Reporters have written much about the so-called “Donroe Doctrine” in the wake of the January 3, 2026, U.S. military kidnapping of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro. Observers have denounced the U.S. strike as an attack on the sovereignty of a Latin American nation, but the Trump administration has partially justified the military intervention by alleging that Maduro oversees the Cartel de los Soles (“Cartel of the Suns”). Experts have refuted this characterization, asserting that the phrase refers not to an organized trafficking group but instead to an unofficial network of corruption and patronage among Venezuelan officials.
The U.S. government’s distortion of Latin American political culture to legitimize intervention in Latin America bears echoes of the Theodore Roosevelt administration’s military actions against Venezuela’s neighbor Colombia in 1902, shortly before proclaiming the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Where the 1823 Monroe Doctrine demanded that European powers refrain from interfering in the Western Hemisphere, aspiring to place Latin America under the U.S. sphere of influence on the world stage, the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary argued that the U.S. reserved the right to intrude into Latin American affairs “in flagrant cases of […] wrongdoing or impotence.”[1] It remains to be seen whether the Trump administration’s portrayal of the Cartel of the Suns stems from an intentional manipulation of facts, but it shares that cynical strategy of distorting Latin American geopolitics under the guise of regional policework with the Roosevelt administration.
Colombia was the unfortunate target of U.S. policing in 1902 amid the Thousand Days’ War, a civil war between the Conservative government and the rebellious Colombian Liberal Party. For the Liberals, the war was a rebellion for political enfranchisement and civil rights; for the Conservatives, it was a holy crusade to defend the Catholic Church and its alliance with the government. Liberal governments in nearby countries, including Venezuela, Ecuador, and Nicaragua, covertly supported the rebellion, making the war a major international conflict.
When an assassin shot William McKinley in September 1901, former Rough Rider Edwin Emerson Jr. was in Venezuela and Panama, fighting alongside the Liberals under General Rafael Uribe Uribe while he reported on the conflict for Collier’s Weekly. As an active participant, Emerson should have understood the political context of the Thousand Days’ War better than most Americans. However, in a handwritten letter from Caracas to still-Vice President Theodore Roosevelt dated September 7, Emerson called the Thousand Days’ War a “silly war and revolution which is now turning everything upside down.” (Before he settled on “silly war,” he also considered writing “uncalled for” before striking that out.)[2] With this dismissive attitude, Emerson demonstrated the mindset many Americans held toward Colombia and Latin America more generally: its violence was never political, verging instead on the ridiculous.