Over the last ten weeks, analysts have debated whether the United States was justified in extracting Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from Caracas. Washington’s defenders point out that Maduro was an authoritarian whose terrible policies immiserated Venezuelans and sent millions fleeing into neighboring countries. Its critics, meanwhile, note that the United States violated Venezuela’s territorial integrity, running afoul of international law. Both sides make strong points: Maduro’s leadership was illegitimate, yes, but so was Washington’s intervention.

Ultimately, it is good for Venezuela that Maduro is gone. But his tenure should not have ended like this—and it didn’t have to. When Maduro brazenly stole his country’s 2024 elections, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Colombian President Gustavo Petro, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and U.S. President Joe Biden had a chance to push him out of office. Yet they didn’t. Instead, Lula, Petro, López Obrador, and Biden were unwilling to pressure Maduro either because of a misguided commitment to principles of nonintervention or simply because of apathy or ideological alignment. They all condemned Maduro with varying degrees of vigor, but they refused to take tangible action. As a result, Maduro fortified his hold on power. By the time U.S. President Donald Trump returned to office in 2025, American military action appeared to be the only clear way to remove Venezuela’s dictator.

This failure means that Latin America is now stuck in a mess of its own making. The region is better off without Maduro, but Venezuela’s future remains uncertain, and all the pernicious consequences of his reign remain: a mass exodus of Venezuelans, border conflicts, and, relatedly, the rise of guerrilla groups in neighboring Colombia. The Cuban government, which depended on Venezuela for oil, is now on the brink of collapse. And Trump, emboldened by his success with Maduro, is menacing other regional leaders and scouring the hemisphere to root out Chinese influence. Colombia and Cuba may be the two most vulnerable countries, but almost no Latin American state is truly safe from U.S. pressure. Trump has repeatedly threatened Mexico. Three senior Chilean officials lost their U.S. visas for working too closely with Chinese companies. And Peru could end up in hot water for making deals with Beijing-controlled firms.

Latin America’s countries are not powerful enough to handle U.S. pressure and the fallout from Venezuela on their own; the region will have to overcome its divisions and act together. In the 1990s, most of Latin America’s large countries supported free trade, democratic rule, and market economies. They acted together to fight against electoral tampering, and they helped form the Inter-American Democratic Charter. But then Maduro’s predecessor—Hugo Chávez—consolidated power in Venezuela and began railing against governments that he deemed insufficiently left wing. Soon, his grandstanding encouraged countries to either identify with the left or the right, and that polarization has not yet abated. In fact, many of the region’s conservative leaders, such as Argentine President Javier Milei and El Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele, are exacerbating it today. For the region to speak with a single voice, its governments do not need to agree on everything or even most things. But they do need to find common ground on matters of foreign policy. Otherwise, Latin American governments will simply stand by as Washington does what it wants to its neighbors—and to them. The irrelevance of the region’s governments in the world will be confirmed by their insignificance at home.

A DISASTER IN THE MAKING

In many ways, the extraction of Maduro began on July 28, 2024, the day of Venezuela’s most recent presidential election. It was the best chance Venezuela’s opposition had to get him out of office. Maduro, after all, had become extremely unpopular over his decade in power, thanks largely to the country’s historic economic collapse. The opposition candidate and former diplomat Edmundo González, who was running in place of the disqualified opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado, was broadly respected. González and Machado knew that Maduro would try to rig the vote. But their supporters rigorously tracked and tallied the country’s ballots, which allowed them to report the results. When they did, they found that González had won with nearly 70 percent of the vote.

Yet Venezuela’s election authorities declared Maduro the victor anyway. In response, people from across the country took to the streets. Regional leaders demanded that Maduro produce tally sheets proving his victory. But Venezuela’s two neighbors—Brazil and Colombia—ultimately did not sanction him or apply any other real pressure to make him validate his win, and he refused to do so. López Obrador, then Mexico’s popular president, was of similarly little use. And Cuba never sought to convince Maduro, its client, that it was wise to step down.

Latin American countries weren’t the only ones that failed. The United States has feuded with the Venezuelan government for years, sanctioning its officials and economy and condemning its leadership. In the wake of the election, the Biden administration could have upped the pressure, threatening to quarantine Venezuela’s oil exports, for example. But Washington quickly made it clear it would not contemplate such measures, preemptively ceding U.S. leverage. Biden, along with Lula, Petro, and López Obrador, also refused to mobilize the Organization of American States behind a resolution threatening sanctions and isolation against Maduro’s regime, invoking the Inter-American Democratic Charter. Such a resolution could have also increased the pressure. At a minimum, it would have created the legal justification for using force, even if that justification was not entirely plausible.

