Whereas, over two centuries ago, President James Monroe announced that the United States Government would actively oppose any interference by European powers in the affairs of independent Latin American and Caribbean countries for the purpose of oppressing them or controlling in any other manner their destiny;

Whereas, over time, this policy, referred to as the Monroe Doctrine, came to be interpreted by many United States policymakers as a mandate for United States interference in the sovereign affairs of Latin American and Caribbean countries in order to protect and promote perceived powerful economic and political interests in the United States, irrespective of genuine external tangible threats to countries in the region posed by foreign powers;

Whereas, following a period of western expansion of the United States, resulting in the massive, forced displacement and genocide of Native peoples who originally inhabited much of North America, United States political and business leaders took an increasingly active interest in the acquisition of raw materials and in investment opportunities in other parts of the Western Hemisphere;

Whereas, after annexing the territory of Texas, the United States invaded Mexico militarily in 1846 and, after defeating the Mexican Army and occupying Mexico City, acquired 55 percent of Mexico’s territory through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed in 1848;

Whereas, in 1856, President Franklin Pierce recognized the dictatorial regime in Nicaragua established by United States colonialist William Walker, whose regime’s measures included the legalization of slavery in Nicaragua;

Whereas, in 1898, the United States invaded Puerto Rico and Cuba during the Spanish-American War and continues to maintain control of Puerto Rico, as well as a piece of territory in Guantánamo, Cuba, to this day;

Whereas, from 1898 to 1934, the United States conducted military interventions in Cuba, Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, known as the Banana Wars, in order to advance powerful corporate American financial interests, that often came at the expense of United States support for dictatorships and flagrant human rights violations across the region;

Whereas, in 1904, President Teddy Roosevelt established the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, whereby the United States could intervene to ensure the protection of United States interests and those of foreign creditors in the region, and declared that the United States could exercise international police power in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing and impotence;

Whereas, in 1909, President William Howard Taft sent United States warships to Nicaragua as part of an effort to overthrow the Government of Nicaraguan President José Santos Zelaya, before launching an invasion of the country in 1912, setting off a period of sustained United States-led intervention, occupation, and repression that would ultimately give rise to the brutal, multigenerational Somoza family dictatorship;

Whereas, in 1915, and against the background of the United States Government’s longstanding hostility toward the precedent set by Haiti’s successful revolution in 1804, President Woodrow Wilson led a United States invasion and occupation of Haiti that would last until 1934;

Whereas the United States invasion, occupation, and continued interference in Haiti, combined with the massive economic impact of the payments that the country was forced to make to the former colonial power, France, under threat of military aggression, until 1947, impeded the country’s efforts to build robust democratic institutions and enabled the rise of the United States-supported dictatorship of François Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude Duvalier, which brutally ruled the country from 1957 to 1986;

Whereas, in 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced the establishment of a Good Neighbor policy toward the region that sought to emphasize nonintervention, noninterference, and shared prosperity trade in contrast with the previous policy of using military force to advance United States interests;

Whereas, in 1947, President Harry S. Truman signed the National Security Act which created the Central Intelligence Agency (hereafter in this preamble referred to as the CIA) and authorized the agency to begin covert action in the region;

Whereas, in 1953, after democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz instituted proworker policies that threatened the profit margins of United States corporation United Fruit Company, President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized the CIA to begin Operation PBSuccess, a multimillion-dollar project involving investing in psychological warfare and political action that led to the coup against President Arbenz in 1954;

Whereas, in 1961, the United States covertly financed opposition leaders and began seeking military leaders to support the eventual 1964 coup against Brazilian President João Goulart which resulted in a 21-year military dictatorship in Brazil;

Whereas the Organization of American States (hereafter in this preamble referred to as the OAS), headquartered in the District of Columbia, and funded in large part by the United States Government, remained largely silent and inactive with regard to the many egregious abuses perpetrated by United States-backed military rightwing dictatorships during the decades of the Cold War;

Whereas, in 1962, the United States imposed a full embargo on Cuba, still in place today, which has led to tens of billions of dollars in capital losses for the island country, and has contributed significantly to the immiseration of the Cuban people;

Whereas, following the election of Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1970, United States President Richard Nixon directed the CIA to spread propaganda aimed at preventing Allende from taking power, and later, actively worked with and supported Chilean military leaders that carried out the 1973 coup of President Allende resulting in a 15-year-long military dictatorship in which at least 40,000 people were tortured and more than 3,000 killed;

Whereas, from 1975 to 1980, the United States actively supported Operation Condor, a coordinated campaign of political repression and state terrorism that saw the United States work closely with military governments in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay to help kidnap, torture, and kill people who had left their home countries in exile;

Whereas, following a regional debt crisis sparked in part by historic Federal Reserve interest rate hikes, the International Monetary Fund (hereafter in this preamble referred to as the IMF) vastly expanded its lending portfolio in Latin America;

