On Sunday morning the world awoke to the news that Nicolás Maduro had been captured by US forces. Maduro held power at gunpoint, jailing political opponents under the false color of law, killing protesters, and, after he lost it, overturning the last presidential election. He and his predecessor Hugo Chávez turned one of the most prosperous nations in Latin America into one of its poorest, flooding the Western Hemisphere with perhaps 8 million refugees fleeing the oppression and corruption of their Venezuelan homeland. This exodus is on the order of five times larger than the one from Cuba since the communists came to power in 1959.
Maduro’s ouster has been justified in the name of combating “narco-terrorism.” He has been called the “narco dictator” of a “narco regime.” Maduro’s government was indeed up to its neck in drug smuggling. But the stress placed on this issue reflects a persistent failing in the US approach to Latin America—what we could perhaps call narcolepsy. This is the tendency for US foreign policy to remain sound asleep when it comes to Latin America except when it is occasionally awakened to deal with narco-trafficking. Otherwise, public opinion in the United States studiously ignores the one region, excluding Mexico, with which we run a consistent trade surplus.