These countries did make an effort to get Maduro to rerun the election. And in the weeks following the vote, they seemed to succeed. The foreign minister of a major Latin American country told me that both Maduro and Machado agreed to hold a new contest, conducted under international supervision and with an impartial electoral authority. The Biden administration also gave the plan its blessing. But Lula’s envoy in Caracas, Celso Amorim, publicized the deal, and it fell through. A frustrated López Obrador subsequently pulled out of the mediation effort, and the entire endeavor collapsed. As a result, when Trump’s team arrived in office, it felt it had carte blanche to handle Maduro as it saw fit. About a year later, U.S. helicopters were making their way to Caracas.

PROXIMITY AND POWER

Maduro’s defenestration holds many consequences for Latin America. First and foremost, it marks the arrival of Trump’s “Americas first” foreign policy. The president’s administration now owns Venezuela; if the country breaks, the White House will have to put it back together. Washington will thus be more focused on Latin America than it was before. The Trump administration—or indeed its successors—may also more readily choose to intervene in other countries in the region. After all, one of Trump’s main reasons for reasserting Washington’s supremacy in Latin America is to keep China out—a bipartisan ambition.

Washington’s attempt at promoting U.S. hegemony in the hemisphere will probably prove successful in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America. With the exception of post-1959 Cuba, these countries have fallen within the United States’ sphere of influence since the nineteenth century, and they are extremely dependent on their northern neighbor for trade, foreign investment, tourism, and defense. As a result, Trump does not need to do much to limit Chinese influence there. In fact, Mexico imposed 50 percent tariffs on all Chinese imports at the end of 2025, before officials began the renegotiation of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade deal. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum understood that it made sense to preemptively make concessions, given that her country is extraordinarily dependent on the United States for its well-being. Seventy percent of Mexico’s electric power, for example, comes from natural gas—and 60 percent of that gas comes from Texas.

In South America, however, Washington’s efforts to assert its dominance will prove more challenging. China has become the largest trading partner for Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela—which is to say most of the continent—mainly through its purchases of commodities. Chinese state-owned companies have huge investment stakes in all these places, and Beijing is the largest foreign investor in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru. The Biden and Trump administrations have even alleged that a Chinese satellite station in Argentine Patagonia, the Chinese-controlled port of Chancay in Peru, and a sophisticated Chinese telescope in the Chilean desert have military purposes. Such ties make it harder for the United States to coerce South American governments.

Washington’s policies are deepening Latin America’s divisions.

But China’s involvement in this area is exactly why Trump might target the region. After all, if Beijing remains a major player in South America, his vision of “American dominance,” as he calls it, would be little more than rhetoric. The president has already started his anti-Chinese campaign in Venezuela. In exchange for lifting Washington’s blockade and easing sanctions, for example, Trump has forced Caracas to stop selling oil to Chinese firms. He might next turn to Colombia, the other major country that is part of both the Caribbean basin and South America. The Colombian economy is still more tied to Washington’s than it is to Beijing’s, and it is a long-standing U.S. military and security partner. But Petro has tried to draw closer to China, and he has made feuding with Trump a key part of his political persona. Trump, in turn, has suggested that he might attack Colombia, alleging that Petro is engaging in drug trafficking. The two leaders have recently improved their relationship, yet Petro will be leaving office in August, and it is unclear who will succeed him. In the interim, rather than attacking Colombia, Trump may well attempt to influence the election’s outcome (as he did in Argentina and Honduras in 2025) to ensure that an anti-Chinese, pro-U.S. candidate wins the presidency.

Trump might also go after countries that have much deeper ties to China, notably Peru. That country has experienced substantial political turmoil, cycling through seven presidents in ten years. Its most recent leader—José Jerí—was just removed from office because of a secret meeting he held with Chinese business officials. A Chinese government firm owns 60 percent of the port of Chancay, and U.S. authorities maintain that the port’s multibillion dollar installations are designed not just to export Peruvian copper but also to serve as a base for the Chinese navy. Trump might therefore try to strong-arm Lima into kicking Beijing’s company out. Washington, after all, successfully forced Panama to take control of the erstwhile Chinese-owned ports along its coastline. In this case, as with Colombia, Trump might involve himself in the country’s upcoming elections, conditioning proper relations with Washington on the Peruvians electing an anti-Chinese, pro-U.S. leader.

