U.S. Interventions in the Americas: A Historical Pattern of Force, Profit, and Human Cost

 So timely, illuminating, and vital to understand,

absorb, and act upon!! — Molly

U.S. Interventions in the Americas: A Historical Pattern of Force, Profit, and Human Cost

Thursday, December 25, 2025

From the mid‑19th century to today, U.S. interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean have consistently combined military force, political influence, and economic pressure. Across this long arc, millions of lives have been shaped—often shattered—by policies that prioritize strategic advantage over human flourishing. Today’s geopolitical tensions with Venezuela are the latest flashpoint in a historical pattern that rewards elites while exacting profound human costs.

Note on Timing: This article is intentionally posted on Christmas Day 2025, a day traditionally associated with peace, goodwill, and reflection, to underscore the contrast between those ideals and the ongoing human toll of U.S. militarism and intervention abroad. The symbolic timing is a reminder that while many celebrate, others suffer the consequences of policies driven by power, profit, and geopolitics.

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A Critical Warning for Students and Young People

As Higher Education Inquirer has repeatedly argued, the United States’ military footprint—its wars, recruitment programs, and entanglements with higher education—has deep consequences not just abroad but at home. ROTC programs and military enlistment are often marketed as pathways to education and economic stability, but they also funnel young people into systems with long‑term obligations, moral hazards, and psychological risk. Prospective enlistees and their families should think twice before committing to military pathways that may bind them to morally questionable conflicts and institutional control.

Moreover, U.S. higher education has become deeply entwined with kleptocracy, militarism, and colonialism, supporting war economies and benefiting from federal research contracts with defense and intelligence partners that obscure the real human costs of empire. These warnings are especially salient in the context of Venezuela and similar interventions, where human toll and geopolitical stakes demand deeper scrutiny.

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Smedley Butler: War Is a Racket and the Business Plot

Major General Smedley D. Butler, among the most decorated U.S. Marines, became one of the U.S. military’s most outspoken critics. In his 1935 War Is a Racket, Butler rejected romantic notions of military glory and exposed the economic motives behind many interventions:

“War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.” 

 “I spent 33 years and four months in active military service… being a high‑class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.”

 “Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses

Butler’s warnings were not abstract. In 1933, he was approached to lead a coup against President Franklin D. Roosevelt, known as the Business Plot, which he publicly exposed. His testimony before Congress revealed how elite interests sought to use military power to overthrow democratic government, an episode that underscores his critique of war as a tool for entrenched interests at the expense of ordinary people.

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Historical Interventions and Their Toll

Below is a timeline of major U.S. interventions in the Americas, with estimated deaths, showing the human cost of policies that often served strategic or economic interests over humanitarian ones:

Period	Location	Event / Nature of Intervention	Estimated Deaths
1846–1848	Mexico	Mexican-American War: Territorial conquest	~25,000 Mexicans
1898	Cuba/P.R.	Spanish-American War: U.S. seized P.R.; Cuba protectorate	~15,000–60,000 (90% disease)
1914	Mexico	Occupation of Veracruz: U.S. port seizure	~300 Mexicans
1915–1934	Haiti	Military Occupation: Suppression of rebellions	~3,000–15,000
1916–1924	Dominican Rep.	Marine Occupation: Control of customs/finance	~4,000
1954	Guatemala	Op. PBSuccess: CIA coup against Árbenz; led to civil war	150,000–250,000*
1965	Dominican Rep.	Op. Power Pack: U.S. intervention during civil war	~3,000
1973–1990	Chile	U.S.-backed Coup/Regime: Pinochet dictatorship	3,000–28,000*
1975–1983	S. America	Operation Condor: CIA-supported intelligence network	~60,000*
1976–1983	Argentina	Dirty War: U.S.-supported military junta and coup	~30,000*
1979–1992	El Salvador	Civil War: Massive military aid to govt forces	35,000–75,000*
1981–1990	Nicaragua	Iran-Contra Affair: Covert support for Contras	~30,000–50,000*
1989	Panama	Operation Just Cause: Invasion to remove Noriega	500–3,000
2025	Venezuela	Naval Blockade: Active maritime strikes and standoff	100+ (to date)

*Estimates include civilian casualties and deaths indirectly caused by U.S.-supported interventions.

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Venezuela and the Global Politics of Intervention

Venezuela’s 2025 crisis is the latest in a long history of U.S. pressure in the hemisphere. A naval blockade—accompanied by maritime strikes and political isolation—has already produced more than 100 confirmed deaths. Historically, interventions like this have often prioritized U.S. strategic or economic interests over local welfare.

