Washington has orchestrated dozens of regime changes in the region in the 20th century alone, including through direct military invasions
The US operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has become the latest chapter in a long saga of interventions and regime changes staged by Washington all over Latin America over the past century.
Under the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, the US essentially declared the Western Hemisphere America’s backyard. Under this policy, the US played a role in dozens of coups and government overthrow attempts in the 20th century alone, including several cases of direct military intervention and occupation, reaching their peak during the Cold War.
On Saturday, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, told a press conference that an operation to capture Maduro was “meticulously planned, drawing lessons from decades of missions.” According to the general, “there is always a chance that we’ll be tasked to do this type of mission again.”
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RT looks back at some of the landmark cases of US interference that shaped the history of Latin America.
When regime change succeeded…
Guatemala, 1954
In June 1954, Guatemala’s elected president, Jacobo Árbenz, was ousted by a group of mercenaries trained and funded by Washington. The reason for the CIA operation and the first US-backed Latin American regime change of the Cold War era was a land reform that threatened the interests of the American United Fruit Corporation.
The CIA acknowledged its role in the coup and declassified relevant documents only in the 2000s, revealing what would become a template for future US interventions: the strategy involved psychological operations, elite pressure, and engineered political outcomes beyond the coup itself.
Dominican Republic, 1965
A decade later, Washington resorted to a direct military intervention to steer the crisis in the Caribbean state in a desired direction. Citing a “Communist threat,” the US sent its military to Santo Domingo to crack down on supporters of Juan Bosch – the first democratically elected president of the Dominican Republic, who had been overthrown by a military junta.
The US dispatched over 20,000 troops to the island in Operation Power Pack to support the anti-Bosch forces. The subsequent 1966 elections, which were marred by allegations of fraud, brought a US-backed candidate to power. The US occupation led to increased repression in the Dominican Republic and sowed distrust towards Washington’s interventionism in Latin America.
Chile, 1973
Less than a decade later, another elected president – Salvador Allende – was ousted in a US-backed coup in Chile that would become Latin America’s most-cited example of Washington’s disregard for democratic procedures that do not suit its interests.
The coup was preceded by years of covert CIA operations and anti-Communist propaganda since the mid-1960s aimed at preventing Allende from becoming president in the first place. After his election in 1970, Washington spent three years and another $8 million on covert actions, and expanded contacts with the Chilean military and the militant pro-coup opposition.
The 1973 US-backed regime change led to a 17-year-long dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet. During that period, tens of thousands of people were imprisoned for political reasons, with many of them subjected to torture.
… and when coup attempts failed
Cuba, 1961
In April 1961, a Cuban exile force heavily backed by the US landed on the south coast of the Caribbean island to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro. Castro himself came to power as a result of a left-wing revolution against the US-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista, in 1959.
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The Bay of Pigs invasion ended in disaster as the entire 1,500-strong force was defeated in just two days by the Cuban military led by Castro himself. It pushed Cuba closer to the Soviet Union and set the stage for the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The failure also opened the way for the US Operation Mongoose, a campaign of attacks on civilian facilities in Cuba and covert actions designed to undermine Castro’s government.
Nicaragua, 1979
Washington also sought to change the outcome of another revolution in Latin America that ousted the US-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza and brought to power the Marxist Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua in 1979. US President Ronald Reagan secretly authorized the CIA to provide $20 million in aid to militants opposing Ortega, known as the Contras. The scheme was partly funded by sales of arms to Iran in violation of the US’s own embargo.
The plan led to the 1986 Iran-Contra scandal in the US and plunged Nicaragua into a decade-long civil war that claimed 50,000 lives. It still failed to achieve its goal, as Ortega retained his power. While he lost re-election in 1996, Ortega returned to power a decade later and remains the president as of early 2026.
