In a posting to X made this morning, having just been released from a two-week hospital stay, former two-term Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner accurately portrayed U.S. President Donald Trump’s invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, as an application of the “Big Stick policy of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,” based on U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt’s imperialist policy of violating the original intent of the Monroe Doctrine authored by John Quincy Adams.
Regardless of what one thinks of the Maduro regime, she said, no one can deny that “the Trump administration crossed a line that many of us thought would never occur again. In the past, the application of the Big Stick policy of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, especially in Latin America, [which] justified direct military interventions or overt support, through its security agencies, for coups d'état and the resulting installation of bloody military dictatorships, far from favoring the U.S., produced negative feelings toward that country in the region.”
Moreover, she continued, the affected countries often suffered harsh economic and social consequences of intervention. “The violation of the United Nations Charter, international law, and the most basic common sense,” and the “absolute illegality and illegitimacy of the (literal) kidnapping of a president and his wife in their own country … creates a situation of great instability” in Venezuela “and a dangerous precedent in geopolitical terms which would enable any act of violation of political sovereignty, territorial or resource appropriation by any power with economic and military might over weaker countries.”
Kirchner concluded that “what Trump pompously called `Operation Absolute Resolution,’ doesn’t intend to `restore democratic government in the Republic of Venezuela,’ or to `fight drug trafficking,’ but rather to take control of the world’s largest reserves of conventional oil ... Out in the open.”
Former President of Mexico [Andrés Manuel López Obrador posted](https://x.com/lopezobrador_/status/2007562430834950500 on X on Jan. 3 last night (as translated):
