The more the United States comes to dominate Latin America, the more Latin Americans will come to dominate the United States. 

Earlier this year, President Trump was taken with the idea of making Venezuela the 51st state. Such threats to annex portions of the Americas have become almost routine: Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal, and now Venezuela. Previous US expansion schemes failed in Baja California, the Yucatan, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and even Quebec.

Yet it is worth dwelling on what an American Venezuela would mean for the United States. The Bolivarian Republic has a population just shy of 32 million people. As the 51st star on the American flag, it would be the second largest state in the union by population, behind only California and just ahead of Texas. Allocated a fair number of electoral college votes, it would overnight become the decisive swing state in any US presidential election, with more people than Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio combined. 

Presiding over the greatest expansion of US citizenship to a Latin American population ever would be an ironic outcome for MAGA. By comparison, the Reagan Amnesty of 1986 extended a pathway to citizenship to fewer than 3 million undocumented immigrants, predominantly from Latin America. The Trump administration is currently trying to strip 600,000 Venezuelans living in the United States of Temporary Protected Status, a legal category that protects foreign nationals from deportation but does not offer a pathway to US citizenship. To then turn around and offer it to 32 million Venezuelans, who would then presumably be free to move across state lines, would be unexpected to say the least.

Assuming any deeper thought has been put into it, perhaps the kind of US citizenship envisioned for Venezuelans in this hypothetical 51st state is a second-class variety. This was the experience of the newly minted Mexican-Americans created by the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War and put the territories of New Mexico, and California under US control. The former Mexican citizens lost much of their land to white settlers during the Gold Rush, and were not able to call on the rule of law to defend themselves. De facto second-class status is already the case for US citizens of Latin American origin today, thanks to the Trump administration’s deportation policies and its reliance on racial profiling, a reality that has been driving an ever-growing number of Latinos away from Trump’s political coalition. Perhaps he simply hopes to create in Venezuela a population of US-citizen Latinos who would still like to vote for him. 

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In reality, the annexation of Venezuela is highly unlikely. Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez has been accommodating to Trump since the US capture of her predecessor, but even for her, the prospect of complete annexation seems a bridge too far. The prospect of a prolonged counterinsurgency is probably unattractive. Indeed, guerrilla resistance was a major factor in protecting Mexican territory in Baja California, Sonora, and the Yucatan Peninsula from annexation by the United States during negotiations for the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Members of Congress were also opposed, not just liberal opponents of the war, but also white supremacists. As slaveholder Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina put it: “Are we to associate with ourselves as equals, companions, and fellow-citizens, the Indians and mixed race of Mexico?” There’s probably at least one Groyper in the White House wondering the same about Venezuela right now. 

Yet, it is worth acknowledging that becoming US citizens would suit many Venezuelans, Cubans, and Mexicans just fine. Many risk life and limb merely to work in America, even without the hope of becoming citizens. As unhappy as Puerto Ricans are with their commonwealth status, at least they can move to New York City or Miami at will, and vote the moment they get there. Many Latin Americans are envious. 

Furthermore, decisions that dramatically impact Mexico, Cuba, and Venezuela are being made in Washington every day. Everything from Mexico’s security policy to Cuba’s ability to import oil is being decided by the White House. And Nicolas Maduro, nominally the head of a foreign state, is being treated not as a prisoner of war, but as a common criminal arrested under US law, and charged in a Manhattan court. If the lives of Cubans, Venezuelans, and Mexicans are going to be shaped by the US presidency and their sovereign leaders subject to US laws, wouldn’t it be fair if they at least got to vote on it? 

Many more millions of Latin Americans will indeed get to vote. Whether naturalized immigrants or their far more numerous US-born descendants, they are already one of America’s largest voting blocs. The first Latin Americans to obtain US citizenship at scale were the conquered Mexicans of the Southwest. Millions more Mexicans would later migrate north into the former Mexican territories, often actively recruited as cheap labor to work in the extractive industries of the American West. American military conquest similarly created the other large and permanent US-citizen population of Latin Americans when it annexed Puerto Rico after defeating Spain in 1898. If you are unhappy that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is eligible to run for president, blame President McKinley. 

