national security strategy document,” he added.
In what it calls a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine – the “America for Americans” foreign policy set out in 1823 by the US president James Monroe and later used to justify US-backed military coups in Latin America – the recently released document calls for an “expansion” of the US military presence in the region.
In the Caribbean, after Trinidad and Tobago allowed the installation of a US radar system and granted access to its airports, the Maduro regime accused the Caribbean neighbour of taking part in the seizure of the first oil tanker two weeks ago and announced the immediate termination of any agreements on fossil gas supplies between the two countries.
Last week, Trinidad and Tobago’s prime minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, said the “best defence” for her country was military cooperation with the US. On Monday, Venezuela’s interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, said: “If Trinidad lends its territory to attack Venezuela, we have to respond.”
In recent months alone, the US has signed similar agreements with Guyana, the Dominican Republic and Panama, while other countries in the region have already been drawn into the military buildup against Venezuela through existing US bases in Puerto Rico, Honduras and Cuba, and surveillance hubs at airports in El Salvador, Aruba and Curaçao.
John Walsh, the director for drug policy at the Washington Office on Latin America, described the new US strategy as “gunboat diplomacy on steroids”, aimed at rewarding allies and sending a warning to those who fall foul of the Trump administration.
In a letter sent on Monday to other presidents across Latin America and the Caribbean, Maduro issued an “urgent call” against what he described as a US “escalation of aggression … whose effects go beyond my country’s borders and threaten to destabilise the entire region”.
Since being re-elected last year in a vote widely thought to have been rigged, Venezuela’s dictator has had almost no contact with other presidents in the region, including former allies such as Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, two of the few leftwing leaders to remain after a wave of rightwing electoral victories. Lula was sidelined while facing 50% import tariffs before relations thawed and Petro has been threatened with becoming the next US target after Maduro.
“For countries that are not onboard, US gunboat diplomacy is an implicit threat that the US military is right nearby – making sure they don’t cross the US,” said Walsh.
