The liberation of Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua is a matter of U.S. national security.
By: Carlos Sánchez Berzaín - 22/12/2025
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The United States' foreign policy recognizes and is responding to the aggression against democracies perpetrated by 21st-century socialism, or Castro-Chavismo, through forced migration, drug trafficking, terrorism, narco-states, transnational crime, human trafficking, the infiltration of crime into politics, subversion, assassinations, and much more. This geopolitical shift has transformed the liberation of the peoples of Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua into a matter of U.S. national security.
The aggression against the national security of the United States constitutes “hybrid warfare,” which includes “plausible denial,” defined as the ability to deny knowledge or responsibility for any reprehensible action committed by others, when the denier is the indirect perpetrator, the mastermind, or the one responsible for the action. In this context, tracking all acts of aggression involving forced migration, drug trafficking, terrorism, and other means of hybrid warfare leads to the dictatorships of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and their satellite states, with the participation of extra-hemispheric dictatorships.
This century, which should have been the century of “full democracy in the Americas,” resulted in the expansion of the Cuban dictatorship, which established its dictatorial model in Venezuela with Chávez/Maduro, Nicaragua with Ortega/Murillo, Bolivia with Morales/Arce, and Ecuador with Correa. Furthermore, it installed quasi-dictatorial governments in Argentina with the Kirchners, Brazil with Lula, Mexico with López Obrador/Sheinbaum, Honduras with Castro, Chile with Boric, Colombia with Petro, and more—regimes with which anti-imperialist discourse became de facto aggression against the United States and the democracies of the region.
In Latin America, during the last two decades of the 20th century, crime and drug trafficking came to finance some political campaigns and thus influence governments that were identified, labeled, and prosecuted as having ties to drug trafficking, as happened, for example, with President Samper in Colombia. But with the expansion of the Cuban dictatorship, which ended up adopting the label of "21st-century socialism," crime and drug trafficking supplanted politics, establishing narco-states and cartels that hold power and usurp freedom and sovereignty; it is "crime usurping power."
The Castroist dictatorial model in Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia is founded on a narrative of anti-imperialist and populist revolution, absolute concentration of power, state terrorism, indefinite control of power, and guaranteed impunity. This system has established its own transnational organized crime networks.
The organized crime of so-called 21st-century socialism is transnational because, in addition to its international network nature, its criminal operations are directed at and perpetrated against democratic countries, seeking their destabilization, the deterioration of democratic conditions, and the creation of conditions for their domination and replacement with its criminal/dictatorial system. Hybrid warfare describes its operational methodology. The peoples subjugated by the narco-terrorist system of 21st-century socialism have fought and continue to fight heroically for their freedom.
Cuba achieves this at the cost of thousands of deaths, executions, torture, more than a thousand political prisoners currently, and millions of exiles who have become a form of diaspora. Venezuela has made repeated attempts through mobilizations, elections, and international dialogue, sacrificing lives, enduring torture, and with more than eight million exiles. Nicaragua suffers the same conditions with deaths, political prisoners, exiles, and those stripped of their nationality. Bolivia, with its "hope for transition," has gone through the same ordeal and still endures political prisoners and exiles.
The organized crime of 21st-century socialism has transformed the countries and territories it controls into open bases for extra-hemispheric dictatorships like China, Russia, and Iran, as well as terrorist organizations, for purposes and acts of aggression. It practices “diplomatic terrorism,” using embassies, immunities, and privileges to carry out and protect crimes. It assassinates leaders in local politics and in exile, and attacks all democracies in the Americas without exception.
This is the context in which the United States now defends its national security, and to achieve this, it also defends the security of the democracies of the Americas, thus reviving the Monroe Doctrine with the Trump Corollary. In this objective reality, the region's democracies, such as Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, El Salvador, the president-elect of Chile, and others, have joined the new US foreign policy, identifying the narco-terrorist groups that hold power in Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua.
The unequal struggle of the peoples of Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua for their freedom now has the backing of the legitimate use of force against the narco-terrorism that oppresses them, and their liberation is part of the national security of the United States and the democracies of the Americas.
*Lawyer and Political Scientist, Director of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy
«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».