Transcript
Kaeden Thomas: Hey, welcome to The Full Extent podcast. My name is Kaeden Thomas, and I’ll be your host. Today, we are exploring US gunboat diplomatic relations within Latin America. The purpose of this podcast is to explore current events with professionals and academics alike, who know a lot more about the subject matter than I do. With regard to the event, the US Navy has been targeting alleged Latin American narco trafficking boats headed towards the United States. In these attacks, the US Navy has killed at least 60 individuals, further escalating this conflict. The US has decided to send an aircraft carrier to the Caribbean side of Latin America. Now we are joined by assistant professor at the University of Utah, David De Micheli. He obtained his PhD in government from Cornell and served as a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research at Tulane. He has a regional focus on Latin American and comparative politics. I’m going to lay out and list two of the four types of gunboat diplomacy that the US is using right now or could be using right now. One is a definitive force, the use of force, which forces the attack country to submit and acquiesce or to escalate tensions further, and purposeful force, to force the victim to either respond with force or prevent them from taking action in the first place. Which type of gunboat diplomacy does this specific act of force pertain to?
David De Micheli: Well, you know, so it’s a bit of a funny situation, because we are relying on the kind of assertions of the US government and how they’re characterizing the threats they’re facing in the Caribbean Sea in particular. And so it’s a little bit hard to kind of definitively say which type of force we’re seeing here. The other thing to note is that we’re not actually in an active, ongoing conflict with Venezuela, for example, in the Caribbean Sea, right? And so it’s difficult to kind of fit the actions of the US military in the Caribbean Sea into these neat boxes. But I’ll do my best to kind of to answer your question. So, you know, I think if we take the US administration at its word, and we accept that these boats are, in fact, narco traffickers, if they are bringing drugs, and that they do represent this potential threat to the US, then this may be understood as this kind of definitive force that we’re seeing in the Caribbean Sea, and the goal here is to simply stop the flow of drugs into the country. But if others are correct in suggesting that the goal of these actions is not necessarily a tactical decision that we’re seeing on the part of the US government, but maybe it’s a part of a broader political strategy to either escalate tensions with Venezuela, to draw them into some kind of conflict that gives the US justification for some other kind of action, maybe some type of regime oriented covert action inside of Venezuela. The Trump administration Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, it’s not a secret that they’re no fans of Nicholas Maduro in Venezuela. And so what is the real goal here? Is this discourse around narco trafficking? Is this giving the US cover to instigate some type of conflict that allows them to instigate some kind of regime change? Or are they really motivated by the flow of drugs into the United States? One fact we do have that is not connected to the US administration, but that kind of might support this second narrative, that is we’re trying to instigate some kind of crisis that offers a rationale for regime change, is that the Trump administration’s posture towards drug trafficking focuses a lot on fentanyl and fentanyl related deaths in the United States, which is an epidemic in the country. Venezuela is not the source country. It’s not the producer of fentanyl. Some crops might make their way to Mexico, where they’re then produced into fentanyl and then exported to countries like the United States, but it’s really Mexico that the US should be targeting, not Venezuela, if it is, in fact, this kind of fentanyl related problem that the US is focused on.
Kaeden Thomas: Right, yeah. And it’s also interesting that Maduro has made comments on how this use of force could also be the US instigating something in order to take control of oil reserves within Venezuela. You know, I don’t know if that holds weight, but there are a lot of factors here that we do not know yet. So moving on to the next question, I think everybody wants to know this: when does this cease to be a diplomatic effort and really transition into a pure act of war, because I think this is, and correct me if I’m wrong, but this is illegal to destroy vessels in international waters without precedent.
