[News] The ‘Donroe Doctrine’: This is Trump’s neocolonial plan for Latin America

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 The ‘Donroe Doctrine’: This is Trump’s neocolonial plan for Latin America

The Donald Trump administration seeks to forcibly impose the hegemony of
the US empire in Latin America. Through war, he is reviving the colonial
Monroe Doctrine, which top officials now proudly call the Donroe Doctrine.

By Ben Norton <https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/author/ben-norton/> -
October 27, 2025 -
https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/10/27/donroe-doctrine-trump-neocolonial-plan-latin-america/

[image: Trump Monroe Donroe doctrine US neocolonial plan Latin America]
<https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/#twitter>

The Donald Trump administration is waging war on Venezuela
<https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/10/20/trump-cia-attack-venezuela-us-war/>,
but this is part of a larger political war on Latin America.

In the first year of Trump’s second term as president, the US government
has:

   - killed dozens of people without charges and trial in US military
   strikes on boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, executing humble
   fishermen from not only Venezuela but also Colombia
   <https://www.cbsnews.com/news/colombian-killed-us-strike-fisherman-wife-says/>
   and Trinidad and Tobago
   <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/17/trump-caribbean-venezuela-trinidad-boat-strikes>
   ;
   - imposed sanctions
   <https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0292> on the
   democratically elected left-wing president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro;
   - hit Brazil with 50% tariffs
   <https://www.dw.com/en/outrage-in-brazil-as-trump-threatens-50-tariff-on-imports/a-73244289>,
   one of the highest rates on Earth, to try to destabilize democratically
   elected left-wing President Lula da Silva;
   - threatened to forcibly “take over” and colonize the Panama Canal
   <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/26/panic-and-defiance-in-panama-after-trump-threatens-to-take-back-canal>,
   in violation of the Central American nation’s sovereignty;
   - tightened the illegal
   <https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2024/10/31/us-israel-world-un-vote-cuba-blockade/>,
   six-decade blockade of Cuba
   <https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx24468drd1o>; and
   - waged a regime-change war aimed at overthrowing the government of
   Venezuela, and ordered the CIA to kidnap or even assassinate its
   President Nicolás Maduro
   <https://www.geopoliticaleconomy.report/p/trump-cia-attack-venezuela-us-war>
   .

Those are the sticks of Trump’s new Big Stick Policy, aimed at Latin
America’s left-wing leaders.

As for the carrots, Trump has pledged to economically bail out right-wing
US allies in the region.

For instance, the Trump administration offered $40 billion to try to save
Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei
<https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/10/25/trump-bailout-argentina-javier-milei/>,
a close Trump ally who has overseen a severe economic crisis.

The US empire’s goals in Latin America

The US government has always meddled in Latin America’s internal affairs.
This is far from new.

The United States overthrew at least 41 governments in Latin America
<https://www.ft.com/content/0dd424de-9992-4d45-ad77-9dc7f75caaf1> from 1898
to 1994, according to research by Columbia University historian John
Coatsworth.

In the past three decades, Washington has backed dozens more coups, coup
attempts, regime-change operations, and “color revolutions” in the region.

The US military has intervened in every single country in Latin America
<https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2022/09/13/us-251-military-interventions-1991/>,
according to data from the Congressional Research Service. (The only
exception is French Guiana, which is a colony of France.)

US imperialism has always been bipartisan in Washington, and has continued
under both Republican and Democratic presidents.

However, Donald Trump has brought back the most overt, aggressive form of
interventionism.

In its flagrant attacks on the sovereignty of Latin America, the US empire
has three main goals.

*Exploit the region’s resources*

One, the US wants to exploit Latin America’s plentiful natural resources,
including oil and natural gas; gold, iron ore, and other minerals;
agriculture; and fresh water. (As the climate crisis worsens, water will
become increasingly important.)

Trump has been very open about the fact that he wants US corporations to
take over and profit from the region’s natural resources.