The situation is further complicated by global geopolitics. Former President Donald Trump, who recently pardoned key figures involved in controversial interventions, including Iran‑Contra actors, also maintains strategic ties with China and Russia, highlighting how interventions are entangled with global power plays that affect universities, recruitment pipelines, and domestic politics alike.

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A Call to Rethink Intervention and Recruitment

Smedley Butler’s critique remains urgent: to “smash the racket,” profit must be removed from war, military force should be strictly defensive, and decisions about war must rest with those who bear its consequences. From Mexico to Venezuela—and including covert operations like Iran‑Contra—the historical record shows how interventions serve a narrow elite while imposing massive human costs.

HEI’s warnings underscore that higher education, ROTC programs, and military recruitment pipelines are not neutral pathways but deeply embedded parts of systems that reproduce extraction, militarism, and inequality. Students, educators, and families must critically evaluate the incentives and promises of military pathways and demand institutions that serve learning, opportunity, and justice rather than empire.

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Sources

1. Butler, Smedley D. War Is a Racket. Round Table Press, 1935.

2. U.S. Congressional Record and Butler testimony on the Business Plot, 1934.

3. Kinzer, Stephen. Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq.

4. Scott, Peter Dale. Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America.

5. Reporting on Trump pardons, Iran‑Contra participants, and global alliances (2020–2025).

6. Higher Education Inquirer, “Kleptocracy, Militarism, Colonialism: A Counterrecruiting Call for Students and Families,” December 7, 2025. (link)

7. Higher Education Inquirer, “The Hidden Costs of ROTC — and the Military Path,” November 28, 2025. (link)

8. Historical records on U.S. interventions: Mexican‑American War, Spanish‑American War, Guatemala (1954), Chile (1973), Argentina (1976–1983), El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Venezuela (2025).

Please go here for the original article: https://www.highereducationinquirer.org/2025/12/us-interventions-in-americas-historical.html?m=1 

Cristina Breshears: US Citizens and the World Need To Respond With Urgency. NOW.

 So well articulated and powerfully said! 

Thank you, Cristina! 🙏 Molly

 

This morning, the U.S. launched unauthorized military strikes on Venezuela and captured its president, bypassing both Congress and the American people.

This is not foreign policy. This is not national security. This is dictatorship behavior.

We cannot normalize unilateral war and executive seizure of power.

The International Rule of Law is the principle that all global actors (states, institutions, individuals) are accountable to public, clear, and equally enforced laws, promoting peace, stability, human rights, and justice by ensuring no one is above the law, even at the international level, and requiring good faith compliance with international law and norms. It's a foundation for international cooperation, underpinning agreements on trade, human rights, and conflict resolution, and involves fair legal processes, transparency, and independent adjudication, though enforcement relies heavily on state consent. We cannot be silent when it is our own country that is violating the International Rule of Law.

Call your senators: https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm

Email via Resistbot: Text RESIST to 50409 or visit resist.bot

Tell Congress: “No more war without oversight. No more power grabs. Restore checks and balances now.”

It is not alarmist to call this what it is: a direct threat to democracy....

The world needs to treat us like we've all treated Russia for invading Ukraine. The UN General Assembly needs to vote to condemn us and install widespread economic sanctions targeting our banks, energy, and officials, and this needs to be imposed by the whole world. We should be ejected from the G7 and face investigations by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for these war crimes with arrest warrants issued for Trump. US citizens and the world need to respond with urgency .. Now.

— Cristina Breshears

Chris Hedges: America is a Gangster State

Picture of fire at Fuerte Tiuna, Venezuela's largest military complex, after a series of explosions in Caracas on January 3, 2026. (Photo by Luis JAIMES / AFP via Getty Images)

 By Chris Hedges

The kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife solidifies America’s role as a gangster state. Violence does no generate peace. It generates violence. The immolation of international and humanitarian law, as the U.S. and Israel have done in Gaza, and as took place in Caracas, generates a world without laws, a world of failed states, warlords, rouge imperial powers and perpetual violence and chaos. If there is one lesson we should have learned in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya it is that regime change spawns Frankensteinian monsters of our own creation. The Venezuelan military and security forces will no more accept the kidnapping of their president and U.S. domination – done as in Iraq to seize vast oil reserves -- than the Iraqi security forces and military or the Taliban. This will not go well for anyone, including the U.S.

https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/america-is-a-gangster-state

Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan: Breaking the Sound Barrier

