President Trump's pressure campaign against Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro is the latest chapter in a long history of U.S. intervention in the Caribbean basin, rooted in the 1823 Monroe Doctrine but fully realized in the 20th century — ostensibly to protect U.S. interests and counter communism.
In recent months, U.S. strikes on boats that the White House says were transporting Venezuelan drugs, the seizure of Venezuelan oil tankers, and most recently, a CIA strike on a Venezuelan dock reflect a "Big Stick" approach to regional policy that dates back more than a century to President Theodore Roosevelt. In it, Roosevelt built on the Monroe Doctrine, which was formulated originally by President James Monroe to warn European powers away from interfering in the region.
Roosevelt, who himself fought against Spain in Cuba in 1898, expanded that doctrine to assert a U.S. right to act unilaterally as a regional policeman — using military force to reinforce diplomatic pressure to advance its interests.
Following World War II, and especially since the Cuban Revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power in Havana, that focus shifted primarily to stopping what Washington said was the potential spread of communism in the region.
"During the Cold War, intervention was mostly covert. In the 1980s, you begin to see more overt actions," says Eduardo Gamarra, a professor of politics and international relations at Florida International University.
U.S. policy in the region was one of strategic denial, Gamarra says. That meant deterring non-American actors in the region.
"In the 1800s, that meant Europeans; in the 20th century, especially after World War II, it meant the Soviet Union," he says.
This led to a shared post-World War II notion between the U.S. and many right-wing governments in Latin America that communism "was not indigenous to the Americas," says Edward Murphy, a professor of history at Michigan State University. "They justified this through the logic of the Monroe Doctrine, because this was a foreign ideology that needed to be extirpated from the Americas."
By the mid-1980s, the U.S. "transitioned from the Cold War to the drug war" in the region, according to Gamarra.
U.S. policy, underpinned by the Monroe Doctrine, has shaped the region in the decades since World War II, leading to overt and covert interventions that have often — but not always — resulted in bad outcomes and unintended consequences.
Here are five examples:
The overthrow of Guatemala's government
By 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was concerned about a Guatemalan land-reform program that nationalized property owned by the U.S.-based United Fruit Company (now Chiquita Brands International). The initiative was carried out under Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz, the nation's second democratically elected leader, whose term began in 1951. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles accused Árbenz of establishing what he described as a "communist-type reign of terror."
The U.S., Gamarra says, "responded by undermining Árbenz and supporting a military coup."
The CIA launched a successful covert plan of psychological warfare designed to destabilize the Árbenz government while backing a coup to topple it. Coup leader Carlos Castillo Armas, who came to power after Árbenz, was the first in a series of brutal U.S.-backed authoritarians to rule Guatemala before civilian rule returned in the mid-1980s.
The U.S. overthrow of Árbenz emboldened right-wing elements in the country to engage in a campaign of repression, Murphy says. "What the overthrow of Árbenz really did was fortify illiberal forces in Guatemala."
Murphy says what happened in Guatemala became a model for other repressive right-wing governments in the region, such as Chile, to follow.
The Bay of Pigs invasion
Shortly after taking office in 1961, President John F. Kennedy approved a covert plan to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who had grown increasingly aligned with the Soviet Union since seizing power two years earlier. The secret operation, originally developed under the Eisenhower administration, relied on a force of about 1,400 CIA-trained Cuban exiles who were expected to seize the Bay of Pigs on Cuba's southern coast and spark a popular uprising against Castro.
Instead, the Bay of Pigs invasion ended in disaster. Castro ordered some 20,000 troops to the beach, forcing most of the U.S.-backed invasion force to surrender. More than 100 were killed. The incident became a major embarrassment for the United States.
The Bay of Pigs convinced Castro and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that the United States would attempt another invasion of Cuba. Castro convinced Khrushchev he needed Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba to deter further U.S. aggression, precipitating the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The resulting confrontation over the missiles brought the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war before Kennedy and Khrushchev worked out a delicate compromise that averted a direct conflict between the two superpowers.
It was an extreme Cold War confrontation that came close to a nuclear catastrophe, Gamarra says. The long-term consequences, he says, resulted in "a misguided embargo that hasn't changed the regime and instead consolidated Cuba's relationship with the Soviet Union and now Russia."