At a 2023 rally, Trump boasted said he wanted to “take over” Venezuela, and
“we would have gotten all that oil
<https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2023/06/12/trump-venezuela-oil-coup/>”.

*Cut off relations with China*

The second goal of the US empire is to prevent all governments in Latin
America from having close ties with China. Washington would like to cut off
regional relations with Russia and Iran as well, but China is the top
priority.

China is already the number one trading partner of South America, and
economic exchange is growing more and more by the year.

The United States is waging a Second Cold War, or Cold War Two, which seeks
to isolate China. US strategists want to turn not only Latin America but
all of the western hemisphere into an imperial “sphere of influence”.

It is not a coincidence that, in the first trip that Trump’s Secretary of
State Marco Rubio took abroad, he went to Panama, where he successfully
pressured the country to withdraw from China’s global infrastructure project
<https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/02/04/panama-drops-belt-and-road-agreement-with-china-after-us-pressure_6737775_4.html>,
the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
[image: largest trading partner latin america US China map]

The number one trading partner of countries in Latin America

*Install right-wing regimes that keep workers’ wages low, so US
corporations can “friendshore” manufacturing*

Finally, the third goal of the US empire, which is closely related to the
first two, is to topple all independent left-wing governments in Latin
America and replace them with right-wing, oligarch-run regimes that
obediently serve the interests of Washington and US corporations.

These right-wing governments would also keep wages of workers low, so US
corporations can reshore or “friendshore” manufacturing production out of
Asia and into Latin America, which is a major priority for Trump.

US imperial strategists recognize that it is not realistic for the US
itself to re-industrialize and bring back manufacturing jobs, especially in
labor-intensive industries that are prone to unionization — so they instead
plan to exploit low-paid Latin American workers.

Argentina’s libertarian leader Javier Milei is the poster child of the kind
of leader Washington would like running every country in Latin America. His
extreme neoliberal policies, which are being designed by longtime employees
of Wall Street megabank JPMorgan
<https://x.com/BenjaminNorton/status/1980637411857326224>, are rapidly
de-industrializing Argentina
<https://x.com/dw_espanol/status/1979315712716943411>, turning the South
American nation into a resource colony and destroying any local
manufacturers that could possibly compete with US corporations.

Another model for the kind of leader the US empire would like to run all of
Latin America is Ecuador’s right-wing President Daniel Noboa, who is a dual
US citizen and the son of the country’s richest oligarch. Noboa is pushing
through measures that allow the US military to re-open bases in Ecuador
<https://www.resumenlatinoamericano.org/2025/09/06/ecuador-noboa-abre-la-puerta-a-bases-militares-de-ee-uu-y-respalda-la-designacion-de-rubio-como-fto-para-pandillas-ecuatorianas/>
and enter the country at any time, for any reason, without oversight by the
local government.
[image: Javier Milei Argentina Trump Karina IMF]

Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei and his sister and chief of
staff Karina meet with their boss, US President Donald Trump (Credit: White
House photo)
Trump turns the colonial Monroe Doctrine into the Donroe Doctrine

Donald Trump has proudly revived the colonial Monroe Doctrine, a
202-year-old policy that essentially states that Latin America is the
imperial “backyard” of the US empire.

The US government first declared the Monroe Doctrine when it was beginning
to expand its territorial empire to both the west and the south.

>From 1846-48, for instance, the US waged a colonial war of aggression
against Mexico and stole the northern half of its territory, which became
the modern-day US states of Arizona, California, Nevada, Texas, Utah, and
New *Mexico* (that is why it is called *New* Mexico, because it was seized
from “*Old* Mexico”).

Note that these natural resource-rich territories that were stolen from
Mexico were cash cows for the US empire: California is the third-largest US
state by land and has the single biggest economy ($4.1 trillion in GDP),
while Texas has both the second-largest territory and economy ($2.7
trillion in GDP).