Deepest bow to Democracy Now! and Amy Goodman. Listening to, watching, and reading Democracy Now! over all these years has changed my life and absolutely fueled my passion for truth, integrity, activism, courage, compassion, and fierce caring and love for the well-being of us all —something which I clearly recognize today is dependent upon being an informed populace. Amy Goodman and all of those who she has interviewed over the past 30 years have been a reflection of what Amy has devoted her life to — holding the powerful accountable rather than being their voice pieces. Deepest bow of gratitude, respect, appreciation, and love. 🙏💜Molly

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

We’ve been writing this weekly column for close to 20 years. This one will be our last syndicated by King Features. We have aspired to stay true to this column’s original intent, to “break the sound barrier,” highlighting voices excluded from the corporate media, covering the movements that drive change, and holding to account those in power, regardless of political party. One goal, in addition to serving our readers and the newspapers that have long carried the column, has been to inspire other journalists to pick up our stories. We call this trickle-up journalism, centering grassroots struggles that are too often marginalized in our civic discourse.

While we leave this particular platform of weekly syndication, our work continues, as demanded by the tenor of these times. Democracy Now!, the TV/radio/internet news hour we produce each weekday, turns 30 years old in February. Carried on over 1,500 stations around the globe, and with a growing audience of millions across multiple digital platforms, the program has become a leader in the burgeoning non-profit news space, as we collectively grapple with a multipronged crisis in journalism.

In November, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism released its 2025 State of Local News Report. Using data compiled over 20 years, Medill reports that, since 2005, close to 3,500 newspapers have ceased printing. In the same period, more than 270,000 newspaper jobs, 75% of the total, have disappeared, with fewer than 100,000 remaining.

As the role of print journalism changes, many people, and especially young people, turn to the digital realm for news. The Pew Research Center recently reported that “38% of those ages 18 to 29…get news from news influencers,” that is, not reporters, but people who have large followings on social media.

Content there is notoriously unvetted, subject to increasingly sophisticated “artificial intelligence” or AI fabrications and distortions, and favored for distribution by black-box algorithms unleashed on the planet by a small circle of immensely powerful corporations like Google, Facebook, and Elon Musk’s X.

The climate for journalists is eroding as well. President Donald Trump regularly denounces the press as the “enemy of the people.” Trump’s violent rhetoric has real-world consequences, as his followers verbally abuse, harass, and even physically assault reporters.

When asked by ABC’s Rachel Scott about releasing footage of the Pentagon’s lethal September 2nd double-tap strike on a boat in the Caribbean, Trump replied: “You’re the most obnoxious reporter in the whole place — actually a terrible reporter.”

Trump recently called CBS’s Nancy Cordes “stupid,” Katie Rogers from The New York Times “ugly,” and when Catherine Lucey of Bloomberg News asked him about releasing the Epstein files, Trump told her, “Quiet, piggy.”

Attacks on women journalists were a focus of the United Nations on November 2nd, International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists, noting, “73 percent of the women journalists surveyed said they had been threatened, intimidated and insulted online in connection with their work.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists counted 126 journalists and media workers killed in 2025, an enormous toll. Gaza remains the most dangerous place for journalists, with Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian reporters reaching unprecedented levels – well over 200 since October, 2023. Mexico, Sudan, and Yemen have also been lethal for journalists.

Despite this grim picture, there are signs of hope. Medill counted “close to 700 stand-alone digital sites, more than 850 network-operated digital sites, more than 650 ethnic and foreign language organizations,” journalistic entities springing up to fill the voids left as traditional business models that supported journalism for centuries, collapse.

As we mark Democracy Now!’s 30th anniversary, we’ll be traveling across the United States, touring with a remarkable new documentary about Democracy Now!, named after one of our news hour’s mottos, “Steal This Story, Please!” directed by the Oscar-nominated filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal. We’ll be holding fundraisers for public television and radio stations as they reel from the Trump administration’s abrupt cancellation of federal funding, and reporting on how people are organizing in their own communities.

Democracy Now! started at the Pacifica radio network, founded in 1949 to provide an alternative to the increasingly commercialized media landscape, that, as the late George Gerbner of the Annenberg School of Communication once said, “have nothing to tell and everything to sell that are raising our children today.”

We really do think that those who care about war and peace, those who care about racial, economic and social justice, about LGBTQ+ issues, and about the climate catastrophe, are not a fringe minority, not even a silent majority, but the silenced majority, silenced by the corporate media.

It’s our job to go to where the silence is, to be the exception to the rulers.

