U.S. Special Forces had barely bundled Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro out of Caracas before Latin American leaders lined up to opine on his ouster, the U.S.-led regime change in the oil-rich country and the apparent return of gunboat diplomacy in the Western Hemisphere.
Leftist presidents denounced U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to remove Mr. Maduro during an audacious U.S. military raid in the early hours of Jan. 3, calling it dangerous and destabilizing. “Aggression against the sovereignty of Venezuela is aggression against the sovereignty of Latin America,” Colombian President Gustavo Petro posted on X.
“I know perfectly well that what Donald Trump has done is aberrant. [The United States] has destroyed the rule of law worldwide,” Mr. Petro said. “They have urinated in blood on the sacred sovereignty of all of Latin America and the Caribbean.”
After the raid in Venezeula, Mr. Trump sent subsequent warnings to Mexico and Colombia—alleging that drug cartels controlled Mexico and calling Mr. Petro, a frequent critic of the U.S. president, “a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States.”
“He’s not going to be doing it very long,” he added, showing little hesitation to add to the regional disquiet.
That unease was only exacerbated by comments suggesting the United States was ready to seize Greenland, and by various efforts Mr. Trump has made to define his “Donroe Doctrine.” His assertion of U.S. hemispheric domination represented a contemporary riff on the Monroe Doctrine, which warned European powers 200 years ago to stay out of the Americas.
Pope Leo XIV, meanwhile, sounded a general alarm, telling diplomats, “War is back in vogue, and a zeal for war is spreading.” Of Venezuela, he said, during the Angelus on Jan. 4, “The good of the beloved Venezuelan people must prevail over every other consideration.”
But more than a half dozen right-leaning, Latin American heads of state supported the U.S. intervention, including the pro-Trump leaders of Ecuador, Argentina and El Salvador.
Maduro fatigue
“The arrest of Nicolás Maduro is great news for the region,” Chilean president-elect José Antonio Kast said on X. “His permanence in power, sustained by an illegitimate narco-regime, expelled more than 8 million Venezuelans and destabilized Latin America through drug trafficking and organized crime.”
The incoming president is hardly alone in his distaste for Mr. Maduro and the regime that remains in power in Caracas. Analysts report that regional good will toward Venezuela has slowly evaporated after its economic collapse in the 2010s led to millions of migrants relocating across Latin America. (More than 764,000 Venezuelans found their way to the United States, according to the Migration Policy Institute.)
In Peru the general public began to weary of Maduro “because of the whole migration issue,” said José Gordillo S.J., executive director of Jesuit Migration Service in Peru. “People recognize that there is a real problem in Venezuela and that has led to many Venezuelan citizens coming [to Peru].”
Father Gordillo added that many Latin Americans have come to “erroneously” associate higher levels of immigration with rising crime—something right-wing candidates have capitalized on during recent election campaigns.
Even with Mr. Maduro’s ouster, he expected few Venezuelans to return to their country of origin. “Many have already made their lives [in Peru],” Father Gordillo said.
What comes next in Venezuela is uncertain. The Trump administration has sidelined Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado, the popular Venezuelan opposition leader, opting instead to work with Mr. Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez. Mr. Trump has spoken effusively of boosting Venezuelan oil output and urged U.S. companies to use this opportunity to return to Venezuela for first dibs on its vast oil reserves.
A powerful state violently imposing itself on another nation to extract its natural resources is something last seen in the region during the 19th century, Father Gordillo said. He admits to “mixed feelings” about the U.S. intervention—“not because of Maduro, because I actually think Maduro has done a lot of damage to Venezuela—but because of this kind of brutal power that Trump is wielding.”
Mr. Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, are facing drug charges in New York. His removal from power has divided U.S. public opinion. An Economist/YouGov survey found 44 percent of U.S. respondents opposed sacking the former Venezuelan president, while one-third supported it and 23 percent were “not sure.” Republicans were mostly warming to Mr. Maduro’s overthrow, the poll found, while Democrats remained steadfastly opposed.
The new U.S. intervention may have revived memories of yanqui intervention in a region long-aggrieved by U.S. interference and support for military dictatorships during the Cold War. But among the general public in Latin America, polls show surprising support for the U.S. ouster of Mr. Maduro—higher than in the United States itself.
An Altica Encuesta survey found at least 50 percent support for the arrest of Mr. Maduro in eight of the nine Latin American countries it polled—with Mexico as the only exception. Analysts attribute the sanguine attitude on U.S. military action to regional fatigue with Mr. Maduro, who had an approval rating of just 14 percent among all Latin Americans, according to an October poll by Bloomberg and AtlasIntel.
The Venezuelan regime has sold itself as revolutionary-socialist since being ushered into power by Hugo Chávez in 1999. The former president, who died in 2013, began a social and political movement that came to be known as Chavismo. But over the long term, it did not prove to be a formula for broad-based social improvements for average Venezuelans.
