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BRUTE FORCE SWEEPS AWAY THE RULE OF LAW  
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Fabrizio Tonello
January 8, 2026
Il Manifesto Global
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_ Donald Trump is weak and aggressive, while his advisors are
unscrupulous. The mini-Nazis he has surrounded himself with are
rushing to deploy military power to mask their total failure on the
domestic front. _

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No, it’s not just about the oil. Nor is it about the Monroe
Doctrine, which has been used for two centuries by United States
governments to justify their misdeeds in Latin America.

It’s (obviously) not about drugs either. It’s something simpler:
Donald Trump is weak and aggressive (he said on Sunday that the United
States “will govern” Venezuela), while his advisors are
unscrupulous. The mini-Nazis he has surrounded himself with
instinctively feel that the regime cannot last forever (John Bolton,
his former National Security Advisor, said Trump “hasn’t got the
brains” to be a dictator) and are rushing to deploy military power
on three continents to mask their total failure on the domestic front.

Let’s start with oil: the world’s largest producer today is the
United States, which extracts as much crude as Russia and Saudi Arabia
combined. Venezuela has large reserves but ranks around 20th among
producers, extracting less than one million barrels a day. Caracas’s
oil industry was nationalized not by Hugo Chávez or Maduro but by
Carlos Andrés Pérez, the United States’ best friend, in 1975.

Regime change by force in Caracas certainly fits into the long history
of violence against countries that have the misfortune of being
located south of the Rio Grande. A Latin American proverb says: “Why
will there never be a coup d’état in Washington? Because there’s
no American embassy there.” Support for the military juntas in
Guatemala alone during the civil war between 1960 and 1996 caused
200,000 victims, 86% of whom were indigenous. Furthermore, the
U.S.’s installation of authoritarian regimes in Peru (1962),
Argentina (1962 and 1966), Guatemala, Ecuador and Honduras (1963),
Brazil (1964), the Dominican Republic (1965), Chile and Uruguay (1973)
are historically established facts, as is its strengthening of
dictatorships like that of Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay (1954-1989)
and Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua (1936-1979).

So the installation of a friendly regime in Caracas, with advantageous
oil concessions for the U.S. regime’s friends (“Drill, baby,
drill!” was a Trump slogan), is undoubtedly part of the scenario
prepared at the White House – but it is a minor reason. What is
central is the unhesitating exhibition of military force, an expansion
of internal violence on a global scale. Just as Trump’s personal
Gestapo – Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – arrests
alleged undocumented immigrants without a warrant, puts American
citizens in jail and deports its victims to other continents in
violation of the Constitution and court rulings, so in foreign policy
Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela get bombed – and tomorrow it may happen to
any other country that offers an opportunity for the little Duce of
the White House to show off how macho he is.

After all, the pretext of prosecuting Maduro for protecting drug
trafficking is particularly laughable: on December 1, Trump pardoned
Juan Orlando Hernández, a former president of Honduras who was truly
a protector of cocaine cartels, had been arrested in his country,
extradited to the United States and sentenced to decades in prison.
This happened while the U.S. Navy bombed the boats of alleged
traffickers in the Gulf of Mexico, also murdering the survivors who
were calling for help.

In reality, the “war” on drugs launched by the Nixon
administration in 1973 was a pretext for criminalizing opposition and
ethnic minorities at the time, just as it is a pretext for exhibitions
of force on a planetary scale today. In 1970, the number of
drug-related arrests in the United States was 322,300; by 2000 it had
become 1,375,600, and in 2019 it reached a peak of 1,560,000. The true
goal, from the beginning, was to target ethnic minorities: on this we
have the testimony of Nixon’s advisor John Ehrlichman (the one who
organized Watergate). In a 1994 interview, he calmly confessed that
the objective was to hit the left opposed to the Vietnam War and
African Americans, by ensuring public opinion associated students with
marijuana and Blacks with heroin and by heavily criminalizing both:
“We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their
meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did
we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did,” Ehrlichman
told journalist Dan Baum of Harper’s.

Nowadays the lies don’t need to be sophisticated: Trump has accused
Canada of exporting the opioid fentanyl to the United States, where it
was and is being produced by Johnson & Johnson and Purdue Pharma. The
latter company ended up in bankruptcy after admitting its
responsibilities in the opioid crisis and paying $6 billion into
compensation funds for states, local organizations and victims.

_Originally published at
__https://ilmanifesto.it/il-regno-della-forza-che-spazza-via-quello-della-legge_
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on 2026-01-04_

 

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* Venezuela
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* U.S. imperialism
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* Monroe Doctrine
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* war on drugs
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