Interview/ Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Colombian writer
January 3 was no ordinary day, when President Donald Trump announced military strikes on Venezuela and the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. More than a decade before this, Colombian writer Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, who teaches philosophy, human rights, and global affairs at Birkbeck College, University of London, had posed a provocative question in his book What If Latin America Ruled the World? Speaking on the sidelines of the Jaipur Literature Festival, Rivera reflected on his 2010 assessment, Latin America’s long colonial history, and its shifting place in world politics.
Edited excerpts:
Q/ Your book What If Latin America Ruled the World? How The South Will Take The North Into the 22nd Century imagined a very different global order. Given recent developments in the region, especially Venezuela, how do you see Latin America’s place in world politics today?
A/ When I wrote that book in 2010, it was not a prediction, but a kind of bet which had to do with demography. By 2040, the US will no longer be a white-majority country. That was already a well-known fact. Rather, most calculations, including mine, were conservative. It is happening faster than expected.
Latino is the fastest-growing demographic in the US, no matter how much racism or anti-immigration policies exist. Today, in several areas in the US, you are often better off speaking Spanish. So I said that two things could happen:
First, Latinos tend to be politically progressive, but socially conservative. It has got to do with colonial violence, Christianity, and also that it was one of the first regions to fight colonialism. That spirit of struggle still defines the region. Take what happened on January 3, when the US attacked Venezuela and then immediately issued threats over Greenland. For Europeans, this was shocking. They are still running around like headless chickens, asking, ‘Why is this happening to us? We’re supposed to be white. We’re supposed to be the west. We’re allies.’
This is no longer about abstract ideas of liberty or freedom. It’s about the spirit of struggle, which remains the mark of Latin America. You see it in the way Colombian President Gustavo Petro responds to threats. You see it in Brazil, in how they dealt with their own Donald Trump (Jair Bolsonaro). You even see it symbolically: Petro standing alongside Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, speaking out for the Palestinian people last September.
But there’s another side—a less optimistic one which we also have to be prepared for. Latinos’ socially conservative tendencies are precisely what the Republicans have been more effective at cultivating than the Democrats. Machismo and the deification of the nuclear family with the wife in the kitchen and children never dissenting. Republicans have leaned into this imagery very successfully, aided by colonial Christian legacies. You can see this in election after election: a significant shift among Latinos and African Americans, particularly men, toward that worldview. Why? Because in times of uncertainty, people cling to an idea of a time of purity, a time when men knew how to be men, women stayed in their roles, and everything was supposedly peaceful.
Of course, that past never existed.
Q/ For those of us from formerly colonised countries, the contrast is hard to ignore: Europe’s response to Venezuela versus Greenland, or Ukraine versus Palestine. Given Venezuela’s oil wealth and Latin America’s resource richness, are we entering neo-colonialism?
A/ You are right to point out a new cycle of resource extractivism. But for Latin America, this is not new. It is our entire history, especially given our proximity to the US. It is not just the US, the European Union, too, does not stop at the European mainland. France still has overseas territories in the Caribbean, such as Guadeloupe and Martinique. The British still treat many former colonies as property. The relationship has always been about siphoning our wealth to make them rich, and us poor.
However, something fundamental has changed. Earlier, imperialism required territorial control, having boots on the ground. That has changed. And the perfect example is oil. The US oil majors are not in the business of extracting oil; they are in the business of making money. They don’t want to own territory. This is why, and yes, I’ll say it, Trump was actually sensible in allowing the Chavista regime to remain in power.
Q/ Given this, why have countries in the Global South struggled to unite as a bloc, the way Europe has?
A/ Actually, we did unite, which people have forgotten. After the Bandung Conference in the 1950s came the Tricontinental Conference in the mid-1960s, held in Havana. It was not funded by the Soviets, but by China. It brought together African, Asian and Latin American countries. The message was simple: racism is not about skin colour. The coloured peoples of the world uniting is a political position against any and every kind of empire and imperialism. There is also a contemporary example: The Hague Group, with countries like Colombia and Indonesia taking political positions against what is happening in Palestine, right from the heart of Europe.
Q/ You were born in Colombia. How do you see its response, given that it has Venezuela as its neighbour, has military ties with the US, and presidential elections are due in May?
A/ The Latin American left leaders are radical pragmatists. Petro understood that the US and Colombia share a problem: criminal gangs operating along the Venezuelan-Colombian border, where oil is produced. Petro was pragmatic, clever and careful enough to propose to Trump: why not help us tackle the criminal gangs that continue to pose a serious security threat even to Colombians? The future is multi-alignment, a beautiful successor to non-alignment.
Q/ The Monroe Doctrine emerged in a very different geopolitical moment, yet today we are seeing renewed assertions of the US across the western hemisphere, extending even into parts of Europe. How do you read this shift, and what are your thoughts on the so-called Donroe doctrine?
A/ Even from Monroe to Donroe, there is one thing that has not changed. In the late 19th century, the Monroe Doctrine was often explained to Americans through cartoons. In those images, Latin America was depicted as a young woman, available for the taking. That kind of language is still there. This feminisation of Latin America has long served a political function: it allows the region to be treated as a minor, voiceless, whose patrimony can be claimed by others.
That has not changed. What has changed, however, is the nature of imperial power. Resource extraction is no longer the primary driver for major oil and energy corporations. Profit is. The dominant economic logic today is financial, not territorial. Control is less about owning land or resources outright, and more about determining how profits are distributed. This is precisely what Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales did during the Pink Tide. They did not nationalise oil; instead, they negotiated profit-sharing agreements with multinational companies.
What we need to understand is that the newer conditions for imperialism will have that component, so how do we speculate? And out of that, what future do we want?