With the original Monroe Doctrine, Washington was sending a message to
European colonial empires, warning them that Latin America would be part of
the US empire’s sphere of influence, and that it would not tolerate
European intervention in the region. It was cynically framed as a kind of
colonial anti-imperialism.

Today, the Monroe Doctrine 2.0 uses the same kind of cynical framing,
except now the US empire is telling China that it cannot have relations
with the countries of Latin America.

In fact, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump administration
officials
<https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/trumps-donroe-doctrine-aims-to-dominate-the-americas-b31208dd>
have casually referred to their neocolonial strategy as the “Donroe
Doctrine”.

According to this neocolonial Donroe Doctrine, the Wall Street Journal
wrote, Trump is “treating the hemisphere as an extension of the U.S.
homeland, where Washington will act unilaterally to root out perceived
enemies. Loyalty is rewarded, and defiance can carry a price”.

A more straightforward description was put forward by Pete Hegseth, Trump’s
extremist self-declared secretary of war
<https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/03/07/us-defense-secretary-hegseth-overthrow-china-crusade/>:
“the Americas first”.

The Trump administration has quietly expanded its ultra-nationalist
“America first” slogan into the neocolonial principle of “the Americas
first”, with the US on top and in control — or, as left-wing critics in
Latin America <https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPEXh8tDrxB/> put it, “the
Americas for the North Americans”.

The idea is for the US government to control everything in the western
hemisphere, from Canada (which Trump wants to make “the 51st US state”) and
Greenland (which Trump also wants to colonize) at the top of North America,
down to the southern tip of South America, in the Argentina run by loyal US
asset Javier Milei.

This is precisely why Donald Trump chose lifelong neoconservative war hawk
Marco Rubio to serve as both his secretary of state (head of the State
Department) and national security advisor (chief of the National Security
Council).

Rubio is just the second official in US history to simultaneously serve in
both positions, after notorious war criminal Henry Kissinger.

A former Florida senator, Rubio is the veritable king of the right-wing
Miami *golpistas* (coup-plotters). He has dedicated his entire career to
trying to overthrow the leftist governments in Cuba, Nicaragua, and
Venezuela.
MAGA’s neocolonial slogan for Latin America: Monroe 2.0

The Wall Street Journal described
<https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/trumps-donroe-doctrine-aims-to-dominate-the-americas-b31208dd>
the US government’s neocolonial attacks on Latin America as “Trump’s new
war on terror”.

The newspaper interviewed Steve Bannon, who was the CEO of Trump’s 2016
presidential campaign and served as the US president’s chief strategist
during his first term.

Bannon proudly described Trump’s neocolonial foreign policy as “Monroe 2.0”.

“This is much more sellable to the America First base than the stuff in the
Middle East”, Bannon added, indirectly referring to the US-sponsored
genocide in Palestine and its nonstop wars in West Asia.

The Wall Street Journal noted that “‘Monroe 2.0’ has become a popular
rallying cry across the conservative ecosystem”.

What this demonstrates is that Trump’s far-right, so-called “MAGA” (Make
America Great Again) movement is not actually anti-war or
anti-interventionist. MAGA Republicans happily support US imperialism in
Latin America. They don’t see Latin Americans are equal human beings; they
consider them to be inferior, and treat them all as criminals.

The aggressive attacks on Latin America are by no means a new feature of
Trump’s second term.
[image: President Donald J. Trump and President Moon Jae-in of the Republic
of Korea]

Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and National Security Advisor John
Bolton in April 2019

In the first Trump administration, the US president voluntarily surrounded
himself with neoconservative war hawks like his National Security Advisor
John Bolton, who was one of the architects of the Iraq War in the George W.
Bush administration.

Bolton admitted in a CNN interview that the first Trump White House carried
out a coup attempt in Venezuela.