Meanwhile Cuba, while not formally annexed, was subjected to near-total US economic and political control, a quasi-colonial reality only broken by Fidel Castro in 1959, though Trump is now attempting to reverse the outcome. The political and economic entanglements with Cuba created a vast Cuban diaspora in the United States, even before Castro came to power. For example, Marco Rubio’s parents came to Florida not as political refugees but as economic migrants two years before the Cuban Revolution. 

In more recent history, US trade policies like NAFTA created dislocation and job loss in Mexico’s agricultural heartlands, at a scale similar to the destruction of the Midwestern Rust Belt. Millions of Mexicans headed north to build new lives in the United States, very belatedly meeting the hopes of the Spanish Crown in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries to settle its vast North American empire with Catholic Spanish-speakers. And these pioneers in the 1990s and 2000s largely remain in the United States today, excluded from citizenship, essential for our economy, and having in most cases already produced US-born offspring. They are increasingly joining electoral populist revolts of both the Right and Left — and have proven to be open to Trump’s pitch. Yet if you deport their parents, they have the ability to punish you at the polls. 

Despite its recent Latino support, Trumpism first emerged as a backlash to the post-NAFTA wave of mass Mexican migration. Earlier Anglo-American backlash, such as the state-level efforts of Proposition 187 in California or Senate Bill 1070 in Arizona had already made immigration the defining conservative issue in the American Southwest, an issue that ultimately helped shift both states blue. The restrictionist tendency has found its champion in Trump. Yet the US has already become a Latin American country in ways the Trump presidency is unable to reverse. And this would still be true if every undocumented immigrant were somehow deported tomorrow. 

The United States is already home to more native Spanish-speakers than any country other than Mexico. Latin American cultural influence abounds — the Bad Bunny performance at the Super Bowl was remarkable precisely because of how mundane it was. And the American Right itself is ever more Latin American. In 2024, Trump won his second term in large part because of historic levels of Latino support. Marco Rubio, the first man since Henry Kissinger to simultaneously serve as both National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, records tributes to the United States’ distinctly Hispanic and Catholic roots. The Border Patrol agents who shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis are both Mexican-Americans. Hispanic authoritarians from Bukele to Pinochet to Franco are figures of open admiration in many corners of the American Right. The infamous Nick Fuentes is proud of his Hispanic heritage. In Donald Trump’s America, even our Nazis are Mexican! 

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Geopolitically, a US shift away from Europe and towards Latin America is also a defining feature of Trump’s second term. The White House endorses presidential candidates in Latin American contests as routinely as if they were governor’s races in a US state. And often, the MAGA label is attractive to voters in Honduras, Argentina, Colombia, and elsewhere in Latin America. Rubio’s “Americas First” foreign policy — experienced by Latin Americans as bullying and Europeans as abandonment — can nevertheless be read as Washington finally realizing exactly where it is and who it shares the continent with. The rumored possible shift in the US position on the Falkland Islands — from backing Britain to backing Argentina — should be understood as merely the geopolitical manifestation of America’s increasing Hispanization. The United States today is as much part of Latin America as it is the Anglosphere. It is, in Trump’s words, “OUR hemisphere.” And the more Latin America belongs to the US, the more Latin American the US will become.

It’s already happening. For Anglo politicians from the Southwest like Beto O’Rourke or George W. Bush, the ability to deploy Spanish is now an indispensable part of retail politics. Down the class ladder, white guys aspiring to work anywhere from a kitchen to a construction site need to pick up a fair amount of español just to talk to the other guys. Even Pope Leo, the first American Pope, is really more of a Latin American, admitting he would prefer to root for Peru in the World Cup over the United States. The pontiff is simply the highest-profile example of the reverse assimilation into Latinidad that will become an ever more common part of 21st-century American life.

