United States President Donald Trump has threatened his Colombian counterpart, Gustavo Petro, in the wake of Washington’s abduction of Venezuela’s leader, and said he believed the government in Cuba, too, was likely to fall soon.
Trump’s comments on board Air Force One on Sunday indicate the US is prepared to consider additional military interventions in Latin America despite the growing outcry over Nicolas Maduro’s abduction.
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Trump told reporters that both Colombia and Venezuela were “very sick” and that the government in Bogota was run by “a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States”.
“And he’s not going to be doing it very long. Let me tell you,” Trump said, referring to Petro.
When asked if he meant an operation by the US on Colombia, Trump said, “Sounds good to me.”
The comments prompted an immediate backlash from Petro, who called on all countries in Latin America to unite or face being “treated as a servant and slave”.
“The US is the first country in the world to bomb a South American capital in all of human history,” he wrote in a lengthy post on X. “The wound remains open for a long time,” but revenge was not the answer, he said.
Latin America must unite, Petro said, and become a region “with the capacity to understand, trade, and join together with the whole world” and one that does not look “only to the north but in all directions”.
Warnings to Venezuela, Mexico, and Cuba
Trump’s comments came after US forces seized Maduro in Caracas on Saturday in what Washington described as a law enforcement operation to bring him to trial on 2020 narco-terrorism charges. But critics contend Maduro’s ouster was aimed at taking control of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves.
The raid marked the most controversial US intervention in Latin America since the invasion of Panama in 1989.
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Trump insisted that the US was “in charge” of Venezuela, even though the country’s Supreme Court has appointed Vice President Delcy Rodriguez as interim leader.
He also reiterated a threat to send the US military back to Venezuela if it “doesn’t behave”. A lot of Cubans were killed in the US raid, he continued, adding that a US military intervention in Cuba was unnecessary because the island appears to be ready to fall on its own.
“Cuba is ready to fall. Cuba looks like it’s ready to fall. I don’t know how they, if they, can hold that, but Cuba now has no income. They got all of their income from Venezuela, from the Venezuelan oil,” Trump said.
“They’re not getting any of it. Cuba literally is ready to fall. And you have a lot of great Cuban Americans that are going to be very happy about this.”
The US president went on to warn neighbouring Mexico, saying the country “has to get their act together because they’re [drugs] pouring through Mexico and we’re going to have to do something”.
He described Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum as a “terrific person” and said he has offered to send US troops to Mexico every time he spoke to her.
The Mexican government is capable of addressing the issue, “but unfortunately the cartels are very strong in Mexico,” he said.
“The cartels are running Mexico whether you like it or not,” he added.
‘Don-roe Doctrine’
The US president’s comments on Sunday were not his first threats against Colombia and Cuba.
Following the US actions over the weekend, Trump said that Petro has to “watch his a**” and that the political situation in Cuba was “something we’ll end up talking about because Cuba is a failing nation.”
Al Jazeera’s John Holman, reporting from Cucuta on the Colombia-Venezuela border, said Trump’s recent remarks come amid a “bigger pattern” of Trump targeting left-leaning countries in Latin America and trying to assert US dominance in the region.
“He’s saying that Latin America is our area, and we need to be dominant there and after what’s happened with Nicolas Maduro, those threats and comments are going to be taken a bit more seriously,” Holman said.
Trump has made no secret of his ambitions to expand the US presence in the Western Hemisphere and revive the 19th century Monroe Doctrine, which states that Latin America falls under the US sphere of influence.
Trump has called his 21st century version the “Don-roe Doctrine”.
The governments of Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay and Spain meanwhile expressed their “profound concern” in a joint statement and said they “firmly reject the military actions undertaken unilaterally in Venezuelan territory”.
“These actions contravene fundamental principles of international law, particularly the prohibition on the use or threat of force. They constitute an extremely dangerous precedent for peace and regional security and endanger the civilian population,” they said.
‘Regime change’ in Latin America
Analysts said it was too soon to tell whether Trump would make good on his threats to Cuba and Colombia, or whether he was aiming to coerce them into cooperating with Washington.
“It’s very hard to predict. If you look at the way Trump operates, what he always hopes is other countries will do what he wants them to do without him having to use very much force. These short, spectacular displays of force like the bombing in Iran, this operation in Venezuela scare other countries into doing what Trump wants them to do,” said David Smith, an associate professor of the University of Sydney’s US Studies Centre.
“Maduro seems to have tried to call his bluff in this case, and it turned out it wasn’t a bluff,” Smith told Al Jazeera. “They don’t know whether he’s bluffing now when he makes threats towards other countries, or renewed threats towards Venezuela.”
Trump is “trying to pressure regime change” across Latin America in other ways as well, Smith said, noting that the US president has previously sparred with Petro over deportation flights and sanctioned a Brazilian judge who oversaw the prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro – a Trump ally – for an attempted insurrection.
Trump has also backed the right-wing government of Argentina’s Javier Gerardo Milei and pardoned ex-Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez of drug trafficking charges.
“We’ve seen in this first year of his administration in general a far more concerted agenda to promote right-wing governments in Latin America and to damage left – wing governments in Latin America,” Smith said.
Another expert said he believed more US military action was unlikely soon, but that Cuba would be the top priority.
The US and Cuba have had a strained relationship since Fidel Castro overthrew a US-backed government in Havana and established a socialist state allied with the former Soviet Union.
“Cuba and Colombia present somewhat different situations,” said Matthew Wilson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in the US state of Texas.
“I would be more concerned if I were in Cuba than if I were in Colombia, if I were a member of the regime there, because there’s a longstanding US grievance against Cuba, and definitely a mobilised constituency of Cuban Americans who are very hostile to the regime there,” he told Al Jazeera.
