Trump has turned influence into conquest and forced South America to respond accordingly - and resistance is becoming unavoidable. Right, so Trump has just made conquest official again. Not invasion-by-invasion, not deniable pressure, but a written claim that all of South America will be subordinate to US authority, its governments conditional on that, its resources pre-tagged for the US, its borders negotiable by Trump’s leave. Venezuela wasn’t a mistake or a one-off, it was the proof of concept, the test, the moment Washington stopped pretending this was about law enforcement or democracy and started acting like take over was the point. Once a US president puts doctrine behind that, once oil is named, once leaders are removed, and military force is normalised across borders, every country in the hemisphere has to adjust or be caught flat-footed ...