It is natural then for both Republicans and Democrats to want to elevate Latino candidates to win over an increasingly Latino electorate. Based on recent 2028 polling, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio is a frontrunner for the Republican one. The 2028 campaign for the White House could well be between a Miami Cuban and a Bronx Boricua. That’s what a Monroe Doctrine gets you.

A Latino-on-Latina presidential contest in 2028 would be an objectively funny way to finally bring the Trump era of American politics to a close. A political movement which began with “Build the Wall” as its defining slogan and has lately devolved into “annex Venezuela” was never going to reverse centuries-long migration and demographic patterns. Whether these changes usher in a Lusotropical Neoconservatism or a Mestizo Socialism remains to be seen. Yet the arc of the moral universe is bending inexorably towards Latinidad. This may be the future that MAGA deserves: oprime 2 para inglés. 

When Monroe outlined his plans to Congress in 1823, the US already controlled a sizable portion of North America, but there was still room to grow. Although the country was more built-up in the East, it was sparsely populated in the West. The US bordered Spanish-held land that covered what we now know as California and other states. Both the US and the Spanish territories were themselves incursions onto the lands that were once held, or were still contested by, America’s native inhabitants.

But these settler Americans were not inclined to stop expanding their territory. In 1845, the journalist John L. O’Sullivan coined the term “Manifest destiny”: the belief in a preordained, inevitable and divinely-inspired expansion of the United States across the North American continent to the Pacific Ocean and beyond. Expansionism was not a concept unique to the nascent US, but this was a heady time. Some American men of letters even imagined that their country might one day engulf British North America, now known as Canada. Some of their northern neighbors were equally keen: the repealing of the Corn Laws had severely affected the Canadian economy, and so many Canadians looked south for help. In 1849, a group of Montreal businessmen even demanded political union with the US. William Seward, an American senator, wrote in 1853 that Canada “will ultimately become a member of this confederacy, if we will consent”.

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In the years that followed, Manifest Destiny took the US west rather than north. The US engaged in a variety of deals and wars that added hundreds of thousands of square miles to the young nation, but left blood on American hands. Native tribes were brutalized. Even when territory was acquired by purchase, those purchases were often between settlers. The Louisiana Purchase, by which the US had bought a vast tract of land from the French in 1803, is one example; the Alaska Purchase, transferring ownership of Alaska from Russia to the US in 1867, is another. In neither case were the natives consulted.

Such abuses were not acknowledged, of course. Instead, America’s expansion was romanticized in popular culture and with propagandistic art. The painter Emanuel Leutze commemorated the Alaska Purchase with a portrayal of American and Russian officials discussing the deal over an enormous globe. And a painting by John Gast depicted Columbia, a figure representing republican values, marching west, laying a telegraph line as she went. (That painting was posted on X by a newly nationalistic Homeland Security only last year.)

One of the men depicted in the Alaska Purchase painting was William Seward, who had forecast that Canada might eventually join the US. He had now risen to the role of secretary of state, where he was able to put into practice his early enthusiasm for Manifest Destiny. As early as 1848, shortly after the phrase was coined, Seward had written that “our population is destined to roll its resistless wave to the icy barriers of the north and to encounter oriental civilization on the shores of the Pacific”.

Seward, an ardent abolitionist, sought to achieve expansion peacefully, criticizing his colleagues who sought to redraw America’s northern and southern borders by means of war. He believed that America had only to be patient, and that Mexico, as well as Canada, would one day join the Union of its own accord.

But his work on the Alaska Purchase helped intensify American territorial ambition. In the summer of 1867, Seward’s ally in the Alaska deal, Robert J. Walker, suggested the purchase of Greenland and Iceland from Denmark. Hoping to persuade his colleagues in government, Walker commissioned a report on the two territories’ assets. In addition to praising the vast and valuable resources of both areas, including fisheries, coal, cryolite, and other minerals — the rare earths of their day — the report specifically noted that the acquisition of Greenland might hasten the absorption of British North America. Such an acquisition, the report argued, would “greatly increase her (British North America’s) inducements, peacefully and cheerfully, to become a part of the American Union”.

