On July 4, the United States of America will celebrate its 250th birthday. Initially an inspiration to Latin American and Caribbean independence fighters seeking liberation from European colonization, the United States soon emerged as the premier obstacle to the pursuit of peace, equality, and self-determination in the region. It is a mantle that the country continues to bear.

Donald Trump’s presidency — especially his present, second term — has revived the ugliest faces of US imperialism in the hemisphere: gunboat diplomacy, unilateral military and economic aggression, electoral intervention, and the persecution of migrant populations within and approaching US borders.

These hostilities have been performed under the auspices of a rehabilitated Monroe Doctrine, christened by no lesser authority than the New York Post as the “Donroe Doctrine.” Mercurial even in its early nineteenth-century iteration, the doctrine was briefly celebrated by newly independent Latin American nations as a rejection of European recolonization in the hemisphere. Soon, however, it was invoked to broadly justify US intervention in what the ruling class came to consider the country’s “backyard.”