During that coup attempt in 2019, Bolton “proudly” stated that the Monroe
Doctrine is “alive and well”
<https://theweek.com/speedreads/835854/john-bolton-says-monroe-doctrine-alive-well-history-shows-why-thats-controversial-statement>.
In his 2020 memoir “The Room Where It Happened”, Bolton declared that “it
was time to resurrect” the Monroe Doctrine, claiming that Venezuela “was a
threat due to its Cuba connection and the openings it afforded Russia,
China, and Iran”.

In his first administration, Trump also appointed the neoconservative war
hawk Mike Pompeo as CIA director, then secretary of state. Pompeo, too, cited
the colonial Monroe Doctrine
<https://2017-2021.state.gov/a-foreign-policy-from-the-founding/> as he
oversaw US-backed coup attempts in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba.

US officials have made it as clear as day that they support blatant
colonialism in Latin America.

In a Fox News segment in October 2025, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a
close Trump ally, and pro-Trump host Sean Hannity proposed colonizing
Venezuela and turning it into the 51st US state
<https://www.thedailybeast.com/fox-news-host-sean-hannity-floats-making-yet-another-country-donald-trumps-51st-state/>
.
Trump’s new “war on drugs” is an imperial war based on lies: It is WMDs 2.0

US spy agencies have long had close ties to drug traffickers in Latin
America.

In the 1980s, the CIA used drugs to fund its terror wars against leftist
groups in Central America. In his influential book
<https://archive.org/details/dark-alliance-the-cia-the-con-gary-webb> *Dark
Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion*,
journalist Gary Webb documented the role of the US spy agency in
trafficking cocaine to finance the *Contra* (Counterrevolutionary) death
squads that unleashed terrorism against civilians
<https://www.nytimes.com/1986/01/09/opinion/l-terror-is-the-most-effective-weapon-of-nicaragua-s-contras-938786.html>
to try to overthrow Nicaragua’s socialist Sandinista government.

In his bombshell book
<https://archive.org/details/bigwhiteliedeepc0000levi> *The
Big White Lie: The Deep Cover Operation That Exposed the CIA Sabotage of
the Drug War*, a former agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA),
Michael Levine, showed how US intelligence operatives used drugs and
cartels to advance Washington’s imperial interests in Latin America and
around the world.

To try to justify his neocolonial attacks on Latin America, Donald Trump
has claimed that he is supposedly fighting “drug trafficking”.

This is completely false. It is a lie that is reminiscent of the George W.
Bush administration’s false allegation that Iraq supposedly had “weapons of
mass destruction”, or WMDs.

First of all, it is not cocaine but rather synthetic opioids like fentanyl
that are responsible for the vast majority of drug-related deaths in the US.

Venezuela already is not a major producer of cocaine
<https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/10/20/trump-cia-attack-venezuela-us-war/>,
but it has practically nothing to do with fentanyl.

Journalists at the independent publication Drop Site News
<https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/marco-rubio-secretary-state-push-venezuela-maduro-regime-change-boat-strikes>
spoke with a senior US government official, and reported the following
(emphasis added):

*U.S. intelligence has assessed that little to none of the fentanyl
trafficked to the United States is being produced in Venezuela*, despite
recent claims from the Trump administration, a senior U.S. official
directly familiar with the matter tells Drop Site.

The official noted that many of *the boats targeted for strikes by the
Trump administration do not even have the requisite gasoline or motor
capacity to reach U.S. waters*, dramatically undercutting claims by
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. The claim is backed up by recent
comments made by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who similarly noted that zero
fentanyl is produced in Venezuela.

Even some mainstream Western media outlets, such as the Financial Times
(FT), have admitted that Trump’s war on Venezuela
<https://www.ft.com/content/bd217091-84bb-4af2-b08b-9d9556dbb6d6> is not
actually about stopping the flow of drugs.

“The priority now is to force the departure of top Venezuelan government
figures”, the FT wrote. It added that the Trump administration is making
“the clear threat that if Maduro and his inner circle cling to power, the
Americans may use targeted military force to capture or kill them”.