Whereas the IMF, whose largest shareholder is the United States, promoted austerity, deregulation, and other structural reforms that resulted in stagnant economic growth in much of Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s, following two decades of strong economic growth;

Whereas, in 1983, under the false pretense that the safety of 600 United States medical students in Grenada was under threat, President Ronald Reagan authorized the military invasion of the island country, a move condemned as a flagrant violation of international law by the United Nations General Assembly;

Whereas, in the 1980s, the Reagan administration—

(1)

supported security forces in Guatemala that perpetrated a genocide against Mayan Indigenous peoples, according to the Commission of Historical Clarification;

(2)

supported death squads in El Salvador;

(3)

supported rightwing paramilitary militias (Contras) in Nicaragua; and

(4)

participated in efforts to coverup egregious crimes perpetrated by Central American security forces, such as the massacre of 6 Jesuit priests and 2 other unarmed civilians by an elite United States-backed battalion in El Salvador;

Whereas the United States-backed dirty wars of Central America triggered a major wave of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua to the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s;

Whereas, in 1989, President George H.W. Bush launched Operation Just Cause, a unilateral United States invasion of Panama conducted in violation of international law, leading to mass civilian casualties, including in the bombing of low-income, civilian population centers such as El Chorillo, where casualties are credibly estimated to have been in the hundreds;

Whereas the CIA covertly financed units of the Haitian military, whose officers led a violent coup d’état in 1991 that overthrew the country’s first democratically elected President, and then continued to support individuals involved in death squads that targeted supporters of the ousted President;

Whereas, beginning in 2000, the Bush administration blocked development and humanitarian assistance to the Haitian Government and provided financial support to opposition groups culminating in another coup against the elected President in 2004;

Whereas, starting in 2000, the United States provided billions of dollars of funding to Plan Colombia, a joint counter narcotics and counter insurgency initiative which resulted in thousands of civilian casualties, massive human rights abuses perpetrated by military and paramilitary forces, and the forced displacement of millions of mostly Afro-Colombian and Indigenous civilians, while failing to reduce the production and trafficking of cocaine;

Whereas the United States-backed drug war, along with economic displacement attributable in part to United States-sponsored free trade agreements, resulted in another major wave of migration from Central America and Mexico during the first two decades of the 2000s;

Whereas, from 1941 to 2003, United States Navy operations in Vieques, Puerto Rico, caused the death of civilians and high rates of lethal illnesses to the population;

Whereas, in 2002, the United States Government provided funding and other support to political actors that carried out a short-lived coup against the democratically elected Government of Venezuela, and subsequently expressed support for the coup;

Whereas, following the 2009 coup in Honduras, the United States continued to support the country’s illegitimate government by providing, between 2009 and 2016, an estimated $200,000,000 in military and police aid to Honduran security forces engaged in violent extrajudicial killings and other human rights crimes targeting protesters, activists, land rights advocates, and other civilians opposed to the regime;

Whereas, in a 2013 address to the OAS, Secretary of State John Kerry declared that the Monroe Doctrine era is over … The relationship that we seek and that we have worked hard to foster is not about a United States declaration about how and when it will intervene in the affairs of other American states. It’s about all of our countries viewing one another as equals, sharing responsibilities, cooperating on security issues, and adhering not to doctrine, but to the decisions that we make as partners to advance the values and the interests that we share.;

Whereas, in 2014, Presidents Barack Obama and Raul Castro announce the thawing of and eventual normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba;

Whereas, beginning in 2015, the Department of Justice played an active role in Operation Car Wash, or Lava Jato, a sprawling anticorruption probe which was used to advance a partisan political agenda in Brazil, resulting in the politically motivated conviction and imprisonment, and barring from the 2018 Presidential election, of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva;

Whereas credible media reporting has exposed the extensive involvement of Department of Justice officials in Lava Jato, including actively advising Brazilian prosecutors outside of proper channels and acting in violation of Brazilian law and bilateral treaty procedures;

Whereas, in 2017, President Donald Trump threatened to invade Venezuela militarily and imposed broad unilateral sanctions against the country that have significantly harmed the country’s civilian population;

Whereas, in 2019, United States National Security Advisor John Bolton announced, Today we proudly proclaim for all to hear: the Monroe Doctrine is alive and well.;

Whereas the migration of Cubans and Venezuelans to the United States has increased dramatically in the years following the imposition (and reimposition) of broad economic sanctions against these countries;

Whereas, in late 2019, a military coup was staged against the elected Government of Bolivia following unfounded claims of electoral fraud made by an OAS Electoral Observation Mission, while the subsequent coup government received support from the Trump administration and OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro;

Whereas President Trump reversed the Obama administration’s policy of normalization with Cuba, imposed new sanctions, and, as one of his last acts in office, put Cuba back on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list without justification;

