A New Manifest Destiny: How Corporate Interests Shape U.S. Policy in Latin America

When examining the factors that drive U.S. Latin American foreign policy, a clear distinction can be found between public justification and private motives. These two, in fact, complement and enable each other across decades of U.S. history. Intervention in Latin America is often influenced by corporate lobbying, which can swiftly and quietly translate private sector profit motives into complex and elaborate national security narratives. As new economic interests emerge, corresponding security concerns are generated and used to justify certain policies. In the specific cases of Guatemala in 1954 and Venezuela today, anti-communism and national security are used as mainstream, easily digestible public justifications, while market access and contract stability are the motives that only appear in private cables and behind closed doors.

The 1950 election of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán as the Guatemalan president set his nation on an unavoidable collision course with the United States government. Arbenz was a determined nationalist who immediately set off to tackle some of Guatemala’s largest socioeconomic issues. In 1952, Arbenz introduced a sweeping land reform program called Decree 900. This decree redistributed unused lands of sizes greater than 223 acres to landless peasants. It is estimated that around 500,000 Guatemalans directly benefited from the reform (about one-sixth of the entire Guatemalan population). In his 1953 address to the Guatemalan Congress, President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán declared, “The Agrarian Reform Law begins the economic transformation of Guatemala; it is the fundamental base of the destiny of the nation as a new country.” He went on to mention that the law formed “a part of the heavy debt the ruling class and governors have contracted with the humble people, with people of the field with cheap cotton shirts and palm-leaf sombreros who do not have shoes, or medicine, or money, or education, or land.” Arbenz was a new, fresh leader who was taking immense strides to give everyday Guatemalans a real opportunity at an improved way of life. 

Of course, the reform law was met with fierce opposition from the Guatemalan elite and the U.S. government. Both groups had one thing in common: economic interests tied to the United Fruit Company (UFCO). The company’s extensive history and involvement in Guatemala dates back to the beginning of the 20th century. By the 1930s, UFCO had gained control of over 42% of the land in Guatemala and was exempt from paying taxes and import duties. Soon, the company was the single largest landholder, business, and employer in the country. But in 1953, Arbenz’s Decree 900 had expropriated large amounts of UFCO’s unused land, undoubtedly angering the company and U.S. government officials who were closely linked to the company. By that time, the Guatemalan government had also implemented new healthcare, education, and labor reforms. The new labor code allowed workers the right to organize and strike to improve their working conditions. 

The combination of Decree 900 and a new labor code immediately led to an intense lobbying campaign orchestrated by UFCO in Washington, pushing for U.S. intervention. This wasn’t a difficult task. The company had a powerful ally: Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s law firm had represented UFCO. Additionally, his brother Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, owned shares in the company and had previously sat on its Board of Trustees. The agreed-upon strategy was to reframe the property dispute as a Cold War security threat to the Western Hemisphere. With the help of the U.S. government and the CIA, UFCO began an elaborate disinformation campaign to shape public opinion. They painted the Guatemalan government’s policies as evidence of communism creeping into Central America. Despite only 4,000 registered communists in a country of three million people, the narrative that UFCO and the CIA had created resonated deeply with President Eisenhower. Given the mounting political pressure and the Cold War policy at the time, there was enough justification for a U.S.-led intervention in Guatemala. In August 1953, President Eisenhower authorized Operation PBSuccess, a CIA operation with the sole objective of overthrowing the democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. 

John Foster Dulles (right) is greeted by his brother Allen Welsh Dulles on his arrival at LaGuardia Field in New York City in 1948.

The stated intention of the operation was clear: to remove the menace of the present communist-controlled government of Guatemala. To achieve this goal, the CIA recruited a disgruntled ex-Arbenz military officer named Carlos Castillo Armas. Armas would be the one to rally an army of a few hundred men, supplied and supported by the U.S. government. With the help of U.S. intelligence equipment and logistical support, Armas and his men attacked on June 18, 1954. Simultaneously, the CIA launched a psychological warfare and propaganda campaign, warning the public that a massive invasion was coming. Quickly, panic overtook the capital, and Arbenz’s supporters began to lose faith. When Arbenz attempted to gather his own militia to fight back, only a couple of hundred civilians showed up. Nine days later, Arbenz resigned and fled the country. Operation PBSuccess was an unstoppable victory, and the U.S. government-backed corporate greed of UFCO prevailed. 

Shortly after the operation, Armas arrested thousands of opposition leaders, branded them as communists, and then repealed the democratic constitution of 1945. Progressive healthcare, education, and labor reforms were quickly dismantled, and UFCO regained all of its land that had been formally expropriated under Arbenz.

The Guatemala intervention established a playbook for the U.S. government that would come to be refined and repeated across Latin America for decades. The formula for this foreign policy template remained consistent: identify economic interests, manufacture a hyperbolic security threat, and execute regime change. No contemporary case mirrors the Guatemala intervention as precisely as current-day Venezuela.

72 years later, the subject of U.S. government and corporate interests has changed, but the objective remains ever so similar. Venezuela is home to the world’s largest oil reserves and has long been of high interest to many U.S. oil companies. In the year leading up to the Trump administration’s recent military intervention in Venezuela, corporate actors who stood to benefit from regime change spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying the White House and various federal agencies. This extensive lobbying campaign was led by companies in the fossil fuel and cryptocurrency industries, who sought unrestricted economic access to the resource-rich nation. The major oil giants, including Shell, Chevron, and Phillips 66, announced in their lobbying reports that they interacted with the Treasury Department regarding Venezuelan licenses and sanctions during the first three quarters of 2025. These titans of industry were pushing for a regime change that would allow them to gain licenses to produce, sell, and profit from Venezuelan oil.

In typical fashion, U.S.-based companies with promising prospects of profitability abroad were able to sway foreign policy decisions and successfully convince the current administration to take military action. On January 3, 2026, Operation Absolute Resolve, a large-scale military effort, successfully captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and transported him back to the U.S. to face narco-terrorism charges. The Trump administration cited several reasons why intervention in the Latin American nation was necessary. The White House consistently claimed that drug trafficking and terrorist groups led by or associated with Maduro posed a real and dangerous threat to U.S. national security. President Trump asserted that Venezuelan oil production had plummeted due to mismanagement and corruption within the country and made the unsubstantiated claim that Venezuela had stolen oil and other resources from the United States.

Trump meets with oil executives at White House to push for investment in Venezuela

Overnight, the president of a sovereign country was abducted, and the U.S. had near-complete authority in Venezuela. Immediately following the operation, U.S. energy companies saw their stocks climb. Chevron, ExxonMobil, and ConocoPhillips, the three largest U.S. oil firms, experienced price surges and were granted a new, profitable opportunity in Venezuela. 

The recent U.S. intervention in Venezuela follows the familiar historical playbook that focuses on public justifications like security, stability, or liberation. Yet, without fail, these interventions coincide with the strategic and financial interests of large corporations. It becomes clear that “security threat” framing automatically delegitimizes any alternative economic motive. The aftermaths of these interventions are also crucial to consider, as they carry immense costs, often destabilizing regions, igniting humanitarian crises, and leaving ordinary people to bear the consequences after corporate interests have secured their gains. The names change, the resources of interest shift, and the “security threats” are rebranded for each generation, but the fundamental truth remains: U.S.-Latin America policy is written and decided not in the halls of Congress, but in the conference rooms of major corporations.