This is not surprising, given that, during Trump’s first term, Marco Rubio
lobbied the president to launch a US invasion of Venezuela
<https://www.lapoliticaonline.com/mexico/internacionales-mx/n-131858-marco-rubio-agita-al-war-room-de-trump-pide-invadir-venezuela-para-asegurar-los-votos-de-florida/>
.

Today, Rubio is the second-most powerful person in the US government, and
he is now overseeing this neocolonial war.

The FT made it clear that the US has three main goals: overthrowing
Venezuela’s independent leftist government; exploiting the country’s
plentiful natural resources; and cutting off its ties with China, Russia,
and Iran.

“At stake in Venezuela are the world’s largest proven oil reserves and
valuable deposits of gold, diamonds and coltan”, the newspaper stressed.

The FT quoted a wealthy US-backed Venezuelan opposition figure, who
revealed, “The plan now is a capture of Nicolás Maduro. Capture-kill or
capture-arrest and take him out, one way or another”.

So the US empire has two war scenarios for Venezuela: the Panama option, or
the Libya option.

The US invaded Panama in 1989, killed many civilians, overthrew its
government, and arrested its leader Manuel Noriega (who, ironically,
was a longtime
CIA asset
<https://www.reuters.com/article/world/panamas-noriega-cia-spy-turned-drug-running-dictator-idUSKBN18Q0NW/>,
who had spent years trafficking drugs with the backing of US spy agencies).

US-led NATO forces waged a regime-change war in Libya in 2011, killing
anti-colonial leader Muammar Gaddafi, and collapsing the state. Still
today, 14 years later, Libya is a failed state that has been plagued by
endless civil war, and open-air slave markets
<https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-42038451> where African refugees are
bought and sold like cattle.

Either scenario would be catastrophic for the people of Venezuela, but they
are never considered in the war plans made by Washington’s imperial
strategists.
The US government is allied with the worst drug-traffickers in Latin America

The US military killed dozens of people in attacks on boats in the
Caribbean and eastern Pacific in September and October 2025. None of the
victims were formally charged or given a trial.

The Trump administration did not present a shred of evidence proving that
the people it executed were “drug traffickers”.

Among the victims were fishermen from Venezuela, Colombia, and Trinidad and
Tobago.

One of the few leaders in the region who was brave enough to stand up to
the US empire and speak out against its extrajudicial executions was
Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro, the country’s first ever left-wing
leader.

Petro has been particularly outspoken against Trump. In his 2025 speech at
the UN General Assembly, the Colombian president compared the US government
to Nazi Germany and called Trump the “new Hitler”.
[image: petro xi china colombia]

Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro with China’s President Xi Jinping in
October 2023

Colombia has historically been the closest US ally in Latin America. The
country has been governed for decades by corrupt right-wing oligarchs.

Petro is the first modern leader of the country to pursue an independent,
non-aligned foreign policy. He took a historic trip to Beijing in May,
where he signed an agreement for Colombia to join the Belt and Road
Initiative
<https://www.dw.com/en/colombia-signs-up-to-chinas-belt-and-road-initiative/a-72534659>.
This infuriated China hawks
<https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/colombias-china-pivot-raises-u-s-concerns/>
in Washington.

To punish Petro for resisting the US empire and defending his country’s
sovereignty, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on the
democratically elected Colombian president and his family members.

In an angry post on his website Truth Social, Trump viciously attacked
Petro and repeatedly misspelled the name of the country, confusing Colombia
the nation with the US university, Columbia.

In his social media publication, Trump claimed, without any evidence, that
supposedly Petro is an “illegal drug leader”.

This is completely false, and it represented a flagrant attack on the
democratically elected leader of a sovereign, independent country.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a billionaire hedge fund manager from
Wall Street, also echoed Trump’s lies. He incorrectly wrote on Twitter
<https://x.com/SecScottBessent/status/1981798717607837863> that, “Since
President Gustavo Petro came to power, cocaine production in Colombia has
exploded to record high rates”. This is a lie.