Please go here for the original: https://www.democracynow.org/2025/12/31/breaking_the_sound_barrier

“I Will Govern as a Democratic Socialist”: Watch Zohran Mamdani & Bernie Sanders at NYC Inauguration

“I Will Govern as a Democratic Socialist”: Watch Zohran Mamdani & Bernie Sanders at NYC Inauguration

Zohran Mamdani hailed “a new era” for New York on Thursday, promising in his inaugural address to deliver on the ambitious agenda that electrified progressives in the city and saw him defeat the political establishment in both the Democratic primary and the general election last year. Addressing thousands of supporters who braved freezing temperatures to attend the ceremony at City Hall, Mamdani vowed to “govern expansively and audaciously” for residents. “I was elected as a democratic socialist, and I will govern as a democratic socialist. I will not abandon my principles for fear of being deemed radical,” he said.

Mamdani was sworn in by Vermont independent Senator Bernie Sanders, who also spoke during the ceremony.

Please go here for the original video and transcript: https://www.democracynow.org/2026/1/2/zohran_mamdani_inauguration_speech

Let There Be Peace On Earth — and Let It Begin With Me

Photo by Molly

Let There Be Peace On Earth

and Let It Begin With Me

Let there be peace on earth—and let it begin with me. Not with someone else. Not somewhere far away. Not when conditions are perfect or when the world finally changes. But here, now, with me.

Peace begins the moment we become mindful of our breath—that simple, sacred rhythm that connects us to the present moment. It begins when we bring awareness to our daily actions, to the way we move through the world, to the choices we make in each ordinary moment.

Let peace begin in the way I speak to myself when I make a mistake. In the breath I take before reacting. In the kindness I choose when patience feels difficult. In the forgiveness I offer when holding onto hurt feels easier.

Let it begin in my home, in the gentleness I bring to those closest to me. In my community, in the compassion I extend to neighbors and strangers alike. In my daily life, in every small choice to respond with understanding instead of judgment, with love instead of fear.

We often look outward, wishing the world would become more peaceful. But the truth is simpler and more challenging: the world becomes peaceful when we do. When each of us takes responsibility for the peace we carry—or fail to carry—in our own hearts.

One person practicing mindful breathing creates ripples. One person acting with awareness transforms their corner of the world. A family practicing peace becomes a refuge. A community practicing peace transforms a neighborhood. And slowly, quietly, persistently, the peace that begins with “me” spreads to “we,” and from “we” to all.

Let there be peace on earth. And let it begin with me—with my breath, my thoughts, my words, my actions, my presence in this world.

This is not passivity. This is the most active, courageous work we can do.

May you and all beings be well, happy, and at peace.

#WalkForPeace #Buddhistmonks #AlokathePeaceDog

Francis Weller: The Work of the Mature Person

Photo by Molly

 The Work of the Mature Person

The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them. How much sorrow can I hold? That’s how much gratitude I can give. If I carry only grief, I’ll bend toward cynicism and despair. If I have only gratitude, I’ll become saccharine and won’t develop much compassion for other people’s suffering. Grief keeps the heart fluid and soft, which helps make compassion possible.

— Francis Weller

https://www.francisweller.net/

Rebecca Solnit: As We Prepare for 2026, Remember We Have the Power to Make Our Future

May we all be inspired to do our part, whatever that may be and no matter how large or small, in contributing to the deep and vital universal struggle to create a just, sustainable, equitable, caring, and peaceful world. We are truly all in this together! —  Molly

‘The administration now seems to be getting more extreme and reckless as it grows more desperate.’ Photograph: Kylie Cooper/Reuters

We enter 2026 with radical uncertainty about the fate of the US – but also with the clarity that people have the power to determine what it will be

By Rebecca Solnit

When we talk about opposition in politics, sometimes it’s just a policy disagreement – but in the current political crisis in the US, the opposition has become the opposite of the Trump administration in meaningful ways. It had to because this is not only a policy conflict.

Between the administration and the opposition are actual opposites of principle: among those committed to inclusion and those to exclusion; truth and lies; kindness and cruelty; the protection and destruction of systems that in turn protect the climate or public health.

It seems possible that what will ultimately emerge is a clarified sense of principles and a deeper commitment to them (which is why part of the conflict is over American history itself).

On one hand, there are the heads of the federal government and their spokespeople, whose lies are part of their disdain for the electorate and the rule of law. Those lies also get served up as the justification for their cruelty – the cruelty directed toward federal workers, immigrants, children in this country in need of food and healthcare, including vaccines, and the millions of people currently starving or devastated by preventable disease around the world since Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” gang destroyed USAID.

