Why is there a build-up of the US armed forces in the southern Caribbean? According to Dr. Evan Ellis, Latin America Research Professor and General Douglas Macarthur Research Chair at the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, our guest on The LatinNews Podcast this week, this is about putting an end to a significant strategic threat to U.S. interests that are threatening the core of things that President Trump said he was going to defend, issues of migration and issues of drugs. 

For the Venezuelan people, the importance of restoring Venezuelan democracy, and it’s likely that Venezuelans have never had a better opportunity than Edmundo Gonzalez and Maria Corina Machado to reunite a deeply divided country. How can this regime change take place? 

The sense is that the way that the current administration is looking at this challenge is that it's more through the lens of a threat that is generating harm against the United States. Drugs are the first little piece of that, but it's about those harms more than about democracy. 

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