Power, Deception, and the Risk of War in the Americas

by Germánico Vaca

This essay is a political argument and historical interpretation. It reflects the author’s views and aims to provoke public debate at a moment of extraordinary global risk.

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Why This Must Be Said Now

The American empire is no longer rising; it is contracting. History shows that declining powers often respond not with reform, but with force. Today, Venezuela—and increasingly Ecuador—stand at the center of that danger. The language being used to justify confrontation is familiar, recycled, and perilous. It is built on selective memory, moral inversion, and the erasure of past interventions that shaped the very crises now invoked to legitimize war.

If this trajectory continues, the result will not be democracy or stability, but a widening conflict that could escalate far beyond the region.

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Cuba as a Precedent, Not a Mystery

For decades, Cuba has been presented to the world as proof of communist defiance against the United States. Yet this simplified narrative ignores a far more complex—and uncomfortable—history of U.S. influence, intelligence operations, and strategic manipulation in Latin America during the Cold War.

Before 1959, Cuba was not an isolated revolutionary experiment. It was deeply embedded in U.S. economic and political structures. The Batista regime itself emerged from that relationship, supported and shaped by external interests. When that order collapsed, what followed was not merely a spontaneous rupture, but a transition that unfolded amid intense intelligence activity, geopolitical calculation, and global rivalry between Washington and Moscow.

The Cuban Revolution cannot be understood without acknowledging the broader Cold War logic in which it occurred: a world where influence, access, and containment often mattered more than ideology itself.

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Intelligence, Power, and Manufactured Outcomes

Declassified materials, memoirs, and congressional testimony have shown that intelligence agencies during the Cold War did not merely observe events in Latin America—they actively shaped them. Political movements were infiltrated, media narratives influenced, labor and student organizations penetrated, and leaders cultivated or discarded based on strategic convenience.

This was not unique to Cuba. Ecuador, Chile, Guatemala, Brazil, Argentina, and many others experienced variations of the same pattern: sovereignty constrained by covert pressure, economic policy subordinated to external interests, and democratic outcomes tolerated only when they aligned with geopolitical priorities.

The lesson is not that all revolutions were fabrications, but that none unfolded in a vacuum. Power intervened—sometimes crudely, sometimes subtly—to steer outcomes.

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The Bay of Pigs and the Logic of Failure

The failed invasion of Cuba in 1961 is often portrayed as a simple miscalculation. Yet its consequences were profound and lasting. It consolidated internal power, eliminated organized opposition, and transformed a fragile revolutionary government into a permanent security state.

Whether through incompetence or design, the outcome reshaped Cuban society and regional politics for generations. What matters today is not assigning a single motive, but recognizing a recurring pattern: interventions justified as corrective often produce the opposite result—entrenchment, radicalization, and long-term instability.

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The Missile Crisis: Two Visions of Survival

The Cuban Missile Crisis is remembered in the United States as a triumph of restraint. Less discussed is the fact that key actors held radically different views on risk and sacrifice. Correspondence from that period reveals that nuclear war was not a theoretical abstraction, but a real possibility shaped by human judgment, fear, and ideology.

One critical lesson emerges clearly: even authoritarian systems can recognize that survival of a people must outweigh the pride or ambition of leaders. War, once unleashed, obeys no ideology.

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From Cuba to Venezuela—and Ecuador: The Resource Equation Everyone Ignores

What is almost entirely absent from mainstream discussion is the sheer material scale of what is at stake. Venezuela and Ecuador, taken together, sit atop an extraordinary concentration of strategic resources—oil, gas, rare earths, critical minerals, biodiversity, and agricultural capacity—that represent a substantial share of South America’s total resource base.

This reality explains why the confrontation is not merely regional. From the perspective of the United States, losing influence over these territories would accelerate economic decline and weaken its ability to stabilize supply chains, energy markets, and advanced industries. From the perspective of other global powers, allowing a single declining hegemon to consolidate control over such resources would fundamentally alter the global balance of power.

This is why China, Russia, and other BRICS-aligned nations cannot simply acquiesce. Semiconductor production, advanced computing, energy transitions, aerospace, and next-generation technologies all depend on materials that are abundant in Venezuela and Ecuador. Whoever controls access to these resources will shape industrial capacity for decades.

What is being framed as diplomacy or security cooperation is, in reality, a high-stakes struggle over the material foundations of the global economy.

History shows that when empires face debt pressure, industrial decline, and internal instability, they often externalize the crisis. In the early 2000s, the United States entered a cycle of permanent war justified by fear, urgency, and moral absolutism. The result was not renewal, but deeper debt, institutional erosion, and global mistrust.

Today, a similar pattern is emerging—not as a repetition of past events, but as a repetition of logic. Economic stress is again being converted into geopolitical confrontation. Resource control is again being framed as moral necessity. And complex global realities are again reduced to the illusion of quick victories.

The assumption that Venezuela will “fold,” or that Ecuador’s compliance guarantees regional control, is a profound miscalculation. These countries are not isolated nodes; they are embedded in a multipolar system where retaliation does not require direct conflict. Trade realignment, currency blocs, technological decoupling, and alliance shifts are already on the table.

If Mexico or other regional powers were to deepen alignment with BRICS structures in response, the consequences would extend far beyond Latin America. Supply chains would fracture. Financial leverage would weaken. The very objectives this strategy seeks to achieve would be undermined.

This is why a military escalation involving Venezuela would not be a contained conflict. It would mark the opening phase of a far wider confrontation—one driven not by ideology, but by resources, debt, and declining hegemonic control.

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This Is Not an Ideological Defense

Opposing this trajectory is not an endorsement of socialism, communism, or authoritarianism. I have consistently rejected false socialism and state corruption masquerading as justice. This is not about left versus right.

It is about realism.

A military confrontation involving Venezuela will not remain local. China, Russia, Iran, and other global actors will not view it as an isolated event. Resources of this magnitude do not exist outside great-power competition. To pretend otherwise is either ignorance or deliberate deception.

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The Final Warning

Empires do not collapse because enemies defeat them. They collapse because they refuse to confront their own history.

Using distorted narratives to justify war does not erase past interventions—it amplifies their consequences. The people of Latin America will pay the price first, but they will not be the last.

The truth must come out—not to rewrite the past, but to prevent a future defined by irreversible catastrophe.

Silence, at this moment, is not neutrality. It is consent.