The American Civil War had ended only in 1865, but Canada was already back on the agenda. In 1866, Congressman Nathaniel Banks introduced a bill calling for the annexation of British North America. The bill failed, but British officials were alarmed. For decades, they had resisted the idea of the states of British North America becoming a single confederation. A unified Canada might, after all, form a strong bond with its closer, republican neighbor, or fall prey to American expansion without the oversight and protection of the British military.

But things had changed. Now, in the late 1860s, America was making a quick recovery from the Civil War. It was getting its way with Alaska and it was casting hungry glances at Canada. And those glances, as Allen Francis, the US consul in Victoria, British Columbia, noted in April 1867, were reciprocated. Many locals, he wrote, “are now urging with great unanimity annexation to the United States as their only salvation — as the only means of retrieving the Colonies from their present embarrassment and decline.”

To the British, confederation now seemed the best way of buttressing Canada against American expansionism. On the day before the Alaska treaty was signed, Queen Victoria approved the British North America Act and the Dominion of Canada was formed on 1 July 1867, containing four provinces: Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Over the next decade, Canada would grow to include four more provinces. To some extent, then, Canada’s existence can be viewed as a defensive play against American expansionism.

And so far, the play has worked. In 1931, the Statute of Westminster made Canada legally independent from Britain, but there were no rumblings of conquest from the south. The same was true in 1982, when Canada’s constitution became fully separated from British control. (The shared monarch is now the only remnant of the legal bond.) By the second half of the 20th century, America was the global hegemon, and its foreign adventures went far beyond its home continent: not only in Latin America, to which President Roosevelt had extended the Monroe Doctrine, but to Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Canada was a friendly neighbor that subscribed to America’s liberal values and was an important trading partner.

Yet today those jingoistic rumblings have resumed. Trump represents less a continuation of 20th-century liberalism than the expansionism of old. He invoked “Manifest Destiny” in his second inauguration speech, is pressuring Denmark to cede Greenland, and has sometimes appeared to have similar designs on Canada. Indeed, he has called the Canadian-American border “artificial” and envisioned Canada as the 51st state.

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Canadians, of course, have bristled. In early 2025, the then-prime minister, Justin Trudeau, wrote on X that “there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell” that Canada would become part of the United States. When Mark Carney became prime minister a few months later, Trump seemed to quiet down, perhaps feeling less overshadowed or threatened now that the handsome and charismatic Trudeau was out of the picture. But now, in the wake of the attack on Venezuela and the threats against Greenland, Canadian politicians are once again eyeing the United States with suspicion. Both Bob Rae, Canada’s former ambassador to the United Nations, and Jean Charest, the former premier of Quebec, have warned that Trump’s imperial ambitions may include putting Canada “back in his crosshairs”. Canadian Arctic sovereignty and control of the Northwest Passage, after all, have been challenged by the US and are directly linked to Trump’s claims about national security concerns in that region. Meanwhile, conservative Albertans have mirrored the Montreal businessmen of yore, campaigning for a separatist referendum in the hope of joining the US.

How this all plays out remains to be seen. History cannot predict the future, nor can it offer specific advice for political players. As Adam Gopnik, an American essayist raised in Canada, wrote: “What history generally ‘teaches’ is how hard it is for anyone to control it, including the people who think they’re making it.” And despite the historical legacy of American expansion and the notion of Manifest Destiny, the circumstances today are far different from those of the 19th century. Greenland and Canada are not vast expanses of uncharted land, waiting to be “discovered” and “civilized”. Furthermore, the United States, Denmark and Canada are all Nato members. Threats of American aggression have created an unprecedented crisis within the alliance, destabilizing an organization that is still wrestling with how to respond to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The arrogance with which the imperial countries of the 19th century invaded other lands in search of resources, disregarding the existence and rights of the local inhabitants, should be a thing of the past. Yet Trump, just like Vladimir Putin, seems to wish for a bygone day, when larger nations dominated smaller ones without fear or compunction.