The U.S. invasion of Grenada
By 1983, the southern Caribbean island of Grenada was undergoing a period of political instability after the 1979 overthrow of Prime Minister Eric Gairy by Maurice Bishop, a socialist leader aligned with Cuba and the Soviet Union.
"Cuba was making inroads across the Caribbean," Gamarra says.
President Ronald Reagan's White House was suspicious of Havana's involvement in the construction of a large international airport in Grenada, which had only gained independence from Britain in 1974.
In its first major combat deployment since the end of the Vietnam War, U.S. forces landed on Oct. 25, 1983, as part of Operation Urgent Fury. Reagan cited regional security concerns and the need to protect U.S. medical students attending the island's St. George's University School of Medicine as justification for intervention.
Although U.S. forces encountered stronger resistance and more logistical difficulties than expected, military operations took only a few days. The U.S. helped install a provisional government and elections were held in 1984.
Since then, Grenada has experienced stable, democratic governance, with elections and peaceful transfers of power. Today, it is generally regarded as more politically stable than most of its Caribbean neighbors.
U.S. support for the Nicaraguan Contras
After decades of U.S. support for the oppressive and corrupt Somoza family that ruled Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza was overthrown in 1979 during a popular uprising led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). Daniel Ortega, a committed Marxist at the time and prominent FSLN leader, assumed control of the government.
President Reagan opposed the Sandinistas and in 1981 issued a covert directive for U.S. aid to support a group of anti-Sandinista insurgents known as the Contras.
In 1982, the U.S. Congress passed the Boland Amendment to block U.S. support for the Contras. Despite these restrictions, the Reagan administration secretly continued aiding the group through a scheme that illegally sold weapons to Iran and funneled the proceeds to the Nicaraguan rebels. When the operation was exposed, it became one of the most significant scandals of Reagan's presidency: the Iran-Contra affair.
"The Contra war was devastating — socially, economically, and politically," says Murphy.
Despite efforts to topple him, Ortega remained in power and won a decisive electoral victory in 1984. He lost in 1990 to Violeta Chamorro, a wealthy, U.S.-educated newspaper owner who served as president until 1997.
"In the end, it was … soft power that led to the Sandinistas' loss in the elections and the victory by Chamorro," Gamarra notes.
Subsequently, Ortega's political stance evolved away from Marxism, and he won elections in 2006, 2011, 2016 and 2021. Today Ortega is president of Nicaragua along with his wife, co-President Rosario Murillo.
Murphy says it's a different Ortega now — one that "looks more like a Somoza government than a Sandinista government because it's a family dictatorship."
Ortega and Murillo, who Murphy calls "the power behind the throne," have "followed almost to the letter what Somoza was doing."
The U.S. invasion of Panama
Although brutal and corrupt, Panama's Gen. Manuel Noriega was useful to the U.S. in the 1980s, due to the de facto leader's cooperation with the CIA in providing a base of operations for the Contras in Nicaragua.
But Noriega's drug trafficking, which included a relationship with notorious Colombian narcotrafficker Pablo Escobar, soon transformed him into a net liability for the U.S. By 1986, mounting evidence of his ties to drug cartels, extrajudicial killings and selling of U.S. secrets to Eastern European governments was an embarrassment. In 1988, federal grand juries in Miami and Tampa indicted Noriega on racketeering, drug smuggling and money laundering charges.
The following year, President George H.W. Bush took office. Bush was briefly CIA director in the 1970s, when Noriega was considered a valuable intelligence asset. But in 1989, Bush decided that Noriega needed to go. The administration backed a failed coup attempt in October. But two months later, Bush launched Operation Just Cause, an invasion by 20,000 U.S. troops that ultimately overthrew Noriega and took him into U.S. custody.
Since Noriega's ouster, Panama has maintained a stable democracy with regular, peaceful elections and significant economic growth.
Gamarra says Panama is a rare example of a successful American intervention in the region. "We went in there, we got rid of Manuel Noriega," he says.
"We had a clear exit plan, which is not something the U.S. is very good at anywhere else," Gamarra says, referring to the emphasis on capturing Noriega in a quick and limited military operation. Today, he says, "at least in terms of its economic system, [Panama] is still extraordinarily successful."
However, Murphy is less sanguine.
"I don't think the invasion is responsible for anything positive that comes later," he says, "other than the fact that Noriega was no longer in power."
Copyright 2026 NPR