Description
This paper looks at US policy towards Venezuela during the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. By developing a ‘critical’ approach to the study of US-Latin American relations, it will not only identify the key interest groups that affect US foreign policy but also show how they intervene in the policy-making process. Many works explore the broad economic, military and geopolitical power disparities between the United States and Latin America, but they do not explain how these corporate, commercial and military interests actually affect the decisions taken by US policy makers. Are there business lobbies that directly influence policy-makers, for example, and if so, how? The paper considers the policy making process in its social context and traces the informal social networks between officials, politicians, the private sector and other powerful societal groups. By doing so it aims to identify the inequalities in access to governmental decision-making and consider how a hegemonic image of Venezuela is constructed and disseminated. A critical approach should consider the perceptions, assumptions and even prejudices, of politicians and officials – how seriously should we take a Trump tweet written at 3 o’clock in the morning?