Trump might also call in favors from candidates he has helped, such as Milei. The U.S. president, for example, probably could persuade the Argentine president to shut down or supervise more closely the Chinese-owned satellite station. But Trump will experience far more resistance if he tries to convince Milei to stop exporting soybeans to China. It is by far Argentina’s most important cash crop and source of currency, and there is no one else to sell it to. Trump will also have much less success pressuring Brazil, Latin America’s largest economy. Brazil maintained strong ties to China even under pro-U.S. and pro-Trump President Jair Bolsonaro, who governed from 2018 to 2022. Unlike the rest of the continent, Brazil can actually afford to go it alone.

A HOUSE DIVIDED

Right now, Washington’s policies are deepening Latin America’s divisions between both right and left and north and south. Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and El Salvador—ruled by right-wing populists—all applauded Maduro’s extraction, whereas Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico condemned it. But the praise was louder from El Salvador than from Ecuador, and the criticism more muted in Mexico than in Brazil. Central American states, it seems, understood they had more to gain and more to lose from their relations with U.S. officials.

The region has not always been disjointed. When the United States invaded Panama in 1989, for instance, the Organization of American States closed ranks in opposition, condemning the attack in a 20-to-1 vote. But today, Latin America risks being paralyzed by its schisms, rendering it unable to address the many challenges it now confronts. Consider Venezuela. Maduro may be gone, but his regime remains in power. The government still needs to liberate all political prisoners; end repression; reestablish freedom of assembly, expression, circulation, and organization; allow for the return of exiled opposition leaders; and hold new elections. But Trump appears uninterested in forcing Caracas to take any of these steps. Instead, he is focused on getting the country’s oil. Democratizing Venezuela, then, falls to Latin America. It should start by reembracing some of the principles it broadly held during the 1990s—namely, collective support for democracy and human rights. That means it should insist on a new Venezuelan presidential vote in early 2027 at the latest and the immediate restoration of all human and political rights for Venezuelans. Moreover, it should push Washington to eventually end the virtual protectorate it has established over the regime of acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez, which has brought the country’s oil and other resources under U.S. receivership.

Latin America will also need unity in order to manage Cuba, the other regional country most obviously at risk of descending into chaos. The island is already in worse economic and social condition than it has been at any point since the revolution of 1959, with shortages of food, gasoline, electricity, water, medicine, and garbage collection services, and its situation is likely to worsen. Both Trump and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio seem to have the dictatorship in their sights, and they are tightening travel and remittance restrictions to the country, establishing a virtual quarantine on oil, and attempting to persuade the European Union to also cut the country off. It is now impossible to rule out the possibility that Washington will attack the island outright, even though the risk of U.S. casualties would be much greater than it was in Caracas.

To avert catastrophe, Cuba’s neighbors to the west and south must push Havana to make a peaceful, gradual, and fair democratic transition with Washington’s support. This will not be easy: most of Latin America’s left-of-center governments are at least somewhat sympathetic to Cuba’s leaders, and they might insist on economic reforms without regime change, the equivalent of former U.S. President Barack Obama’s approach and an outcome that is, in principle, unacceptable to the Trump administration. Right-of-center leaders, however, might insist on an immediate, complete, and radical political transition. Cuba will obviously not accept this, but neither will Brazil, Colombia, or Mexico. If these states could set aside their differences, they might be able to assemble a proposal that brings about regime change in Cuba in exchange for immunity for the current leadership; the conservation of some of the 1959 communist revolution’s legacy, such as universal, free health care and education; and a major international reconstruction program largely financed by the United States. But if they can’t, the island will continue to be strangled by Washington, with Latin America again watching from the sidelines.

Today, such cooperation might seem out of reach, given just how divided the region is ideologically and geographically. But its countries must try. If they don’t, they will lose power over their own neighborhood’s future on other, perhaps more substantial topics. For example, in the great U.S.-Chinese rivalry, Latin American states will be unable to forge ties and relations that suit their interests. Instead, they will be forced to negotiate on an individual basis with Washington to determine what kind of Chinese presence in their countries is acceptable. Most important, the region will keep compounding its irrelevance in the world arena, despite large deposits of resources and great human talent. That is an outcome that every country in the hemisphere, no matter its leanings, should want to avoid.

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