Analysts Warn Venezuela Invasion Could Empower Trump to Take Actions Elsewhere

The bombs fell in the early hours of January 3. They cascaded over the city, one and then another. The bright orange explosions rocked Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, shaking people awake.

“The bombs lasted a while,” Caracas resident and community organizer Yanahir Reyes told Truthout. “And you could hear the helicopters, the planes. It was terrifying.”

The U.S. forces rained down fire — focused on the military barracks in the capital and nearby states, but also hitting surrounding neighborhoods.

Videos of the invading forces spiraled quickly onto social media. Countless videos of the bombs falling, people screaming, trying to make sense of it all, while the explosions shook buildings and destroyed homes. And the sound of the arrival of the U.S. forces echoed across the city.

Shock. Fear. Confusion.

“The scariest part was videos of helicopters — helicopters flying in Caracas and bombing targets on the ground around Fuerte Tiuna [Venezuela’s largest military barracks],” Caracas-based journalist Ricardo Vaz told Truthout. “What are they here for? Are there troops on the ground?”

U.S. forces would kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, under charges of drug trafficking. Maduro is now in New York, awaiting trial at the Southern District Court. According to the BBC, a Venezuelan official says at least 80 people were killed in the U.S. invasion.

This was the invasion that Donald Trump had vowed for months. An invasion that U.S. administrations had threatened for years and decades, going all the way back to President George W. Bush.

And it marked the U.S. once again deploying direct military action in other countries in the region. A return to President Theodore Roosevelt’s gunboat diplomacy, where the United States pushes its agenda and its interests by force. The Monroe Doctrine on steroids, or what Trump has called it his own “Donroe Doctrine” — Donald plus Monroe.

It is a terrifying precedent. It is the first time the United States has taken unilateral military action against a nation in Latin America in more than 35 years. Many analysts and Latin Americans had hoped this bellicose foreign policy and direct U.S. aggression had been relegated to the history books.

But those playbooks have been dusted off and are being used again, echoing the December 20, 1989, U.S. invasion of Panama. And it was a copy and paste job — give or take some minor alterations.

“This is meant to send a message way beyond Venezuela, not only way beyond Venezuela in the region, but worldwide.”

“The invasion of Venezuela is a blatant violation of international law,” John Lindsay-Poland told Truthout. He’s the author of the book Emperors in the Jungle, about the history of U.S. intervention in Panama and the 1989 invasion. “It is a prelude, potentially, to a long and violent conflict within Venezuela. And it’s a throwback to other times when leaders who had broken democracy, who had exploited their peoples in Haiti in 1915 or in Panama in 1989, became the fodder for further U.S. invasions and occupation.”

As the 1989 invasion of Panama would be considered a training exercise for the ensuing U.S. wars in the Middle East, the Venezuelan invasion on January 3 was Trump’s testing ground for military supremacy in the region.

“We’re ready to go again if we have to,” Trump said in a press conference after the invasion. And not just against Venezuela. Trump has threatened military action in Colombia, Cuba, and Mexico. These are dangerous, unprecedented times.

“We should be concerned,” says Steve Ellner, an associate managing editor of the journal Latin American Perspectives, who taught for decades at the Universidad de Oriente in Venezuela. “And we should be concerned because this is meant to send a message way beyond Venezuela, not only way beyond Venezuela in the region, but worldwide.”

1989 Panama Invasion

On December 20, 1989, U.S. President George H.W. Bush ordered the U.S. invasion of Panama. Twenty-six thousand U.S. troops invaded the country. They rained down fire and bombs — attacking the barracks of the Panama Defense Forces in the capital of Panama City and other areas.

The U.S.’s goal was to capture President Manuel Noriega on drug trafficking charges.

“This is the history. It’s painful, more than anything else.”

Neighborhoods like Panama City’s El Chorrillo went up in smoke. Twenty-thousand homes burned. U.S. forces killed hundreds of people. They dumped bodies into mass graves.

When I visited El Chorrillo in late 2023 to report for the episode of my podcast Under the Shadow about the U.S. invasion, I saw the open wounds that still remain. The bullet holes left by U.S. troops. The pain in people’s voices as they remember that night and the subsequent U.S. occupation.

“So many innocent people died,” said resident Omar Gonzalez, who was only 12 at the time and watched fires engulf homes. “Friends of ours. Children we knew. People. Men and women. Some people who were sleeping at that moment. Elderly people who couldn’t stand up or run away because they lived close to the barracks. And this is the history. It’s painful, more than anything else.”

U.S. forces killed more than 500 people. Victims and their families are still demanding justice. Large murals cover walls, like one depicting a U.S. helicopter flying over rubble engulfed in flames. It reads: “Never forget. Never forgive.”

The Panama invasion marked a new era for U.S. foreign policy in the region in a number of ways. First, it came just a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall. For President George H.W. Bush, it was a way of showcasing U.S. military might, despite the end of the Cold War. It was also the first U.S. military action in the name of fighting the so-called “war on drugs.”

