“The stakes are high, but we can take courage from the amazing record of the Latin American revolutions and the pioneering role they have played for the global left.”
The Morning Star’s Ben Chacko was amongst the speakers to address this year’s Latin America Conference. You can read an edited version of his speech below.
Solidarity with Latin America seems more urgent in 2026 than at any time I can remember. This year began with the shocking news of the first-ever US bombing of a South American country — Venezuela — and, we learned soon afterwards, the almost unbelievable kidnapping of its president and his wife.
If Gaza has been a test case for the destruction of international law — including through US attacks on international courts trying to uphold it, and now with his Board of Peace being pitched as an alternative to the United Nations, itself controlled directly by the thug in the White House and his plutocrat friends — then Venezuela is a test case too.
The lethal bombing of boats across the Caribbean accused, without evidence, of smuggling drugs, was the showcase of Pete Hegseth’s “maximum lethality, not tepid legality” mantra, the explicit rejection of international law. Trump’s brazen theft of a Venezuelan oil tanker headed for Cuba last year — accompanied by his blasé admission “I guess we’ll keep it” when asked what would happen to the oil — was not the first US act of piracy in these waters, but a more open and shameless one than ever before.
And Trump’s rants about Venezuela — where his greed for oil takes centre stage, the bogus claims about drug-smuggling an afterthought and the old lies about US aggression being motivated by humanitarian concerns being dropped — show we are in a new era of imperialism unmasked, a might-is-right world the US president is trying to create where national sovereignty and international law are things of the past.
This is not just about Venezuela. The noose is tightening around Cuba as we speak. Within hours of the Venezuela attack, Trump had issued threats against Cuba, Colombia and Mexico. An excellent article by Lee Brown in the Morning Star outlines the US determination to reassert dominion over the whole of the Americas.
This is the platform for yet another “American century,” as or more violent than the last. When the National Security Strategy was published last November some saw it as a sign the US was retreating from its ambitions as the globally dominant power, was planning to carve the world up into spheres of influence, with its renewed focus on the Americas signalling a retreat from Europe, Africa, the Middle and Far East, a potential carve-up of the world into spheres of influence with other great powers.
The Morning Star argued that this was to misread the document and Trump’s actions. The Sharm el-Sheikh conference and the Board of Peace do not indicate any retreat from US power projection in the Middle East or its unlimited support for its genocidal ally Israel. The strategy talks at length of maintaining Pacific naval dominance, increasing US military access to ports and bases across Asia. We know that Trump bombed Nigeria on Christmas Day and is currently threatening devastating war against Iran.
There is no retreat. Rather, reasserting US dominance over Latin America is the stepping stone to reasserting its dominance worldwide. Its global rivalry with China is at the heart of this: Trump’s first acts of international bullying last year involved imposing a renewed US military presence on the Panama Canal and booting out a Hong Kong-based company there.
The fixation in the NSS with forcing “non-hemispheric actors” out of Latin America is first and foremost about China, which, as we know, has been an investor in and partner to many left-leaning American countries, including Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba.
On one level, this is old-fashioned imperialism — directly about the control of resources and markets. The US wants to keep China out so it can monopolise the oil, minerals and elements key to high-tech manufacturing. Its need to control fossil fuel resources is increased because of China’s huge lead in renewables, and the reactionary opposition to green energy that is an ideological feature of the Trump movement. US officials have also referenced the enormous energy needs of AI technologies, another field of intense competition with China.
On another, though, it is about crushing the rise of the global South, in which China plays a key role. It is a pillar of the BRICS alliance, one of whose founding members is the South American giant Brazil. Its Belt & Road Initiative has supplanted the World Bank as the world’s biggest source of development loans, giving countries an alternative to an international financial system controlled by Washington.
Washington needs to cut South America off from China because it needs to ensure the BRICs fail: that there is no possibility of a new world order in which countries are free to pursue independent development, choose their own alliances or exercise sovereignty over their resources. That is why South America is the first target of the Trump administration and a battleground on which the fate of Trump’s new world order could be decided.
The stakes are high, but we can take courage from the amazing record of the Latin American revolutions and the pioneering role they have played for the global left.
The resilience and strength of the Cuban Revolution remained a beacon after European socialism collapsed, disorienting much or most of the world socialist movement in the 1990s.
By the end of the decade, Venezuela was pursuing the first major post-Soviet socialist revolution. The “end of history” proclaimed by the neoliberals was nothing of the kind. Venezuela paved the way for a “pink tide” across Latin America, the first continent to hit back against the global triumph of capitalism. Che’s old slogan, Another World is Possible, was renewed across a continent, bringing new concepts to a socialism that in the 21st century must reckon with concerns around ecology and sustainability that loom larger than a century ago — as we saw in Bolivia with its concept of constitutional rights for nature itself.
There have been as many setbacks as steps forward. Latin America has also led the way for the new right, with Javier Milei an inspiration to Trump as Pinochet was for Thatcher and Reagan. Revolution has been rolled back in Ecuador, Peru, and now Bolivia; Chile has fallen again to the far right. Reactions to renewed US aggression are divided.
But all that just underlines the way this continent is a crucible for the whole world. Its battles are global battles. A cry of the Chilean student movement in the last decade was that neoliberalism was born in Chile and would die in Chile. The fight is still raging, and they could still be proven right.
- Ben Chacko is the Editor of the Morning Star.
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