Both men may discover that they have less control over the future than they think. The war in Ukraine has dragged on far longer than anyone thought possible, and Putin has discovered that President Zelensky is a more dogged adversary than he anticipated. Might Canada surprise Trump in a similar way? Though American military superiority is unquestioned, Canada has begun to expand its military reserves and may take the approach of Finland vis-à-vis Russia, the goal being to make conquest too costly and troublesome to be worth the effort. Or will the Democratic Party find its footing and retake the White House in the next presidential election, reversing the tide of American foreign policy? Elections in the fall of 2025 seemed to indicate a shift in that direction, but 2028 is far off and Trump can do a lot of damage before then.

As the world now knows, it wasn’t. But what that means for this city and Fermín’s country remains unclear. For though Fermín felt euphoria over Maduro’s arrest, after years of Chavista misrule, Venezuela’s ruling socialist party is still in power, and a dangerous pro-government militia is still active in Fermín’s neighborhood. Indeed, with its web of guerrillas, gangsters, soldiers and political police, the frontier city of San Antonio del Táchira speaks vividly to explosive problems in Venezuela and the dangers of them spilling into more violence — amid Trump’s new “Donroe Doctrine” of open aggression in Latin America.

Since 2014, almost eight million people have fled hunger and poverty in Venezuela. Close to three million have settled in Colombia, and frontier towns like the sprawling Cúcuta are particularly popular destinations. With the Venezuelan economy in a mess — inflation currently sits at 225% — many of Fermín’s countrymen follow him over the border into Cúcuta to work. In the evenings, they cross back over the Táchira River, being sure to return before the Simón Bolívar International Bridge closes at 9pm. Close by, as dusk falls, I talk to Venezuelans as they are blasting salsa and reggaeton, drinking Coca-Cola and beer in plastic cups, and eating hot dogs from a stand.

There are more opportunities in Cúcuta than in Venezuela. The sweaty city of a million people, framed by green hills, has a booming clothes industry, coffee and sugar trades and universities. Even so, this lively community where they sell food and drinks, and zoom about as motorcycle taxis, has its problems. On the Venezuelan side, there are pro-government militias: the so-called colectivos. Since the American attack, they are reported to be putting up checkpoints and detaining people suspected of siding with Washington. The army and political police, known by the acronym SEBIN, also keep tabs on opponents.

Repression is increasing in other ways, too. The government is detaining journalists in Caracas and it has blocked foreign journalists from entering since the strike. Several teams tried to cross in as tourists at Cúcuta; Venezuelan troops held them and deleted photos and video before deporting them back across the river. In front of the bridge, dozens of TV crews made do with taking live shots from Colombian soil, a boon to the gaggle of drinks sellers nearby.

Locals must also contend with guerrillas from the National Liberation Army, or ELN, which has an estimated 5,000 fighters. Active on both sides of the border, the ELN is a fierce backer of Chavismo; following Trump’s attack, it released a statement calling on Venezuelans to defend against “the gringo aggression”. In more prosaic terms, though, the guerrillas extort many businesses in the area, calling payments “vaccines”. One Venezuelan tells me he used to have a food business but gave up because of the extortion, and now drives a taxi.

Whatever its Marxist rhetoric, the ELN also makes money from the drugs trade. Close to the bridge, along a stony river where goats munch on bags of trash, are dirt tracks known as trochas. They’re used by smugglers to take contraband over the border, whether sides of beef — or bricks of cocaine. Once the runners reach Venezuela, crossing the river on rickety wooden planks, they’re liable to face a tax: whether from guerrillas or soldiers. “They all work together,” says Celio, a charismatic former gasoline smuggler. Gangs get their cut too: Celio warns me not to go further along the trochas because it’s the home to infamous gangs like the Tren de Aragua. Five men with guns recently held up a photographer friend there, stealing his equipment.