Researchers suggest that the oil-rich state’s economic failure has undermined public faith in Latin America’s anti-imperial left. Venezuela’s economy sank by nearly 80 percent under Mr. Maduro.
Latin Americans have come to be similarly skeptical of the region’s moderate left, which failed to denounce human rights abuses and electoral frauds in Venezuela. Foremost among such frauds was the 2024 presidential vote, which the opposition won, according to vote tallies collected by opposition campaign workers.
As president, Chávez was not shy about meddling in the affairs of his neighbors and Mr. Maduro had followed his lead, plying neighbors like Cuba with cheap oil and supporting acolytes who won power in Ecuador and Bolivia.
“This is a regime that had fomented chaos, that had contributed to the migration of 8 million people,” said Ryan Berg, director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It spun criminal networks whose tentacles affected just about every country in the region and started financing campaigns supporting certain left-wing candidates.”
Because of the instability promoted by Chavismo policies, people across Latin America “started to support anything that would undermine [the Chavistas] and eventually remove them, to the point where there was eventually more Latin American support for Mr. Maduro’s removal than there was in the U.S.”
A hemispheric shift to the right
The increasing support for ousting Mr. Maduro was accompanied by a hemispheric shift to the political right. The collapse of Venezuela and the Chavista regime’s thuggery and alleged ties to criminal groups made Mr. Maduro a useful foil for conservative campaigners across Latin America, according to political analysts. Conservative and openly pro-Trump candidates have won office in El Salvador, Ecuador, Argentina, Paraguay and Chile, promising strong ties with the United States, the enforcement of immigration laws, and crackdowns on crime, gangs and drug cartels.
“The left is very discredited in Latin America and it’s because of the performance of its governments,” said Rafael Archondo, an academic and former director of Fides, a news outlet supported by Bolivia’s Jesuits. “People suffered in Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador due to what the left did in each country. They know what Chavismo is,” he added.
In Bolivia, the Movement Toward Socialism party was voted out late last year. It was founded by former president Evo Morales, the country’s first Indigenous Aymara president. Mr. Morales was a close Venezuelan ally and an implacably anti-American figure, ruling for nearly all of the past 20 years before losing power amid inflighting and economic collapse.
Ecuador was also closely aligned with Venezuela under President Rafael Correa (now a fugitive living in Europe, where he maintains his innocence after a public corruption conviction), but it has swung right amid rising drug-cartel violence. Argentina’s Peronist movement largely aligned with Venezuela but became discredited itself because of recurring economic crises and was dislodged from power by Javier Milei, an outspoken Trump ally in 2023.
And last December, Chile voted in Mr. Kast, a far-right politician. He takes office in March after campaigning on promises to combat crime, build a border wall and expel immigrants—mostly Venezuelans and Haitians.
Mr. Kast “managed to connect with citizens’ feelings of weariness because of insecurity,” said Pablo Walker, S.J., chaplain for Jesuit Migration Service in Chile.
“Chile is one of the safest countries on the continent,” Father Walker said, but its president-elect still managed to link social unrest, public corruption and high-profile criminal incidents to “irregular migration,” replicating a campaign strategy that had proved successful for others in the hemisphere, including Mr. Trump. Television images of immigration raids in the United States, he added, caused alarm in Chile as migrants wondered if similar tactics might be deployed in South America.
“His campaign focus,” Father Walker explained, “was [establishing] an emergency government in the face of a security crisis, attributed mainly to irregular migration.”
Openly aligning with Mr. Trump has proved a positive in some parts of Latin America. And Mr. Trump’s intervention appears to have swung some elections in favor of his preferred candidates, according to analysts.
The Department of the Treasury provided a $20 billion currency swap to Argentina prior to October’s midterm elections as the country’s peso swooned, an impending collapse that imperiled Mr. Milei’s libertarian project.
In December, Mr. Trump pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted in a U.S. court on drug-trafficking charges. The U.S. president subsequently endorsed Nasry Asfura, a candidate from Mr. Hernández’s National Party, helping him emerge victorious in a tight presidential election last December. Rixi Moncada, the candidate for the ruling Libre Party, finished a distant third (a recount is pending) in the vote and charged that Mr. Trump’s interference in the election represented an “electoral coup.”
But Father Germán Calix, former director of Cáritas Honduras, believes the democratic socialism promoted by Libre and the left-wing jargon of its candidate proved incomprehensible to Honduran voters. According to Father Calix, Libre’s reflexive anti-Americanism failed to move a population that depends heavily on remittances from family members living and working in the United States.
“Many undecided people from the National Party and many people who have migrant relatives decided to vote for the National Party” after Mr. Trump’s endorsement, he said.
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