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The Repeating History of US Intervention in Venezuela

A look back at The Nation’s 130 years of articles about Venezuela reveals that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The Nation has been covering Venezuela for a long time—since before Trump and Maduro, before Chavismo, before the drug war. Spread across three centuries, the coverage is most remarkable for the consistency of its themes: struggles between autocracy and democracy, debates over foreign intervention and national self-determination, dispatches about the corrupting role of oil in enriching the ruling class and attracting predatory foreign powers.

The Nation’s first notable story is from 1895, when a conflict over Venezuela’s border with the British territory of Guiana (now Guyana)—where gold had recently been found—provoked President Grover Cleveland to invoke the decades-old Monroe Doctrine: European powers had no right to intervene in the Western Hemisphere. Cleveland’s statement heralded a new era of US chest-thumping that culminated three years later with the Spanish-American War. Alarmed by the president’s rhetoric, The Nation ridiculed the idea that “we are going, in the name of the Monroe doctrine, to assert........

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