David De Micheli: Yeah, without any real threat, any real piece of evidence or suspicion that this other vessel is actually serving as an active threat to the military, that is considered illegal according to international law, but also US military policy. That’s not the way that the US conducts itself. And so again, if we are not going to view it through that lens, we were taking the administration at their word. We haven’t seen any facts or evidence to really support the claim that these vessels are, in fact, threats, and even so, it’s not clear that transporting narcotics or illegal substances itself is a military threat, though that could be construed as a kind of national threat in another way. So, when does this become an armed conflict? You know, I think again, it’s a difficult question to answer definitively, because we don’t have all the facts, and the administration is the US. Administration is not being perfectly transparent with what it knows and what’s motivating these actions. I think in my mind, it could become a definitive and active, and ongoing conflict if Latin America responded in kind. If they really ramped up their response to these attacks. So far, we’ve been hearing a lot of rhetoric. We’ve been hearing a lot of posturing, but we really haven’t been seeing Latin American States actively seeking a conflict with the US military, for reasons that are going to be obvious, right? The US military is a lot stronger than Latin American militaries. And historically, states in Latin America have actually relied on the assistance of the US military to conduct certain activities inside their countries, in particular, related to narcotics. And so that would be one situation. I think if the US outright just declared war on these countries, as you know, under the premise of this narco trafficking, that would be another situation. But as the Trump administration wants to do, they like to maintain this kind of ambiguous gray zone that offers them license in some areas, but that doesn’t require them to commit fully in terms of troops or financial resources. So they’re kind of trying to have it both ways, if you will.
Kaeden Thomas: And I think it’s interesting that we are, specifically in Venezuela, we’re dealing with an authoritarian figure, and engaging in diplomatic relations or violence with this sort of individual is going to warrant an act of war. And so when cornered, you know, I expect Nicolas Maduro to put up a fight. But unfortunately, Venezuela is not in a position where they can go against the US, you know, a hegemon within the Americas.
David De Micheli: I might also just throw in there, this, actually, it is a threat to Venezuela. Obviously, there has been reporting that within the CIA, Trump has authorized covert action inside Venezuela to overthrow the regime. That may or may not be true, but assuming that that’s not actually going to take place, these things can actually help embattled presidents domestically. The presence of a foreign threat can sort of create this rally around the flag effect. So even people who are critical of Maduro may not necessarily want to see a US intervention inside of Venezuela, and that might actually bolster support for Maduro inside of the country. So these things, they have to be careful they have to thread the needle here, because these things can backfire domestically and actually boost support for this incumbent that the US might actually oppose.
Kaeden Thomas: The US is now leaning into unsolicited direct intervention to engage with the war on drugs. Now, how has the US gone about preventing Latin American narco trafficking in the past? And have these measures been successful?
David De Micheli: Yeah, so I would say that there have been basically two main tactics the US has used to put pressure on states where there is significant narco production, or production of illicit goods that are transported to the United States. The first, most famous one is going to be Plan Colombia, which we saw in Colombia, which was a US financed, US military assisted program in partnership with the Colombian government to eradicate Kuka production and to really, you know, push back against organizations like the FARC right, the famous guerrilla organization growing out of the country’s civil war in the middle of 20th century that, over time, developed into an illicit trafficking organization. So what we saw in those situations were real active efforts to fund eradication in the form of pesticides that are being dispersed through the air, but also military efforts to fight in the Civil War, kind of context. Those tactics can also be deployed, kind of with more tense relationships with certain countries, in a country like Bolivia, neighboring in the Andes to Colombia, you know, we see eradication efforts. The US can also use economic sanctions against states as a way of forcing less friendly governments to engage in eradication efforts or anti-narcotics programs inside of their countries when they otherwise may not want to. So Bolivia is a good example of this. Evo Morales, the first country’s first indigenous president, he actually rose to power through coca-growing unions, and yes, the coca-growing plant, which is refined into cocaine. And so he had real ties to these agricultural rural unions that were staunchly opposed to these anti-eradication efforts, right? And so the US was able to still put some economic pressure on the Bolivian government to maybe take a harder stance than it would have wished to on these sorts of things. But that tends to be the two main prongs: military effort only in allyship with the government, the domestic government, and without that allyship, maybe some economic pressure on the government.
Kaeden Thomas: Now, I think it’s interesting to see, yeah, the violent intervention with which we’ve interacted as of late, but I do think it’s in contrast to the bilateral movements we’ve engaged in in the past, like in Colombia, taking down Pablo Escobar and you know that coordination effort, it is, you know, purely unilateral and within our own interest that we are performing these acts. Now, I know this is maybe a redundant question, because we don’t know all the facts right now, but what do you believe is the is the motivation for recent US unilateral moves within Latin America? I know because we’ve seen Colombian, Mexican Venezuelan presidents all denouncing these attacks. You know, the Colombian President Gustavo Petro has been quoted saying that, if Mr. Trump keeps being complicit in this genocide, as he is up to today, he deserves nothing but jail, and his army should not obey him. This is an abrasive way to interact with people, and in our hemisphere.