Politicians’ lies were once decried and punished when detected, in a process that often led to contriteness and apologies from the liar. Even the act of lying was a furtive one when people feared detection and its consequences. Now lies are the backbone of the Trump administration’s utterances – from likely lying about the inhabitants of the small boats they are blowing up in the Caribbean, to lying about vaccines, the economy, climate, polls, laws, history, race, immigration and pretty much everything else.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt specializes in grotesque falsehoods in praise of Donald Trump’s health, intelligence, success, and popularity. Robert F Kennedy Jr, the health and human services secretary, peddles lies about health and healthcare and the science behind them. Vice-President JD Vance has likewise lied about a broad range of subjects, but his venom has been particularly directed at immigrants, who he falsely accuses of dire economic impacts and outlandish crimes. White House adviser Stephen Miller has told the same lies with even more venom. But Trump is first and last the liar-in-chief.

It’s clear that many on the far right are now part of a subculture that celebrates and revels in cruelty and viciousness and doesn’t mind dishonesty. Trump officials sometimes seem baffled by the response from the rest of us who aren’t part of it, but apparently they don’t think we matter. We’re not their target audience, and this indifference to the opinion and values of the majority is itself a testament to their commitment to minority rule. It’s our job as the opposition to matter. And we have.

The immigrant-rights opposition is motivated by solidarity with those under attack, underwritten by compassion. From Los Angeles to Chicago to Charlotte, North Carolina, people have risked their own physical and legal safety to stand with those under attack by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and organized, trained and otherwise done the work to protect their neighbors. It has had a major impact on the ability of ICE to persecute immigrants and the Brown and Black people whose immigration status doesn’t seem to matter to these goon squads – sometimes as specific as preventing a person from being hauled away, sometimes as broad as the unprecedented protests this year.

For example, the Chicago Tribune reports that on 25 October, “agents deployed even more teargas, this time right before a children’s Halloween parade in Irving Park, where a resident raced out of his house, still in his Chicago Blackhawks pajamas, to confront feds who’d tackled a man in his front yard.”

Others, as lawyers, judges, protesters, journalists, scientists and educators, have defended truth, facts, science and law to protect human beings and the social and natural systems we depend on. They have stood up for the authority of truth that authoritarians seek to squelch or corrupt. The withholding and corrupting of information by the administration is corrosive to democracy, and it comes from a kind of elitism that regards the rest of us as not deserving the truth – and maybe suckers who will buy the lies (which plenty on the right actually are, and most of the rest of us aren’t).

Facts, truth, science, history are themselves democratic. The causes of the civil war, Covid-19 and the climate crisis are the same whether you’re a billionaire or a busker, and money can’t buy you out of that – though it can buy you a social media platform or a network news corporation to corrupt.

The opposition has been marked most of all by solidarity (which is by definition alliance and commitment to those who are not the same as you), an embrace of difference. I do not believe there has been anything like this level of solidarity with immigrants and refugees before, from the crowds showing up in the streets to the US senator who flew to El Salvador to try to rescue the kidnapped and persecuted Kilmar Ábrego García. I hope that it gives rise to a shift in the Democratic party’s discourse about immigrants and refugees, from a watered-down acceptance of their characterization as a burden and a problem, to recognition of their irreplaceable contributions to this country, economically and otherwise.

The attempts to secure truth and maybe justice for Jeffrey Epstein’s victims has also been driven by solidarity with the victims and a sense of principle that the Trump administration and Trump himself don’t share. Their victimization was the result of the radical inequality between poor girls and young women and wealthy men, so one of the underlying questions is about equality, about whether we will have a nation in which everyone’s rights matter, in which everyone deserves protection by the law.

It has been remarkable how this scandal that refuses to die down was what caused widespread Republican defection, when members of the House and Senate voted so broadly to release the files and some Republicans spoke openly against Trump himself. Polls show Trump’s own popularity and that of his handling of the economy and immigration has declined radically over the course of the year.

It was not clear when 2025 began what kind of opposition to the Trump administration there would be and how effective it would be. Many at the beginning of the year feared a powerful administration whose destruction went unchallenged, but it has been challenged and it has stumbled, faltered and backed down in many situations.

The administration now seems to be getting more extreme and reckless as it grows more desperate, chaotic and unpopular. We enter 2026 with radical uncertainty about the fate of this country – but also with the clarity that people have the power to determine what it will be, if they continue to show up and stand on principle.

• Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility

Please go here for the original article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/30/power-future-politics-trump-2026