By invading Venezuela, President Trump has just lit the eternal explosive cigar of the United States.
For more than 175 years – since the United States conquered half of Mexico – almost every president has messed with Latin America while telling the rest of the world to stay out of it.
We have helped topple democratically elected leaders and propped up murderous strongmen. He trained death squads and offered ransoms to his favored allies. He implemented economic blockades and encouraged American companies to treat the region's wealth and its workers like a cookie jar.
From the Mexican-American War to the Bay of Pigs Invasion, from the Panama Canal to NAFTA, we have only taken care of ourselves in Latin America, even as we wrapped our actions under the banner of benevolence.
It rarely ended well for anyone involved, especially us. Many of the leaders we put in power became despots that we tolerated until they ran their course, like Manuel Noriega of Panama. The political turmoil we helped create has led generations of Latin Americans to migrate to the northfundamentally changing our country, even as many Americans think people like my family should have stayed in their ancestral homes.
So there was Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Saturday, insisting that the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife by American troops was a military action as brilliant and consequential as D-Day. He also announced that the United States would “rule the country” and practically did his strange “YMCA” dance at the idea of making money from Venezuelan oil.
His message to the world: Venezuela is ours until we say so, like the rest of Latin America. And if neither allies nor enemies took the hint, Trump announced an updated Monroe Doctrine (the idea that the United States can do whatever it wants in the Western Hemisphere) called the “Donroe Doctrine.”
Because of course he did.
No one in Washington should be more versed in this terrible history than Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cubans who fled the island when it was ruled by U.S.-backed warlord Fulgencio Batista.
Rubio grew up in a community of exiles that saw Batista's replacement, Fidel Castro, remain in power for decades, despite the US embargo. As one of Florida's U.S. senators, Rubio represented millions of Latin American immigrants who had fled civil wars caused by the United States in one form or another.
Yet he is the biggest proponent of regime change in Latin America in Trump World, helping to torpedo the president's anti-interventionist campaign promise as if it were a narco ship off the coast of South America.
On Saturday, Rubio watched silently as Trump threatened Colombian President Gustavo Petro to “watch his ass.” When it was Rubio's turn to answer reporters' questions, he said Cuban leaders “should be worried” and offered a warning to the rest of the world: “Don't play around with this president in office, because it's not going to turn out well.”
In Latin America, few are more vilified than the sold – the sold one. Betraying one's country for personal or political gain is an original sin that dates back to the tribes who allied themselves with Spanish conquistadors to overthrow repressive empires, only to suffer the same sad end. Sold have dominated the history of the region and hindered its development, with leaders (Porfirio Díaz of Mexico, the Somozas of Nicaragua, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic) more than happy to side with the yankees at the expense of his own countrymen.
Rubio belongs to this long, sordid lineup and, in many ways, is the worst sold of all of them.
So Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), left, listens during a 2016 presidential debate with candidate Donald Trump.
(Wilfredo Lee / Associated Press)
I still remember the fresh-faced, idealistic guy who tried to pass a bipartisan amnesty bill in 2013. Although too right-wing for my taste, he seemed like a Latino politician who could thread the needle between liberals and conservatives, gringos and us.
It was wonderful to see him call out Trump's boorishness when the two faced off in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. He told CNN's Jake Tapper, in words that sound more prescient than ever: “In the years to come, there are going to be a lot of people… who are going to have to explain and justify how they fell into this trap of supporting Donald Trump because this is not going to end well, one way or another.”
The thirst for power has a way of corrupting even the most idealistic hearts, unfortunately. Rubio ended up endorsing Trump in 2016, supporting Trump's claims that the 2020 election was rigged and proclaiming at the 2024 Republican National Convention that Trump “has not only transformed our party, he has inspired a movement.”
Rubio's reward for licking boots? He sets our foreign policy agenda, which is like putting an arsonist in charge of a fireworks stand.
I'm sure this all sounds like leftist talk to the Venezuelan diaspora, many of whom applauded Maduro's fate from Spain to Mexico, from Miami to Los Angeles. just a fool stupid could support what Maduro did in Venezuela, which was a prosperous country and a relatively stable ally of the United States for decades while the rest of South America lurched from one crisis to another.
But for Trump, overthrowing Maduro was never about the well-being of Venezuelans or bringing democracy to his country; it was about securing a foothold to demonstrate American power and enrich the US.
Meanwhile, his deportation leviathan has swallowed up tens of thousands of undocumented Venezuelans and canceled the temporary protected status of hundreds of thousands more.
In 2022, when Rubio was still a senator, he advocated for Venezuelans to be eligible for temporary protected status, which is granted to citizens of countries deemed too dangerous to return to. At the time, Rubio argued that “failure to do so would result in a very real death sentence for countless Venezuelans who have fled their country.”
Now? At a press conference in May, he maintained that the 240 Venezuelans deported to El Salvador in early 2025 “were not migrants, they were criminals,” even though the Deportation Data Project found that only 16% of them had criminal convictions.
Rubio has long presented himself as a modern-day Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan who led the liberation of South America from Spain and who has been a hero to many Latinos ever since.
But even Bolívar knew he was skeptical of American hegemony, writing in an 1829 letter that the United States “seems destined by Providence to plague [Latin] “United States with miseries in the name of Freedom.”
Pest, your name is Marco Rubio. By pressuring Trump to rule unchecked in Latin America, you are playing the same old song of American meddling that unites your family and mine. Allowing Maduro's cronies to remain in power if they play along with you and Trump, even though the election was stolen in 2024, shows that you are as much for the Venezuelan people as, well, Maduro.
Sold.