Whereas the international community has resoundingly condemned the United States embargo on Cuba, most recently during the 2025 United Nations General Assembly, with the resolution condemning the embargo passing by 165 votes in favor, with only 7 against;

Whereas, in 2025, the Trump administration began sanctioning foreign officials involved with Cuba’s international medical missions, which for decades have been deployed around Latin America, Africa, and Europe and have been lauded by the World Health Organization and governments around the world for providing crucial health care services to underserved communities;

Whereas the United States Government has failed to apologize for its past support for military coups in the region;

Whereas Investor State Dispute Settlement (hereafter in this preamble referred to as the ISDS) provisions found in United States-backed free trade agreements allow multinational corporations to sue governments before panels of corporate lawyers based on claims that regulatory frameworks, including those designed to protect workers and the environment, will lead to future losses, and thus far Latin American and Caribbean countries have been sued a total of 346 times under ISDS provisions, more than any other region of the world;

Whereas a United States-based company has filed an ISDS claim against the State of Honduras for nearly $11,000,000,000 in alleged future losses, more than a third of the country’s yearly economic output, as a result of the Honduran Government’s announcement that the company can no longer continue to operate as a Zona de Empleo y Desarrollo Economico, a territorial area largely governed and controlled by private investors that has been declared unconstitutional by the country’s Supreme Court and developed under former President Juan Orlando Hernández;

Whereas President Trump interfered in Honduras’ 2025 election, threatening to cut off United States economic support to the country if voters did not elect National Party candidate Nasry Asfura, and then issued a full pardon of former Honduran president and National Party politician Juan Orlando Hernández who had been convicted in a United States Federal court and sentenced to 45 years in prison for charges related to narcotics trafficking and weapons;

Whereas the second Trump administration has pursued an aggressive policy of individual sanctions targeting officials of countries across the region that benefit from Cuban medical missions, which have made a well-documented positive impact on health care systems facing challenges in the region, across the Global South, and around the world;

Whereas President Trump has made multiple threats against Panama regarding control of the Panama Canal, including pledging to take back the Panama Canal, in violation of the Torrijos-Carter treaties;

Whereas President Trump signed a January 20, 2025, Executive order designating drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and has, according to credible media reporting, directed the Pentagon to target cartels through military action, in potential violation of the sovereignty of Mexico and other countries;

Whereas the Trump administration has enacted a policy of overt interference in the judiciary and democratic institutions of Brazil in retaliation against the Brazilian Supreme Court’s trial of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on multiple charges, including attempting to foment a military-backed coup in order to stay in office after losing Brazil’s 2022 Presidential election;

Whereas the Trump administration has misused authorities under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (Public Law 95–223), section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 (19 U.S.C. 2411), and the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act (22 U.S.C. 10101 et seq.) in a politically motivated effort to exert improper influence on judicial proceedings held in accordance with Brazilian law and constitutional norms;

Whereas the Trump administration’s policy toward Brazil risks producing incalculable damage to the alliance between the United States and Brazil, the two largest democracies in the Western Hemisphere;

Whereas the Trump administration has conducted a similar policy of overt interference with regard to Colombia’s judiciary in an effort to support a political ally facing charges of witness tampering and fraud, demonstrating an alarming pattern;

Whereas President Trump has established a partnership with the President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, to wrongfully deport hundreds of people from the United States without due process to face notoriously dangerous prison conditions in El Salvador;

Whereas these individuals have been, in effect, forcibly disappeared, in a manner reminiscent of what has taken place under dictatorships across the region, often by regimes supported by the United States Government;

Whereas, in his second term, President Trump has ordered a series of unauthorized military strikes in international waters targeting Venezuelan nationals and other individuals allegedly involved in narcotics trafficking, strikes that have led to over 100 casualties and that were conducted in violation of the United States Constitution, United States law, and international law, and which risk stoking a wider military conflict with Venezuela and other countries;

Whereas, on January 3, 2026, the Trump administration, citing the Monroe Doctrine, launched an unauthorized military attack against Venezuela in violation of the United States Constitution and international law, killing dozens and abducting the President and first lady of the country;

Whereas President Trump publicly admitted that these actions were taken with the intent of the United States running Venezuela and taking control of its oil reserves;

Whereas President Maduro is being held in a New York prison and awaiting trial on counts of narco-terrorism;

Whereas, on January 5, 2026, following the abduction of Maduro and his detention by United States judicial authorities, the Department of Justice dropped its claim that the Cartel de los Soles is a distinct hierarchical organization headed by Nicolas Maduro, although that claim had served to justify targeting him and his government;

Whereas, since the beginning of his second term, President Trump has made multiple statements referring to potential United States military action and annexation, in violation of international law, targeting Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, Panama, Canada, and other sovereign countries throughout the Americas; and

Whereas the Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy establishes a Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine that prioritizes American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, … access to key geographies throughout the region and the use of United States military presence in the hemisphere for establishing or expanding access in strategically important locations: Now, therefore, be it