At the Fifth Summit of the Americas, in 2009, Hugo Chávez shook Barack Obama’s hand and presented the US president with a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. The gift was pointed: the previous month Chávez had accused Obama of being ‘a poor ignoramus… [who] should study and read a little and learn what reality is’. The polemic, first published in 1971, was a primer in Latinoamericanismo and a foundational anti-colonial text for the Venezuelan strongman. Chávez would die the year before the book’s Uruguayan author publicly recanted in 2014: the prose, he admitted, was ‘leaden’, and he had not had ‘sufficient knowledge of economics or politics’ when he wrote it.

Had Comandante Chávez been more patriotic in his literary tastes, he might have looked closer to home and chosen a Venezuelan writer. Carlos Rangel’s The Latin Americans: Their Love-Hate Relationship with the United States, first published in Caracas in 1976 under the title Del buen salvaje al buen revolucionario: Mitos y realidades en América Latina (From Noble Savage to Noble Revolutionary: Myths and Realities in Latin America), might have ostensibly served Chávez’s purposes equally well. Rangel, a diplomat and journalist, had sought to challenge the Marxist orthodoxy of a generation of Latin American intellectuals and looked to blame the continent’s Iberian heritage for its lack of success in relation to the North. He believed that the ‘monopoly practices, privileges, restrictions placed on the free activity of individuals in the economic and other domains, [were] traditions profoundly anchored in societies of Spanish origin’. This culture would later produce the weak institutions, caudillismo (a political system under the rule of a strongman) and disparities in wealth so prevalent in Latin America. He was not thanked for his thesis: his books were burned in Caracas.

Like many of its neighbours in the region, Venezuela has endured a succession of tyrants. The worst of these was Juan Vicente Gómez, a grotesque figure even by Latin America’s high standards, who ruled between 1908 and 1935 and made a personal fortune out of oil. After visiting Caracas in 1967, the American poet Robert Lowell saw the city for what it was: ‘this pioneer democracy, built / on foundations, not of rock, but blood as hard as rock.’ The country’s first direct presidential election had been as late as 1947.

The Peruvian Nobel laureate, Mario Vargas Llosa, would later name Carlos Rangel, along with the Argentinian Juan Bautista Alberdi, as ‘[two] truly exceptional examples of genuine liberalism in Latin America’. Rangel also foresaw the rise of left-wing populism, caudillismo in a different guise, one that resulted in Chávez and Maduro and what might be termed a ‘Cuban tragedy’ for the country. Not that the Venezuelan intellectual was an apologist for the United States, whose incursions in Panama and the Dominican Republic he openly criticised. Rangel’s later books covered similar ground in examining tercermundismo (Third World ideology) in which he attempts to debunk the application of Marxism to the region. In January 1988, Rangel died by his own hand: a very Latin American ending.

That the 47th president of the United States has developed his own style of caudillismo, one forged in the Americas, would not have been lost on Rangel. Familiarity with strong-armed tactics is one of the reasons why Latin Americans tend to understand Trump’s brand of populism. His changeability is another; surprise events are a historical constant in the region.

Having taken a Nixonian line in his assessment of his southern neighbours – ‘We don’t need them. They need us’ – Trump has started to deliver on his threats. He has countered the Spanish maxim No es posible poner puertas al campo (‘It is not possible to put up doors in a field’) by implementing an executive order to build a wall along the country’s Mexican border. The Panama Canal is on the agenda, through the reappraisal of the 1977 Torrijos-Carter Treaty, as is Mexico, which is now deemed a cartel-run state where the offer of sending in US troops stands.

The capture – though kidnap may be a more accurate description – of President Nicolás Maduro on 3 January for narco-trafficking charges was as audacious as it was short-termist (another political characteristic of the caudillo). The decisiveness with which Operation Absolute Resolve was carried out both alarmed and excited Latin American leaders.

That Maduro had few allies in the region, save for the totalitarian nexus of Cuba and Nicaragua, was evident from the absence of Latin American presidents at Maduro’s third inauguration last January. His failure to relinquish power, despite having lost the 2024 presidential election, led to the evaporation of support, even on the progressive left, with heads of state such as Chile’s Gabriel Boric calling Maduro’s government a dictatorship. Javier Milei, no stranger to hyperbole, has called Venezuela a ‘true hell on earth’, unsurprising for an anarcho-capitalist economist who believes in socialism’s co-existence with the underworld.

Supporters of the Argentinian president have also been keen to present him as having saved his country from a similar fate. In a speech to the Mercosur heads of state last December, Milei gave Donald Trump’s position a Latin American spin. (Not that Milei needed to: his North American ally, though not a Spanish-speaker, has become fluent in caudillismo.) Milei spoke of Maduro’s ‘dark shadow over [a] region’ and welcomed US pressure to avoid the shame of being dragged down with it.

While Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay and Spain have signed a joint statement, expressing their ‘deep concern and rejection of the military actions carried out unilaterally in Venezuelan territory, which contravene fundamental principles of international law’, Milei remains jubilant. ‘We celebrate the fall of the narco-terrorist dictator Maduro. Argentina stands ready to assist in the transition to a free, democratic, and prosperous Venezuela.’ This means ‘assisting’ the US in its plans to ‘run’ the country until a ‘safe, proper and judicious transition’ can be effected. In true Trumpian fashion, the acting president Delcy Rodríguez has been threatened with an unknown punishment, ‘a very big price’, should she fail to comply.

Parallels have been drawn with Operation Just Cause and the invasion of Panama in 1989, though Panama’s relationship with the US was very different from that of Venezuela. Noriega had been a close ally of the US, albeit one that had gone to the bad, which cannot be said of Maduro. More importantly, the United States already had troops stationed in Panama: an example of its historical foreign policy to keep the Caribbean free of any threat to the Panama Canal. The invasion of Panama, lest it be forgotten, paved the way for subsequent incursions into Haiti, Afghanistan and Iraq. That Trump’s Secretary of State is a Cuban American, brought up in Miami, should not be underestimated. Maduro’s recent capture may just be the opening act that ends in the grand finale of the culmination of the 1959 Cuban revolution.