David De Micheli: Yeah, you know, that’s the sort of the theme of the day, is we don’t have all the facts. So it’s a bit of speculation here. But, you know, I think going back to what I was saying earlier about the Mexican case, it’s hard to really figure out what the motivation. And I should say there could be multiple motivations. President Trump himself might have one set of motivations. Secretary of State, Rubio might have another set of motivations. They may align in ways that produce these behaviors towards Venezuela, and then they may not align. That can explain why action isn’t taken in other cases. So, for example, with Mexico, Trump is known to be somebody who really relies on his personal relationships with other leaders. What matters less to him is, you know, the exact nature of the trade relationship, whether or not there are drugs coming across the country, but whether or not he likes this particular this particular leader. So Mexico has actually done a really good job at fending off both trade threats, but also kind of harsh military action related to the drug trade, in ways that should be surprising if Trump is really interested in tamping down narco trafficking into the United States. Claudia Sheinbaum has been pretty savvy at dealing with Trump one one-on-one. Trump does not like Nicolas Maduro. Certainly, Marco Rubio doesn’t like Nicolas Maduro, and so that might be kind of motivating, why we’re seeing some of this more intense military action against Venezuela. The question in my mind is that we are sort of seeing this escalation in this relationship between the US and Venezuela. Nicolas Maduro has been in power for a really long time, and it’s not entirely clear to me why this is happening now in Trump’s second term, when we didn’t necessarily see such a strong posture being taken by Trump against Maduro in the first term. They weren’t necessarily friendly at the time, but he also wasn’t taking this harsh military stance at the time either, and so something’s kind of different here, and that might have something to do with his cabinet, putting more pressure on him, or some kind of mix of conversations that are happening across policy domains in the administration, and I don’t have the facts or the information to really tell you definitively but that’s my sense, is that there are more moving parts, and we have a change of personnel in the Trump administration, and that could really be impacting what we’re seeing in the region.
Kaeden Thomas: Fascinating. As opposed to the first term in which he wasn’t going about diplomatic relationships, as you know, as aggressively like do you presume that this strong arming will continue, or will there be a less interventionist approach in the future if there are negative responses to this?
David De Micheli: Well, I would expect it to continue for one reason, mainly because really only one president has pushed back against the US meddling, or the, we’ll say, the updated posture towards Latin America in Trump’s second term, and that’s been Colombia’s President Petro, that has always been met by really swift, really harsh responses by the United States. So in the early parts of the Trump administration, around immigration, and sort of sending planes, deported immigrants to Colombia and other places, the Colombian President responds by trying to refuse the arrival of these planes by threatening some kind of countermeasure, and Trump brings down the hammer of 50% 100% tariffs. Don’t quote me on those numbers, but he really brings down the hammer. And Colombia can’t withstand, their economy can’t withstand that threat, even that threat alone, even if they never actually materialize. And so they sort of back off. And so what lesson does the Trump administration learn from that? Is these tactics work. That they don’t really face real consequences from these countries who don’t really have an economic leg to stand on. This isn’t Mexico, one of the US is largest trading partners. This isn’t China, who can disrupt the entire global economy with its tariff regime. These are smaller countries that are reliant on US trade, and they don’t really have militaries that can stand up to the US military, if and when there were to be a real conflict breaking out.
Kaeden Thomas: Fascinating. I think that’s all I have. I know a lot of this is speculative and we don’t know the answers yet, but I think your insight provides a lot of needed information to the public, who is sort of floundering in all of this, all these headlines that they’re receiving and worried about violence within our realm of influence, I think that’s that’s very upsetting for most people.
David De Micheli: Yeah, it’s a crazy time, but all we can do is hang in there. But thanks for having me. It was great to chat.
Kaeden Thomas: Yeah, a pleasure.