Over the last four decades, the U.S. drug war would become a major excuse for U.S. intervention in the region, although it would always be carried out in conjunction with local governments — until now.

In recent months, the lethal U.S. boat strikes in the Caribbean and the Pacific have significantly transformed U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. As of January 3, there have been 35 known U.S. unilateral strikes on boats, killing at least 115 people.

2026 Venezuela Invasion

The invasion of Venezuela has escalated the U.S. deployment of military force in the region to a whole new level — striking a country on land. It’s also the first time the United States has unilaterally invaded a South American country, ever.

“While they’ve intervened militarily quite heavily in the Caribbean and Central America, they’ve never carried out military attacks against any South American countries,” Alexander Main, the director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, told Truthout. “There’s no record of that that I’m aware of…. Unprecedented, even by sort of late-19th and early 20th century standards.”

Trump’s invasion of Venezuela was a near carbon copy of the 1989 Panama invasion. Both were carried out overnight during the holiday season. Both were rolled out under the guise of detaining the country’s leaders under charges of drug trafficking.

This, despite the fact that most South American cocaine is produced in Colombia and enters the United States via the Pacific and not Venezuela or the Caribbean. The U.S. Department of Justice indicted Maduro on charges of “narco-terrorism” in 2020, despite almost no public evidence linking Maduro, or other top Venezuelan officials, to drug trafficking.

“Both events respond to the U.S. policy against the Latin American continent, which is what has been called the Monroe Doctrine, through which our countries are subjected to U.S. policy and interests and have to submit to the United States,” Olmedo Beluche told Truthout. He’s a Panamanian sociologist at the University of Panama, and he wrote the first book in 1990 about the U.S. invasion.

Though the United States used drug trafficking as the justification for its invasions of both Panama and Venezuela, the real impetus of U.S. action in both countries was to ensure control over key assets. In Panama, that meant the canal — which in a 1977 agreement, under President Jimmy Carter, had begun to be returned to Panama. In Venezuela, that means oil. Venezuela is home to the largest reserves of crude oil in the world.

“The oil companies are going to go in,” Trump said during a Saturday press conference. “They’re going to spend money. We’re going to take back the oil that, frankly, we should have taken back a long time ago.”

But there is a major difference between 1989 Panama and 2026 Venezuela.

“The difference was that in Panama, the North American troops did enter and take control of the country completely,” says Beluche. “So the United States imposed its version of the facts of the invasion, with the help of the media. And the true facts — the number of dead, wounded, the civilian victims — were not known, although they became known as as witnesses and victims spoke up.”

In Panama, U.S. boots hit the ground. Forces occupied the country. They rounded people up. Carried out raids and killings. It would take the U.S. two weeks to capture President Manuel Noriega. He was detained on January 3, 1990, the same day on which the U.S. invasion of Venezuela would take place 36 years later. In Panama, the United States would install a pro-U.S. puppet government.

U.S. forces reportedly flew into Venezuela with 150 aircraft and kidnapped Maduro and his wife within a few hours. Cuba says 32 Cuban personnel who were helping to defend the Venezuelan president were killed in the U.S. attack. As opposed to Panama, the United States didn’t leave an occupying force in Venezuela. Trump announced the next day that his government would work with Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who has now been sworn in as interim president.

It’s a sign of how far Trump may or may not be willing to go. Under his orders, the United States bombed seven countries in 2025. But the U.S. president has thus far been reluctant to send in troops for a longer presence that could embroil the United States in lasting wars, which he himself has criticized of past administrations.

That doesn’t mean the U.S. invasion of Venezuela is any less dangerous. Analysts believe it could empower Trump to take more actions elsewhere.

“The fact that the military incursion and invasion in Venezuela unfolded the way it did — meaning largely ’clean’ and successful, at least for the purposes of what it was said to achieve — that will give Trump the idea to roll out similar things in the future,” University of Denver associate professor of Latin American history Rafael R. Ioris told Truthout.

But Gilma Camargo says the Trump administration has also missed the point in rolling out this Panama-style invasion in Venezuela. Camargo is a Panamanian lawyer who in 2018 successfully won a lawsuit on behalf of victims against the United States in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights for its invasion of Panama.

“Time has changed. People have changed; the geopolitical moment that has taken place in the world has its mind elsewhere,” Camargo told Truthout. “Nicolás Maduro is not Noriega. And the people of Venezuela are far from what Panama was in 1989.”

She says the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela — which was founded by Maduro’s predecessor, president Hugo Chávez in the early 2000s and remains strong — is far more organized, with working-class leadership and international solidarity. People are protesting against the invasion in Venezuela, in the United States, and around the world.

“As Trump continues to make mistakes about bringing the Monroe Doctrine and raw colonization back, he’s awakening the jaguar, like Colombian President Gustavo Petro has said, because people resent that and they feel that they’ve had enough,” says Camargo. “Enough is enough.”