Collaboration between gangsters and the state is key to the case against Maduro. US prosecutors indicted him in 2020 and again this year on crimes including narco-terrorism conspiracy. Though Venezuela is not a significant producer of cocaine, nor of other drugs like fentanyl, narco traffickers do shift tons of white powder from Colombia through places like Catatumbo, north of here, and on to the United States and Europe, all with the alleged complicity of the Venezuelan army. In 2018, I interviewed convicted Mexican trafficker Fernando Blengio, who told me that the military worked openly with narcos.

While Trump may have taken out Maduro, then, these broader criminal networks still appear firmly in place. And if the regime begins genuinely to totter — violence has lately erupted on the streets of Caracas — corrupt soldiers and gangsters could yet be used to repress the population. Another possibility, of course, is that they instead turn on each other, transforming Venezuela into a low-intensity civil war.

Amid this tangled mesh of state power and criminal violence, the people of La Parada, the local term for the Bolívar bridge checkpoint, seem unsurprisingly cynical of the government in Caracas. Several speculate that the army had not put up a fight but let Maduro be captured. “How come things are normal here if there was really an invasion of our country?” asked Sarai*, selling drinks by the river crossing in Cúcuta. Even so, some are optimistic that acting president Delcy Rodríguez is capable of overseeing a transition back to democracy. “We have to move slowly to change the institutions,” suggests Roberto*, a stocky former Venezuelan soldier. “We need someone inside the government to do that.” The guerrillas, gangs and militias of Cúcuta show how difficult such change could be.

Nor is Venezuela the only country facing challenges following America’s attack on Caracas. On the west bank of the river, I join a Colombian army convoy as it patrols the roads north of Cúcuta. It’s nighttime, and a bright moon bounces light off the heavily armored vehicles. The colonel in charge describes how he also woke to news of the US attack on Venezuela; unlike Fermín, he was soon on a call with Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who ordered 30,000 police and soldiers to reinforce the 1,300-mile frontier with Venezuela.

Petro, himself a former guerrilla, fervently condemned the abduction of Maduro, posting that “the United States is the first country in the world to bomb a South American capital in human history”. Trump responded by accusing Petro of being involved in cocaine production and saying he didn’t have long left himself. Ominous words — though there’s currently no known indictment of Petro, and he’s anyway due to step down this year once his term ends. If the Donroe Doctrine means additional attacks in Latin America, then, other countries may have more to fear. That includes Cuba and Nicaragua, both with more entrenched authoritarian Leftist leaders. Trump, as always, has shown he can be impossible to predict.

As for Colombia, an army officer in the convoy tells me he thinks the Americans are more likely to strike a cocaine lab than attack the government itself. Yet even if Petro and his successors avoid direct intervention, the challenges of Cúcuta still hint at trouble ahead. For one thing, there are those ELN guerillas. Colombian army sources warn that a large concentration have lately crossed the border from Venezuela. In December, the ELN also carried out a wave of bomb and gun attacks on Colombian targets, causing terror with makeshift explosives and killing an ambulance driver as they shot up a police station.

It goes without saying, meanwhile, that a meltdown in Venezuela is likely to spark even more violence across the border. Guerrillas and gangs operate across the two countries and flee heat from one to the other, and that’s before you add Colombia’s own brutal history of drug runners and Marxist fighters. One US argument for taking out Maduro was that his regime causes instability. But a collapse in Venezuela could cause even more.

For the moment, anyway, the rhythms of life in Cúcuta continue. As night falls, Fermín says he’d have to return home to Venezuela — and the fears and hardships he has faced for years. But, he adds, Venezuelans have learned to wait, hardly surprising when the Chavistas have been in power since 1999, when Fermín was just 12 years old. “Before,” he adds, “we made the mistake of thinking things would change when they wouldn’t. Now, we have learned to be patient.” The risk, of course, is that change could be violent, with US forces weakening the regime from the top and guerrillas and militias taking advantage of the power vacuum from below. So while things might get better, there is also the fear they could get even worse.

*Names have been changed.