By: Ricardo Abud
The Monroe Doctrine is not a museum document, nor a dusty relic of 1823 that we can simply file away and consign to oblivion. It is, unfortunately, the grammatical and existential language with which the United States has written the destiny of this hemisphere for more than two centuries.
Many, in a dangerous display of optimism, chose to view it as an outdated ideology, a ghost of the past that history, in its relentless march, had left behind. However, events have demonstrated that we are facing a constant pattern of behavior, a kind of geopolitical survival instinct that is activated with mechanical precision, regardless of who occupies the Oval Office or which political party holds sway in Washington.
The systematic resistance to the presence of rival powers in this part of the world is not a passing political preference; it is a structural fact, a hemispheric law of gravity that admits no exceptions or diplomatic exceptions.
We have witnessed firsthand how this script has unfolded, act by act, throughout our modern history. When Jacobo Árbenz was overthrown in Guatemala to halt an agrarian reform that was interpreted as an opening to Soviet influence, when missiles had to be withdrawn from Cuba after teetering on the brink of nuclear war, or when interventions in Chile and the Dominican Republic seared our sovereignty, the pattern was already crystal clear. The United States does not tolerate the entry of strategic competitors, whether nuclear or conventional, ideological or economic, into what it considers its natural sphere of influence.
The most tragic, and perhaps the hardest to admit, thing is that the Bolivarian leadership knew this history by heart; they invoked it in every speech, waved it like a banner to mobilize the masses, and used it as the cornerstone to justify their dialectical confrontation with the North. But, with a naiveté bordering on the criminal, they acted as if the mere act of naming and denouncing this history were a talisman, a spell sufficient to immunize themselves against it. We believed that, by knowing the enemy, we were already protected from its mechanisms.
The erosion of our sovereignty, far from being a sudden phenomenon, began long before the early hours of January 3, 2026. It was a silent demolition process, a constant drip of affronts that we normalized out of sheer inability to respond. Every time a U.S. military drone crossed our airspace, violating our territorial integrity without encountering a radar to block it or a battery to deter it, the final act of our autonomy was being written, word by word.
Every time they intercepted one of our oil tankers in international waters and the official response was limited to issuing a protest statement—a worthless piece of paper in the face of naval force—we were surrendering another millimeter of our freedom, becoming a chess piece that the other side could move at will. We witnessed, almost hypnotically paralyzed, how we were being transformed into a de facto protectorate long before the first bomb fell.
That is the cruel and arithmetic nature of sovereignty: either it is exercised and defended with all available resources, or it simply vanishes. By failing to respond to minor provocations, by accepting systematic disregard as an inevitable condition of our time, we teach the dominant power that we can be interfered with with complete impunity.
The operation of January 3rd was not, in reality, an extraordinary event; it was the cold, technical culmination of a process we ourselves allowed to develop. We were the laboratory for a geopolitical constant that we chose, out of pride or negligence, to ignore. We must understand that sovereignty is not a negotiable concept in diplomatic forums, nor an abstract idea protected by rhetoric; it is, ultimately, the material capacity to make the cost of invading your territory higher, more painful, and more complex than the invader is willing to accept.
We deluded ourselves into believing that time was on our side, that the emergence of a multipolar world would grant us a natural respite, a kind of shield that would allow us to survive without changing our behavior. But while we lost ourselves in the rhetoric of the "backyard" and in constructing an identity based on resistance, Washington was coldly gauging our capacity to respond, mapping our critical infrastructure, and testing our true resolve. Every drone, every intercepted vessel, was a probing exercise.
These were stress tests that, finding no real obstacles, ended up convincing us—and worse, convincing them—that January 3rd was possible, feasible, and, above all, profitable. Today, the lesson is a shattered mirror before us. Understanding history, having it in mind, and citing it in books is not the same as changing its course. The Monroe Doctrine is not a political option we can reject with a decree; it is a tectonic reality that, if we don't learn to navigate it with a strategy based on real power and not on wishful thinking, ends up burying our projects under the overwhelming weight of a hegemony that has never ceased to be there, lurking, waiting for the precise moment to reaffirm its dominion over our destiny. To all this, we must add the internal betrayals.
Note: First article: https://chamosaurio.blogspot.com/2026/06/el-espejismo-de-las-palabras-y-el-fin.html
THERE IS NOTHING MORE EXCLUSIONARY THAN BEING POOR
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