Independent experts have shown that cocaine production has fallen under
President Petro.

In fact, the opposite is true: cocaine production significantly increased
<https://x.com/GuillaumeLong/status/1981970094688231475> under Colombia’s
previous right-wing leader, Iván Duque, who was a close US ally and friend
of Trump.

During Trump’s first term, Duque’s ultra-conservative government in
Colombia played a key role in the US-led coup attempt in neighboring
Venezuela.

Duque’s political mentor was the most powerful figure in Colombian
politics, the right-wing oligarch Álvaro Uribe.

Uribe served as president of Colombia from 2002 to 2010. During this time,
the US-backed Colombian military murdered more than 6,400 innocent civilians
<https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-67005102> and dressed them up
in the uniforms of revolutionary socialist groups, falsely claiming they
had been guerrillas, in what was known as the infamous “false positives”
scandal.

Uribe was the closest US ally in Latin America. He obediently did
everything Washington wanted.
[image: alvaro uribe george bush colombia]

Colombia’s drug-trafficking President Álvaro Uribe with US President George
W Bush

Uribe also happens to be one of the most powerful drug traffickers in the
modern history of Latin America.

The US government has known for decades that Uribe is a drug lord, yet it
has happily supported him, because he has always loyally served US
interests in the region.

A 1991 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report
<https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB131/index.htm> described Uribe as
one of “the more important Colombian narco-traffickers”, identifying him as
a “close personal friend of Pablo Escobar” who was “dedicated to
collaboration with the Medellín [drug] cartel at high government levels”.

There is a mountain of evidence substantiating this. The Associated Press
reported <https://apnews.com/general-news-ad36c6626bec45c8876de3b9b4241587>
in 2018, “As Alvaro Uribe, Colombia’s most powerful politician, was making
his rise to the presidency more than two decades ago, U.S. officials were
repeatedly told that the up-and-coming politician had ties to the nation’s
drug cartels, according to newly declassified State Department cables”.

Despite Uribe’s well-documented history of drug trafficking, the Trump
administration has continued to publicly defend him to this day.

While the Trump administration falsely claims that its war on Venezuela is
about stopping the flow of drugs, Rubio has heaped praise on the
drug-trafficker Uribe.

“Colombia’s justice has prevailed as former President Uribe is absolved
after years of the political witch hunt against him and his family”, Marco
Rubio tweeted on 21 October, adding the hashtag “Uribe is innocent”.

Back at the beginning of the US war on Venezuela, in July, Rubio tweeted,
“Former Colombian President Uribe’s only crime has been to tirelessly fight
and defend his homeland”.

This is demonstrably false.

In addition to Uribe’s work with drug cartels, it has been known for
decades that Uribe and his family collaborate closely with right-wing death
squads, which kill left-wing activists, labor organizers, land defenders,
and indigenous leaders in Colombia, on behalf of large corporations,
landlords, and oligarchs.

In fact, a right-wing paramilitary group in Colombia used a ranch belonging
to the Uribe family
<https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/news/colombia/2018-07-09/former-colombian-presidents-ranch-paramilitary-base-according-new-testimony>
as its base of operations.

What all of this demonstrates is that the US government’s policy in Latin
America is fundamentally based on lies.

The United States has for decades supported the worst drug-traffickers in
the region, to destabilize independent, left-wing governments and promote
the interests of US corporations.

Trump’s neocolonial war on Latin America today is certainly not new. Every
US president has committed imperial crimes in the region.

However, the difference with Trump is that he is proud of the fact that he
is a colonialist. He doesn’t hide it. He doesn’t regurgitate cynical
propaganda about “democracy” and “human rights”.

Trump says the quiet part loud. He has taken the mask off of the US empire
and shown its true face: an ugly visage based on lies, exploitation, and
war.
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